Virtually every company we talk to needs both disaster recovery solutions to recover their systems and data after a major disruption, and high availability to keep key applications always available. In my discussions with companies considering our everRun software, I’ve heard a lot of them say that they are confused by many vendors’ claims and counter-claims for DR and HA. One of the biggest sources of confusion is that some vendors with solid products for disaster recovery are trying to pass off their DR solutions as reliable HA solutions. If the feedback I’m getting is any indication, these DR solutions posing as HA solutions just don’t work.

It’s not hard to see why a DR solution doesn’t make a good HA solution. With a product that is good at DR, in most cases getting the data across to the other location is pretty straightforward. But when you try to use the same solution to get both the application and the data across to use it for HA, well that’s where it breaks down. Let’s look at why.

A good DR product is usually fairly easy to set up for data replication to another site. But setting up the same product to restart the whole thing, application and data, when a failover occurs is complex and prone to errors. To set it up, you have to script all the pieces to make it happen – fault detection, client redirection to the DR site, application reset, and the list goes on. No wonder we so often hear that scripted-DR-for-HA doesn’t work consistently – there are too many moving parts that have to managed and monitored. In addition, no matter how minor a failure is, failover to the remote site is required. Not every failure you face is a disaster; therefore each failure should not be treated as one. Based on these horror stories, we thought it was a good idea to put together this webinar, Breaking Through the Confusion about DR and HA. I hope to help you better understand when, how, and why DR is the best fit to meet your requirements, when to use an HA solution and how to combine the two for optimal protection.

Interested? You can register here.

In the vehicle manufacturing industry, companies want an efficient and economical way to ensure smooth operation of all servers, software and applications. Any instance of unscheduled downtime could lead to a loss of data, or in a worst case scenario, to a complete disruption of production and services.

Serve customer needs online without interruption

One European vehicle manufacturer, who understands the importance of protection against downtime, has been using Marathon solutions since 2000. As their security needs as an organization have grown, so has their relationship with Marathon. They began by using the Endurance 4000 system to help protect their forklift management system. Three years later, they upgraded to everRun FT to further safeguard files and applications and to ensure continuous server availability.

The implementation of everRun FT gave the company the opportunity to undertake other IT projects to maximize efficiency and reliability. They were able to establish a centralized network to allow the entire staff to access all applications and system updates remotely.

Defend 24/7 operations with Marathon everRun FT software

With these new initiatives in place, one company executive says that it is now more important than ever for applications and servers to be accessible 24/7 – no matter what. “A disruption to the provision of data and applications would affect every employee, and in the worst case scenario, halt operations altogether,” said the executive.

The company uses both Marathon’s everRun FT and SplitSite to allow two servers to operate simultaneously in 100 percent lock-step. SplitSite provides an additional layer of protection against larger scale failures and disasters. This means that the two servers create a single virtual environment and if one fails, no downtime will occur and all software, applications and data will continue to run on the remaining server.

The organization utilizes several levels of security, including a single server, a Windows cluster, and a Marathon System, but all of their most important and mission-critical applications are operated on everRun FT.

Elimination of system failure and increased competitive advantage

Any instance of unscheduled downtime would impact not only the company’s main factory, but also their several hundred other outlets. If an employee was unable to connect to the network because the server was down, all data on customers and products would become unavailable – this could mean a stall on productivity and unhappy customers. The company executive maintains that this is no longer a concern, thanks to Marathon. “With everRun FT, we no longer have to worry about downtime.”

As many of you may know, we will be attending virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2008 in London, October 14-16. We highly recommend European IT executives attend the event to gain from vendors and peers lessons learned on planning, implementing, maintaining and maximizing virtualization investments.

Marathon CTO Jerry Melnick will be on hand at the event as a keynote speaker and will be discussing why the XenServer and everRun combination is so resilient. This won’t be the typical “marketing fluff” event you’re probably use to; instead presenters will be sharing real life case studies to illustrate how their products and services have helped deliver on the promises they’ve made to their customers. Additional keynote speakers of note include: virtualization.info founder, Alessandro Perilli, and Citrix CTO, Simon Crosby.

As a Gold Sponsor for the event, we have been given the privilege of providing our customers and business partners attending the event with a 25% discount for registration. To receive the discount simply visit the event registration page and enter the discount code: PartnersAtVC2008.

For those that have already signed up, Alessandro has made the event agenda available here. If you have any additional questions regarding our involvement in the Virtualization Congress or surrounding the event itself, don’t hesitate to contact us directly or leave a comment here on the blog. Hope to see you there!

Every year Windows IT Pro magazine talks with hundreds of vendors, attends dozens of product demos and reviews some of the best products out in the Windows market. All the products the Windows IT Pro staff has identified can help IT professionals do their jobs faster and more efficiently. This year we are pleased to announce that everRun VM has been chosen as a bronze winner in the virtualization category. Here’s what our CEO Gary Philips had to say:

“Given all of the innovative virtualization companies considered for this award, we are honored to be named a Windows IT Pro Editors’ Best Award winner in the virtualization category. This award is the tenth industry award we have received in the past year, a testament to the importance and value of what we are doing to help companies reduce costs and ensure the availability of their applications.”

Other winners in our category include Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (gold winner) and VMware ThinApp (silver winner).

Casinos want a simple, affordable way to make sure their casino management and player tracking applications don’t suffer outages and the repercussions that follow. Because IT staff are usually not onsite at each casino location, casinos need software that doesn’t require manual intervention to restore operations after a failure. Over 90 casinos in the U.S. currently use everRun software to prevent outages and data loss in their Windows-based slot and casino management applications. Since the gaming industry is highly competitive, it is important to maintain customer loyalty by rewarding players with bonus points and prizes for playing. A failure on one of the servers running the management applications can knock out the entire rewards system for that location, resulting in inconvenience for hundreds of guests and potentially a negative impact on customer loyalty.

Looking for “Self Maintaining” Availability

IT executives at casinos we’ve worked with evaluated several options for protecting their casino management applications before selecting Marathon. The “cold standby” servers they had used in the past were only effective if the necessary IT staff was immediately available on the premises. Many also considered clustering, but the gaming applications they used often were not “cluster aware,” and wouldn’t operate effectively in clusters without a lot of app scripting. What they were looking for was “a sound technology to protect their applications capable of self maintenance.”

Selecting Automated High Availability and Redundant Servers

As one executive at a Casino that selected everRun put it, I have no IT staff onsite at most of our locations. What appealed to us so much about Marathon’s everRun was that if a server fails, everRun restarts correctly and recovers properly on its own. As another IT exec told us he was “impressed with the automated redundancy of everRun because it would help prevent outages due to administrative errors.”

Getting Reliable Protection for Casino Locations without Onsite IT

In the words of another Casino IT exec, “Over time we came to appreciate the “self-maintenance” aspects of the Marathon software …you install it and it just works as advertised with little to no IT intervention. With the Marathon systems, the slot system applications have operated continuously. The systems deliver 99.999% availability and full protection from failures.”

We all like to think that we will be prepared in the event of an emergency, or a disaster. Hospitals exist if we fall sick; fire stations surround us if flames break loose; we are constantly preparing so if a catastrophe strikes, we are ready.

Preparing for a system’s disaster is no different. However, how to go about preparing for an event like this can be confusing. There are many options out there when it comes to protecting your system, each best suited for specific requirement. Unfortunately, many vendors use terms like disaster recovery and high availability interchangeably to describe their solutions when in fact they are usually designed for one or the other.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the way to recover applications and from a system failure. DR is a reactive solution where if a failure occurs, IT relocates the data, builds the system over, and brings everything back up to working order. This takes time, a precious commodity that typically businesses relying on critical applications don’t have. In addition, recovering applications could bring about a number of side effects which you really don’t want to endure every time some minor failure happens.

But what if I could tell you that instead of worrying about how to recover from a computer system failing, you could simply prevent it from occurring at all?

Disaster tolerance (DT) is a proactive way to prevent system failure from impacting application and data availability. A disaster tolerant solution isn’t going to recover the data if there’s a disaster. Instead it will tolerate the fault if a disaster occurs – keeping an organization’s critical applications up and running at all times. It is not recovery, but rather prevention. And with solutions like our everRun SplitSite, separate servers don’t even need to be in the same building – they can be up to 100 miles apart with fault-tolerant protection between the two locations.

DR solutions are good for applications that can afford some downtime while you recover them. But for essential applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint, which need to be available all the time, disaster tolerance is often the best way to go.

So what combination of DT and DR protection would work best for your company’s applications?

At the beginning of July I posted asking our readers to vote for us for Fast Company Magazine’s Fast 50 Reader Favorites. Apparently quite a few people listened because we placed #1 on the list! Being nominated was honorable enough, nevermind topping the chart.

The companies nominated are all major innovators of business technology including: BlogHer, Mozilla, our partner Citrix, FedEx, etc.; so you can imagine the look on our faces when we saw where we placed on the list.

We’ve worked hard to achieve this recognition and are glad that our services aren’t going unrecognized by the community. Thanks to everyone that voted and to the team here at Marathon for making this possible.

Now we’re going to Disney World!!! (just kidding…VMworld’s more like it)

“When we describe everRun VM to customers and prospects, the common reaction is ‘it’s too good to be true’” – Steve Keilen, VP of Marketing for Marathon Technologies

Today we made a Single Host Trial Edition of everRun VM available for prospects to download and test out. The trial edition allows users to experience everRun VM benefits – automated setup, configuration and management, intuitive interface and reliable VM protection – all within a matter of minutes.

By experiencing the simple “Click to Protect” power of everRun VM customers can:
• See how easy it is to protect a virtual machine in two minutes or less
• Put the protected VM through failure scenarios (including network and disk failures)
• Use online migration to move a running protected VM to another XenServer host

If you or your organization is in the market for fault-tolerant, high availability virtual server software, we encourage you to download the everRun VM Single Host Trial Edition. It comes with everything you need to get started, including an evaluation copy of XenServer Enterprise Edition. Feel free to leave a comment or contact us with any questions you may have.

With Microsoft’s Hyper-V announcement a few weeks back, the buzz around virtualization continues to rise. In this Network World podcast, our CTO Jerry Melnick discusses what Microsoft’s announcement means for the virtualization industry. Jerry believes that Microsoft’s moves will bring virtualization within reach of many companies who have been hesitant about adopting it before now – giving Microsoft the opportunity to swim in uncharted waters where VMware hasn’t been able to go.

The podcast also highlights Jerry’s take on the thriving virtualization industry and how the growing virtualization ecosystem is creating solutions that “fill in the blanks” e.g. everRun VM allows customers of all sizes to “consolidate with confidence” with reliable availability for virtual servers.

Do you think availability is a critical factor for a successful virtualization deployment?

Virtualization has saturated the market in terms of awareness, but implementation of this highly efficient technology is still reserved for early adopters. After many months of being the media darling, virtualization has only managed to infiltrate about 10% of Fortune 100 businesses. Should we be concerned at the rate businesses are adopting virtualization?

Through recent discussions with Fortune 100 CEOs and CIOs, it is evident that the past 12 months have been the proving grounds for virtualization. Industry leaders that I have talked to from the Financial, Pharmaceutical, Media and Broadcasting space recognize that the value of virtualization goes beyond just cost savings. The real strategic driver of virtualization is the ability to deploy new applications in hours instead of months; which can translate into drastically shrinking the time to market for new products and services.

Over the next 12 months, that 10% will certainly grow as more and more large enterprises see the value on their bottom line, improvement in business processes and the acceleration of new products and services. We’ll see more integration, customization and validation as time goes on. Even though most of the Fortune 100 has already deployed some virtualization, the opportunity for growth is astounding. One Pharmaceutical company I spoke with plans to virtualize 80% of its applications by 2012…starting now.

The rate at which large enterprise businesses are starting to adopt virtualization technology is about to reach the tipping point. We’re excited to be part of the process, by developing solutions that help large enterprises gain the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications.