Marathon releases high-availability product for Windows clusters

Computerworld - When the East Coast blackouts of August 2003 caused a power outage at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Terry Michaelson was prepared. As director of technical systems for the hospital’s radiation medicine program, Michaelson had two years earlier bought a matched pair of Hewlett-Packard Co. Wintel servers that came installed with fault-tolerant capabilities, courtesy of Marathon Technologies Corp.

The servers run the hospital’s mission-critical radiation-therapy system used to treat cancer patients. When the power went out, one server –- in a room lacking emergency power –- immediately went down. But the application kept running with no loss of data or interruption as the other server kept humming along.

At another time, smoke from a fire in one of the server rooms brought a server down, even as the overall system continued running without failure. Overall, the radiation therapy system has maintained “better than 99.999% uptime,” Michaelson said. “We’re very happy with its performance.”

Littleton, Mass.-based Marathon hopes that the latest iteration of its nearly crash-proof technology will reach an even wider audience. Yesterday, the company launched EverRun HA, which it claims can provide nearly 100% uptime for Windows-based clusters. EverRun HA follows the two other applications Marathon has released since its comeback from bankruptcy in January 2004: EverRun Splitsite, which helps servers -- even if they’re many miles apart -- replicate data and back up operations, and EverRun FT.

Installed on an identical pair of Windows single- or dual-processor servers, EverRun FT runs an application on both machines simultaneously while using a virtualized layer to create the appearance of a single server, according to Gary Phillips, CEO of Marathon. That eases deployment of applications that are not specially written to divvy up workloads among multiple processors or machines and guarantees virtually no downtime, he said.

EverRun HA is more flexible. Users can deploy an application to run over small groups of Windows servers, including racks of blade servers -- even those with multiple processors. The tradeoff is that EverRun HA guarantees only the industry standard of 99.999% uptime, or high availability, instead of true fault-tolerance.

“EverRun HA nicely leverages their FT product to give a lower price and more flexibility to customers who are willing to trade off ultimate availability for a lower price and greater configuration flexibility,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc. “Marathon seems to have finally found an overall strategy, product set and go-to-market model that is working for them.”

Marathon was founded in 1993 by former Digital Equipment Corp. workers. Companies have traditionally looked to mainframes or Unix systems when they demand fault-tolerant or highly-available systems. But that option is not always possible, especially when the software runs only on Windows, as is the case for Princess Margaret Hospital’s radiation-therapy management system. So Marathon sought to bring fault-tolerance to Windows via customized Windows servers that competed with clustering software from EMC Corp. subsidiary Legato Software, Symantec Corp.’s Veritas Software unit or even Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server Cluster software.