Marathon Combines DR, Fault Tolerance for SMP Servers

On the heels of shipping its everRun MX software for fault tolerance and high availability for symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core CPU servers, Marathon Technologies today announced everRun MX Extend, which integrates CA’s ARCserve replication technology with everRun MX for disaster recovery.

The everRun MX software, announced last month, was designed to run on commodity server hardware and eliminate application and I/O downtime in Windows environments. With the addition of the continuous data replication found in CA (NASDAQ: CA) ARCserve, everRun MX Extend prevents localized failures and offers remote failover so customers can restore business operations from a geographically distant “hot site” in the event of an outage, according to Jim Welch, CEO and COO, Marathon Technologies.

“Traditional systems are proprietary, hardware based and speak to specific application sets. Our software uses standard, off-the-shelf servers and eliminates hardware dependencies,” said Welch. “Customers can now get a combined DR/fault tolerance solution for one price tag.”

Welch said many businesses focus their business continuity efforts on only disaster recovery, leaving them susceptible to more frequent localized failures. Coupling ARCserve with everRun MX Extend, he said, changes that focus from disaster recovery to disaster prevention.

“Why settle for downtime or a restart technology when you can have zero downtime?,” he said.

Based on Marathon’s ComputeThru technology, everRun MX was built to reduce the need for system/virtual machines (VM) restarts and data recovery/restores. The software can be implemented with direct-attached storage (DAS), eliminating the need to deploy a SAN for high availability purposes.

EverRun MX is available in two flavors and starts at a price of about $15,000 for a pair of servers. EverRun MX Extend brings the price to about $20,000.

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