Guest Post: Marathon and Microsoft fault tolerant computing

Hi, I’m Jerry Melnick, chief technology officer at Marathon Technologies. Today we announced an expanded development and marketing agreement with Microsoft that underscores industry recognition of the growing need to eliminate downtime for your most important applications.  Working together, Marathon and Microsoft will bring sophisticated fault tolerant availability technology to Windows Server and Hyper-V.  In a nutshell, this collaboration is all about making it a lot easier for a lot more companies to get cost-effective, easy-to-deploy fault tolerance for their critical Windows applications. I wanted to use this blog post to answer two questions: why this announcement matters and how could it impact your role managing your Windows infrastructure.

There are two key factors that are driving the increased need for Windows-based fault tolerant computing.  First, more customers are relying on Windows Server to run their mission critical applications, and the number of these applications is increasing.  Second, with the growing popularity of server virtualization (where applications are being consolidated onto fewer servers) the impact of downtime is often magnified. Fault tolerant computing is becoming more relevant than ever.

In what ways could this partnership impact you?  Three ways. First, it will give you the ability to extend the HA features of Windows Server 2003 and 2008 to fault tolerant protection in minutes. With automated setup and configuration, you will have the simplicity that are hallmarks of our currently shipping products. And with automated fault and policy management it will literally run by itself. You can use our everRun software that supports Windows Server 2003 today and will support Windows Server 2008 in April-June timeframe.

Second, it will give you the flexibility to select the level of availability, from Microsoft’s failover clustering all the way up to system fault tolerance, for each application. You will be able to add or adjust availability levels dynamically to meet fluctuating demands. And you will be able to optimize application availability for your budget and your system resources.

Third, if you are using or plan to use Hyper-V, this agreement will allow you deploy a future version of Hyper-V with Marathon everRun as the common fault-tolerant virtual infrastructure for both Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. In mixed hypervisor environments you can have one software tool to create and manage a fault tolerant infrastructure.

Please feel free to leave comments with any questions that you have. And check out our Resource Center for webinar recordings, white papers and more.