Marathon Technologies Corp has a new version of its Windows application availability infrastructure software that promises high-availability across four-way to eight-way Windows servers.
EverRun HA is designed to mask device failures from Windows applications by virtualizing an operating system environment across coupled Windows servers. Between them the servers maintain a synchronous copy of the data across the active server box and a so-called ready or secondary server.
The two servers provide redundancy for the virtual environment, allowing I/O to be seamlessly redirected away from a failed device to the redundant device, using a process the vendor describes as compute-through.
Unlike the situation in other clustering setups, EverRun HA maintains separate storage devices on each server and synchronizes data between them to prevent any data loss should a failure occur. In the event of a component failure, the vendor said the system simply redirects system operations without interruption of service or loss of application state or data. The release is priced at $7,500 at the entry level, to $10,000 for a dual processor system and $12,500 for the multi-socket version.
The new software is based on the company’s EverRun FT fault tolerant server system, revamped for improved scalability and availability. Optional SplitSite software also means that redundant EverRun HA servers can be located at separate data center, and at sites up to 100 miles apart. That option alleviates the risk of site outages.
Littleton, Massachusetts-based venture-backed Marathon competes against NSI Software Inc’s DoubleTake high-availability and disaster-recovery software for Windows NT/2000 networks and products from the NeverFail Group Ltd, both of which have moved to their restate their market position recently.
Neverfail has announced the launch of a new high-availability solution for Oracle 10g database sites that want to ensure users remain constantly connected to their database application with a system that will kick off failovers if and when a disruption occurs.
Like the Marathon product, Neverfail’s software automatically moves an application’s workload back and forth between primary and secondary servers. Neverfail Oracle Database is licensed based on the server in a pair with the greatest number of CPUs.
Meanwhile, NSI Software Inc has developed a version of its Double-Take software for virtual machine replication and failover which provide continuous data protection across environments virtualized on VMware ESX servers. The software will keep the target virtual disk up-to-date and ready for failover, recovery, and backup at any time.
The vendors are all pushing low-cost mirroring and high-availability options for key Windows systems such as Exchange and SQLServer, and Oracle or virtualization environments that do not require any need for custom coding or scripting of the underlying programs.
