Marathon Debuts EverRun HA

Marathon Technologies Monday announced a Microsoft Windows-based high-availability application solution aimed primarily at SMBs.

Called EverRun HA, the tool is built on top of the company's virtualization architecture, which makes it possible for one of two Windows servers to be running at all times. Marathon plans to position the product, priced at $7,500, as a lower-cost alternative to clustering.

"We think we can offer customers an architecturally different approach to achieving application availability at a high level but at a low cost [that's] easier to set up and manage," says Gary Phillips, president and CEO at Marathon.

Analysts believe many smaller end users and the solution providers who service them are placing more emphasis on server availability. Increasingly however, most are putting as much emphasis on the cost of the solution.

"More and more we see availability becoming a strategic weapon. Companies believe they have to think beyond what they already know and consider new ways to ensure that their critical business-process applications are always up and running," says William Hurley, an analyst at research firm Data Mobility Group.

EverRun HA allows for the online migration of applications from an active server to a secondary one with no interruptions or loss of application state. This better enables maintenance to be performed at any time without affecting client systems, Marathon officials say.

Because EverRun HA works with standard Intel servers, it needs only basic internal storage and standard Ethernet connections. The tool is capable of supporting any Windows-compatible application without the need for that application to be "cluster aware," nor is any custom coding or scripting required.

An option is available, called SplitSite, which can extend the level of availability protection by enabling the primary and secondary servers to be geographically separated while maintaining full protection of data and the application.

EverRun HA requires only a single application license, a company spokesman says.