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Analyst Opinions on Marathon and High Availability
Not sure if Marathon’s disaster recovery and high availability solutions are for you? Find out what the top analysts in the industry are saying about Marathon’s availability solutions.
"As the enterprise increasingly relies on Windows servers for their important business applications, its need for protection against the costs and consequences of server downtime also increases. Further, there is a need in the market for simpler, software-based availability solutions as traditional clustering solutions are quite complex and threaten the availability of the environment."
- Donna Scott, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
“One of the things holding some organizations back in the move towards deploying virtual servers has been concerns about availability and reliability of the workloads that have been consolidated on a single industry standard server. This “put all your eggs in one basket” approach could certainly raise some concerns to those needing very highly available or fault tolerant solutions. In the past, the choices have been to purchase someone’s orchestration/automation solution, purchase expensive fault tolerant hardware or accept lower levels of uptime and use some other solution. Marathon plus either Microsoft or Citrix is a different, more cost effective, way to achieve the same thing.
I was impressed with how simple this software is to install and manage. Even an analyst could do it. Furthermore, Marathon is going to plug their management software into Microsoft’s. IT administrators who are already trained in Microsoft’s tools will find it easy to manage HA or totally fault tolerant configurations.
If your organization needs this level of availability, but doesn’t want to pay for fault tolerant hardware, this might be the solution for you.”
- Daniel Kusnetzky, Partner, Kusnetzky Group, Virtually Speaking
“Customer perception is that availability and DR solutions require a lot of IT resources to setup and maintain, as a result IDC finds most organizations have under invested when it comes to business continuity. The combination of easy-to-use, tightly integrated virtualization and availability software could make HA and DR a practical reality for mid-market companies as well as broaden protection in larger companies.”
- John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software, IDC
“Rather than leveraging expensive fault-tolerant hardware, identical virtual machines running on different physical servers can be treated logically as a single server and run in lock-step with each other. If one server suffers a failure, the other can keep running without interruption to the application. Currently, only Marathon Technologies’ everRun provides fault-tolerant protection without the use of specialized hardware, but Forrester believes that others will follow suit soon.”
- Stephanie Balaouras and Christopher Voce, Forrester Research, X86 Server Virtualization For High Availability And Disaster Recovery
"The exceptional growth of the high availability market not only demonstrates companies’ crucial need to keep applications up and running, but reveals dramatic advancements that have been made to high availability solutions throughout the past few years. As enterprise IT organizations mature processes and technology deployments, IT services will require dynamic management that crosses the traditional silo environment."
- Stephen Elliot, research manager, Enterprise Systems Research, IDC
"I'm not saying it's unique, but I haven't seen anything like it. There is a difference between high availability and fault tolerance, she says, and by supporting fault tolerance in a virtualized setup, Marathon claims the "five nines" style of availability required by enterprise applications that can't be down for even a second or two.”
- Laura DiDio of the Yankee Group
"VM high availability will be a significant concern as virtualization technology improvements allow more high-end enterprise applications to run inside virtual machines."
- Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst, Burton Group
"Although consolidation and legacy migration have been the primary motives for server virtualization, going forward we see high availability and disaster recovery for business resiliency as key reasons why organizations will deploy virtualization software. There is huge market appeal for technology providers that can deliver solutions that can address both planned and unplanned downtime in virtual environments – especially for mid-market and smaller companies."
- John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software, IDC
While at Citrix’s mega analyst event a while back, I saw a fantastic demonstration of both HA and fault tolerant configurations using Marathon Technologies‘ everRun combined with Citrix’s XenServer. Well, the folks at Marathon are doing it again, this time with Microsoft and Hyper-V. What Marathon has accomplished is shear industrial sorcery.
- Daniel Kusnetzky, Partner, Kusnetzky Group, Virtually Speaking
