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Thursday, April 15th, 2010 - 5:38 pm EDT

High Availability on a Budget Q&A

Posted by: Michelle Liro

Earlier this week, we had a great webinar featuring guest speaker Greg Cullen, Sr. Director of Technology at Marathon. Greg provided tips and advice that government agencies can use to ensure optimal availability for their critical applications at minimal cost. He also reviewed  three different government agencies that protected their data and applications from downtime with Marathon’s everRun software.

These included the Brookline Police Department, which kept their 911 system available – even during a hardware failure on Christmas day when no IT staff were on duty; the City of Santa Rosa utilities department, that protects its water treatment facility against outages from earthquakes, power outages and other natural disasters; and a county court system in California that protects its virtualized Exchange server and other paperwork processing applications from downtime.

The transcript of the Q&A session with Greg from the live webinar is below.
 

Q: Can you deploy the two everRun servers in different locations or do they have to be in the same location?
You absolutely can. You can deploy the two servers in the same room, or different rooms in the same building and even in two separate buildings. We call that configuration SplitSite. That’s one way to get disaster tolerance in the event that you have a site-wide outage, rather than having them in the same room or building.

Q: Is there a limit to how far apart the servers can be?
In general, they can be separated by as much as 100 miles, although it really depends on your bandwidth and latency on the connection between the two sites.

Q: What are the hardware requirements for everRun?
You’ll need Intel-based servers that have a moderate amount of memory, or as much as the application requires. And you’ll need enough networks to do the production side of it as well as maintaining the redundancy between the severs. Generally speaking, having four network adaptors in each server and somewhere in the order of 100GB of disk drive is sufficient.

Q: How does the everRun software compare with a clustering solution?
One of the biggest difference between everRun and clustering is that everRun is a single image for the application. Instead of installing and managing two instances of your application like you do with clustering, everRun is just a single image to install and manage. Changes happen on both servers simultaneously through that single image.

Also, everRun software does not require cluster-aware applications. everRun is application agnostic, and can support almost any Windows application. And one more thing, with most clustering solutions, you also need to have a shared storage container that both servers are connected to. everRun can support that model as well, but doesn’t require it like clusters do. In fact, to remove single points of failure, it’s much better to have local storage connected to each of the servers and everRun will manage that storage as a mirrored device.

Q: I’m confused by your use of DR. Can you define what you mean by disaster recovery?
We’ve found that everyone has a different definition of what they mean by disaster recovery. At a very high-level, we see disaster recovery as the need to protect your data. By comparison, we see high availability as the need to protect your application, data and network connectivity. DR means you’re trying to copy your changed data off site to protect it in the event of a true disaster. After the “disaster” is over, you then need to bring that data back to the primary site, or configure an alternate server to use the data in the DR site.

Q: Does everRun work with Siemens building security systems?
Yes, we have been working for several years with building automation and security companies including Johnson Controls, Tyco, Andover Controls, Siemens and many others. As long as the building system runs in Windows Server 2003 or 2008, we can provide availability for it with no custom scripts or custom coding. We have many deployments of everRun protecting these building security systems around the world.

Q: Does everRun work with e911 systems?
Yes – absolutely. Generally speaking, everRun is application agnostic and can work with almost any Windows application. We have many solutions out there where these emergency 911 centers are protected by everRun so that if there is some type of disaster, these systems continue to run.

Q: Is everRun available on a GSA schedule?
Yes, through our channel partners. Contact your Marathon account representative or call 978.489.1100 for specific partner information.

Q: How does everRun differ from data replication solutions?
A lot of times when people look at availability, they simply try to replicate the data. There’s a big issue with that though. That’s only one part of what you need to recover in the event of a failure. everRun not only replicates the data, but also keeps a redundant set of your application environment and network connectivity, and everything else that is required for the application to not see any failures at all, or to recover very quickly in the advent of certain types of failures.
 

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