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Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 - 9:04 am EDT

Achieving 24x7 Uptime on a Budget

Posted by: Michelle Liro

Last week we hosted a webinar looking at why “High Availability Doesn’t have to be Expensive.” We reviewed the trends that are creating today’s “always-on” world where businesses, customers and employees expect 24x7 uptime for all of their applications. We also highlighted several common sources of planned and unplanned downtime, and identified some specific single points of failure to watch out for. We also discussed two real-world success stories of companies that have achieved always-on affordable fault-tolerant protection with Marathon’s everRun software. Below is a summary of the Q&A portion of the webinar.

Q: How much does everRun cost?
Our starting price is less than $10K USD, for an implementation that can support any type of Microsoft application. So you can get full fault tolerance for less than $10K. Contact us for more information.

Q: Have any of your clients implemented Batchmaster ERP with everRun?
We have a number of organizations running ERP solutions protected by everRun. As long as the application runs in a Windows-based environment, we can support it without restrictions. We have more than 3,000 customers running all types of applications and we haven’t seen any application-level constraints within an Windows environment.

Q: What is the farthest apart two machines can be physically located?
We support SplitSite where we can separate systems by up to 100 miles, depending on your interconnect capacity. We see this a lot at airports for example, where our SplitSite solution has one server in one terminal and the second one in a second terminal.

Q: How do you determine when you should use an FT solution vs. a DR solution?
Fault tolerance and disaster recovery go hand-in-hand, but they are two different things to achieve two different results. When planning your application availability model, you have to have solutions for availability, recovery and back-up for complete protection. When considering day-to-day uptime, that’s availability/fault tolerance to prevent those everyday failures that cause business disruption. But when you are talking about a catastrophic event, like a tornado, hurricane or the like, that’s when your DR solution comes into play. DR means recovery time however, so this is not a good solution for protecting against everyday failures. The other important note here is that testing of your backup/recovery solution is critical. Recent studies have shown that 30% or more of recoveries do not go as planned. You need to test those systems regularly to make sure that your recovery will go as planned. So you need to have a local availability solution for the everyday localized failures and then a DR/back-up solution in the event of a catastrophe.

Q: When using SplitSite to separate your servers, is a T1 connection big enough?
It depends on what the applications are doing and what needs to be kept in lockstep. For smaller applications, a T1 could be sufficient, but if the applications tends to be very busy, then that might not be enough. We can work with you to size that and let you know what you will need for your specific applications and requirements.

Q: Does everRun work with Small Business Server?
Yes it does. We have full support of Small Business Server.

Q: Does everRun work with SQL 2008?
Yes, we have full support for SQL 2008 as well.

Q: Can you force a failover manually (for example a corporate policy expects that an application be tested)?
Yes, you can test the systems live and force components and systems to fail manually to test them and make sure that everything keeps working as planned. We had one customer that had some applications being protected with everRun, and a second system that was not being protected with everRun. There was a disk drive failure on the unprotected systems, so what they did was actually pull the working disk drive from the everRun-protected system and use it to temporarily get the unprotected system back up and running. Even without the disk drive, the everRun protected system kept working. This is obviously not something that we recommend that you do, but it shows just how powerful the everRun solution is and how it can keep applications up and running, even when a disk drive is yanked right out of the system.


 

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Webinar  Fault Tolerance  High Availability  Windows 

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