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Marathon’s Sr. Director of Products, Michael Bilancieri, recently answered some questions for Paul Mah of ITBusinessEdge.com regarding disaster recovery planning for small & medium businesses. A few of Michael’s answers are highlighted below. For the complete Q&A with Paul Mah, see the article here.

Mah: Any tips to help SMBs with constrained budgets get management’s approval to implement a DR program?
Bilancieri: This may be the most important part of the process. Without support from the senior management team, any DR plan will be hard to get off the ground. The key takeaway here is to translate the technical language into business terms.

Since DR is not primarily about the technology (it is about the business value), it is important to clearly express what downtime means in terms of revenue loss. By creating a chart, organized by each application, it is easy to clearly articulate how much revenue is lost across each application for a certain amount of time.

Mah: What are the best criteria for determining an optimal disaster recovery plan?
Bilancieri: First, you have to identify what it is you need to accomplish. This includes defining the recovery time objectives (RTO), which is the amount of time applications can be unavailable and recovery point objectives (RPO), which is the amount of data that can be lost when a recovery is required.

Keep in mind that these values will likely vary for each of your different applications. Implementing incorrect or incomplete solutions will result in wasted time and resources. Check with your users and clients to determine their requirements and any service level agreements that must be met.

Mah: Once you determine exactly what your needs, how do you select a plan?
Bilancieri: DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Seriously, there are so many different products that claim to be “DR” solutions, all approaching the problem from different angles, it can be very confusing to determine what actually does the job you are looking for it to perform. As you research different products to implement as part of your DR plan, be sure to ask specifically what their product does (copies just the data, takes data snapshots, captures complete images of the full system, etc.) and don’t be afraid to ask probing questions.

Many vendors make the same claims using the same terms but actually deliver very different results. If you are going to test these solutions in-house, which is recommended, try to do the test under similar conditions as your production environment, with similar system and application loads. Oftentimes, something works well in a test environment [where there is] no real processing happening, [but] fails to function adequately once deployed in the live production environment.

Mah: What would a DR plan look like for a company that may face natural disasters such as hurricanes and flooding?
Bilancieri: Since hurricanes and floods can cause severe damage that can result in long-term outages, it would be wise to implement a solution that protects your systems between locations that could not be affected by the same disaster. Ensure that the backup, or DR, site is planned for a location that can be readily accessible by your users and clients should the primary location be destroyed or otherwise inaccessible.

Marathon has a customer based in Georgia, The Sullivan Group, which implemented a disaster recovery plan just for this reason. The team decided to virtualize its data center with Citrix XenServer and implement Marathon's everRun VM solution to provide redundant virtual machines and synchronized mirroring of the entire system including network, applications and data. The Sullivan Group has a small IT staff but needs to be continuously available for their clients, so they needed a solution that was fully automated and offered simply implementation.

Their first step was to identify what their customers’ needs were - and they decided that they needed continuous protection. Second, the team determined exactly what they could afford, and the ROI they would see from implementing DR software. They already knew that they would constantly face the threat of storms, and that they needed their data to be backed up in a remote location. Finally, they determined exactly what solution their IT staff could support and decided exactly which business applications needed to be fully available.
 

Keeping your applications “always-on” for users is no easy task, and can be particularly tricky for branch or remote locations where you probably have little or no IT staff to support your efforts. Forrester Research senior analyst Stephanie Balaouras has been studying this trend and has pulled together the top 5 best practices for supporting application availability at remote and branch locations. She presented these during a webinar last month and we've also summarized them below.

TIP #1 – Don't Overlook Remote Location Availability

While this may seem like an obvious point, it’s actually very common for IT departments to overlook their branch and remote locations when it comes to application availability. You can’t neglect these offices for both high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) plans—you need a holistic approach to protect all of your business applications, no matter where they are located. This also means that you need to factor in these systems when planning your IT budget as well.

According to recent Forrester Research data, IT systems at remote and branch office locations account for more than 20% of your total infrastructure. They are critical to your business process and operations. Today, a lot of these locations don’t have HA or DR, and in some cases, they don’t even have basic back-up. Make sure that these offices and locations aren’t forgotten as part of your HA and DR plans.

TIP #2 – Classify Systems by Criticallity

When developing your strategy for operational HA and DR, best practices include performing a business impact analysis. This doesn’t have to be a lengthy process—you just need to map the dependent systems for each business process, and then create a rough estimate the cost of downtime for each. Once you have that information, you can determine availability rates as well as recovery objectives. As part of that process you should also identify the most probable types of downtime. When you put that all together, you can classify systems by criticality, such as mission critical, business critical, business supporting, etc., and you can then determine the availability rates needed for each of those systems.

TIP #3 – Develop Tiers of Service for Availability

Once you understand your range of recovery objectives, it helps to have an IT availability and service continuity catalog. This catalog defines a range of service tiers. Forrester typically sees four levels: mission critical, business critical, business important and business supporting. Each of these tiers has associated recovery objectives, technology pre-requisites and the costs to deliver that service. This catalog helps to simplify your strategy, by allowing you to assign appropriate tier classifications to new systems quickly and easily.

Another benefit of using this method is that it also helps you to limit the number of point products you are using for HA and DR. The more point products you are using, the more you complicate the sequencing and complexity of preventing a failure or recovering from a failure. Keep it simple. Every time you deploy a new application or system, assign a tier from your catalog, put the appropriate protection in place, and then communicate that to the business.

TIP #4 – Measure Availability from the End-User Perspective

Well-written objectives measure both planned and unplanned downtime and also take into account the timing of downtime. For example, you don’t take your systems down for planned maintenance during peak sales periods or at 1pm on a weekday when your traffic is at its highest level. You select times when users will be least affected. Availability isn’t about the individual IT system, infrastructure or component. Technology uptime is important to track but is not a true measure of availability. True availability has to be measured from the end user perspective. If the application or service is not available for use, even if the individual components are functioning, then that means the service is down. When making decisions about HA and DR strategies, you have to look at availability from a people perspective, not a technology perspective.

TIP #5 – Make Availability Part of Every IT Decision

Availability is no longer an optional practice. It’s essential. It’s something you owe to your employees, your customers, your partners and your investors. Application resiliency has to be part of the planning process right from the start—HA and DR should not be an after-thought. Even in remote and branch locations, these applications are critical to the success of the business, so availability of the systems should be included during the planning phases of the project, rather than an add-on after the project is completed.

Thanks again to those who joined us for last week’s webinar, "Windows Server 2008 High Availability: Technology Comparison." The on-demand recording of last week's webinar is now available to watch at your convenience (here).

We had a lot of good questions from our attendees during the Q&A portion of the webinar, which are summarized below.

Q: How do you determine when to use an HA solution vs. a DR solution?
When it comes to availability vs. recovery, the most important question to ask is what are your recovery time objectives (RTO)? What is the amount of time your application can afford to be down? If the applications have strict requirements, then you want an availability solution. Disaster recovery is data replication often times with a failover capability, not availability. For critical applications, this may not be sufficient.

Q: If I have an HA solution in place, do I still need a solution for backup?
Availability and backup are two different things. That question comes up a lot, along with the need for disaster recovery. Backup will never likely go away completely. You still need to backup your data to ensure recovery in the future should that be necessary.

Q: Is everRun available for Linux applications?
Yes. We can provide basic failover capabilities for Linux applications today.

Q: How does everRun differ from replication solutions?
everRun 2G is used for availability, both locally and for short-distance geographic separation as well. We have a replication and recovery solution as well that can be used for disaster recovery for long distances. You should determine what your objectives are: do I have to keep my applications up and running or do I just need to recover it if something fails? What’s the recovery time objective for each application? It’s up to your individual applications and what level of protection you need for each. Often times availability is a priority as downtime is not desirable, with DR also a requirement on top of that to ensure recovery in the event of a major outage.

Q: Can everRun be used for planned downtime (i.e. to keep one host running for end-users while the application on the other host is being upgraded)?
Yes, everRun can be used to help facilitate certain system updates to reduce interruptions and mitigate risk.

Q: Can it work between two virtual machines and on x64 based systems?
Yes, we support XenServer and 64-bit hardware and Windows Server environments.

Q: What is the performance impact of using everRun 2G?
That’s variable depending on your application. It can be anywhere from 3-15%. We’ve done some performance testing specifically on XenApp and Exchange. You can download those white papers here:
• Understanding and Characterizing Performance Implications for Running Exchange 2007 with everRun
• XenApp 5.0 High Availability Performance

Q: Does Marathon offer backup solutions for everRun users?
We have methods to backup your systems and we’re working improving on our current offerings to make them quicker, easier and more granular.

Q: Can everRun work with dissimilar hardware? Can everRun work with more than two servers?
From a server standpoint, you just need similar processors; storage does not need to be similar. You can have SAN on one side and NAS on the other or any other combination. On the second question, yes, everRun will work with more than two servers. You can build a pool of servers and protect within that pool.

Q: Does everRun have backward compatibility with older OS?
Yes. It will work with Windows Server 2003, and also Windows Server 2008.

Q: Can everRun run on the Foundation Server Edition of Windows 2008?
It does not. everRun supports the full implementation of Windows Server 2008. everRun runs underneath Windows, it does not install into Windows.

Q: How does everRun handle data stored on NAS?
Storage is transparent to everRun. We look at storage as just a LUN.

Q: What is difference between everRun HA and everRun 2G in Windos Server 2003?
The differences are the ability to create multiple workloads. HA can protect one workload. everRun 2G can protect multiple workloads. There is also a new and improved graphical interface with better reporting and management capabilities.

Q: Does everRun work with XenServer 5.5?
Yes, everRun works with XenServer 5.5.

Q: Are there any changes in WS 2008 & WS 2008 R2 in the way that HA improves?
Yes. You can find an overview of those changes directly from David Hanna of Microsoft in our recent webinar and white paper “The Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows Server 2008.” You can also read the Q&A with Microsoft from that webinar here.

Q: Is everRun 2G available for Microsoft Hyper-v?
We will provide support for Hyper-v in a future release.

Q: With applications using various DNS names, how does this solution integrate with DNS changes? (failover to remote office for true DR-different IP/network)
everRun availability solutions pairs systems within the same subnet of vLAN, eliminating the need to make any DNS changes.

Q: Question is tied to what permissions are needed to do a recovery. For recovery in active Directory most items need to replicate around that there was a change and we do not want to hand out Admin control over the domain(separation of access)
everRun is designed to not require any changes to Active Directory during or after a failure or recovery.

We had a lot of great questions during the Q & A session of our February webinar with Stephanie Balaouras of Forrester Research. We’ve posted the questions and responses here on our blog for everyone’s benefit.

Questions from the webinar:

Q: In the architecture two "mirrored" VMs are shown which are connected. Does that mean that you have to install 2 application VM servers or do you have to install just one and Marathon makes the second?
A: You only need to create one application VM. After this is created, you can use everRun to protect that application. As part of the protection process, everRun creates a “cloned” instance of the application on the second host. The instance is completely identical to the original, with the same identity, MAC address, resources, etc. It is this redundancy created by everRun that protects the applications.

Q: In the Marathon license there is HA and FT. In which are the levels 1-2-3 available?
A: Levels 1, 2, and 3 are available in a single solution called everRun VM and any level of protection can be enabled on a VM. everRun VM level 3 protection will be available in Q2.

Q: The licensing question you just answered seems different from what you used previously. You previously only had to license the VMs OS in a fully protected system. Please explain.
A: Microsoft licensing requires a valid Windows license for each side of the protected VM. Using Enterprise Edition can reduce the number of licenses required. Please refer to Microsoft licensing terms for specific details for your environment.

Q: How does the software communicate between disparate storage NAS to DAS, SATA to Fibre Channel?
A: everRun does not limit you to needing matching storage requirements on multiple hosts. Communication between hosts is done through Availability Links (A-Links), which are private networks between each host. everRun handles the mirroring at the host level, passing I/O through XenServer to write to the disks. The type of disk or connection is not relevant.

Q: How does this compare to VMWare's SRM & VDM products?
A: VMware SRM provides a mechanism to restart a VM on an alternate host, however it relies on other storage mirroring solutions (often within the storage system) to perform the mirroring. SRM does not move data or provide a comprehensive HA or FT solution.

Q: Is the product host based or a fabric based solution?
A: everRun VM is a host based solution, with a minimum of 2 hosts required.

Q: Do you need to keep a warm copy of the applications at the DR site?
A: During the protection process, everRun takes the chosen VM and clones it to the designate secondary host. This creates a complete and identical instance on the secondary host. everRun maintains these two synchronously so that they are always identical. everRun’s unique architecture exposes these two mirrored instances as a single entity; there is no need to install, manage, or update both sides, only the one single instance of the OS/application. Should the entire ‘primary’ host fail, the ‘secondary’ host will immediately start the cloned version. It comes up with the same IP address, hostname, and MAC address of the primary so that there are no client-side, DNS, Active Directory, or other infrastructure changes required.

Q: Is the DATA synchronous like SRDF or near synchronous?
A: everRun performs synchronous mirroring of the entire Windows environment, including the OS, application, and data.

Q: How does this compare to products like RecoverPoint/Replistore, InMage, Neverfail, Falconstor etc?
A: These products are disaster recovery products intended for long-distant asynchronous data replication and failover. everRun availability solutions provide true availability in a comprehensive and automated manner. Marathon also offers DR solutions for long-distant protection. Disaster recovery and availability are mutually exclusive in most cases and should generally be considered separately. They are complimentary more than competing solutions.

Q: What is the software support plan? What are the recurring costs for your product year to year?
A: We offer a Premier support plan or a Basic support plan. The only recurring cost year to year is the cost of support.

Q: What are the operating system requirements, how many copies of the OS do you need?
A: Each Windows environment is mirrored to a secondary host, requiring a second Windows license. Using Enterprise Edition of Windows allows for fewer licensed copies. Please refer to your Windows licensing terms for specific requirements.

Q: Regarding the 10ms sync time, what happens if that time increases to say 20ms due to network traffic?
A: If the latency increases beyond our requirement the paired systems may assume that one system is down and redundancy may be lost. In a properly configured environment the application should remain running while the secondary system is no longer maintained in a redundant fashion. Once the latency returns to within spec, the systems will re-sync automatically and return to a fully redundant state. Typically the application is not impacted.

Q: What are the bandwidth requirements?
A: Best practices state 155MB link between the two hosts. For local systems a simple crossover cable between the two systems is sufficient. When separating the systems the 155MB requirement becomes more relevant. This number can vary depending on the applications being protected and the amount of data being managed.

Q: Do you have instances of numerous geo-available solutions with specific applications?
A: Here are two examples:
MAN AG success story with everRun SplitSite
Chester County, PA success story with SplitSite

Q: Is windows Server 2008 VM supported? If not, why?
A: Windows Server 2008 64-bit will be supported in Q2 of this year.

On February 24th, we’re going to be doing a webinar featuring Stephanie Balaouras, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of the report, X86 Server Virtualization for High Availability and Disaster Recovery. Stephanie was good enough to sit down with us to answer a couple of questions we had before the webinar.

Q: Stephanie, can you give us the 10,000 ft. explanation of why server virtualization is a good alternative for high availability and disaster recovery?

A: In a nutshell, server virtualization facilitates a rapid — or even automatic — restart of applications after an IT failure, and when used in conjunction with data replication between data centers, it can restart applications at a recovery site following a primary site failure. In particular, x86 server virtualization can improve the availability of business-critical systems that are important to the business but not critical enough to warrant the investment in expensive and complex resiliency technologies like fault-tolerant hardware or clustering.

Q: You had mentioned that Forrester is seeing increased customer interest in active-active strategies for high availability. Is that just in Fortune 500 companies or is the interest broader than that?

A: Active-active isn’t just for the largest of companies. Companies of all sizes are under increasing pressure to improve their recovery capabilities but at the same time, they are under pressure to reduce costs and achieve greater operational efficiencies. Companies need an alternate site so they can failover critical business operations in the event of a primary site failure. Given the necessary investment, an alternate data center simply can't remain idle waiting for some disaster to occur. Companies must determine ways to maximize this investment to improve business operations, accelerate growth, or elevate availability.

Q: What’s changed that is driving the greater interest in active active for HA?

A: There are a couple of reasons why there is a growing interest in active-active strategies. First, as I mentioned, most companies are under increasing pressure to improve recovery objectives. In fact, most companies that I speak with have recovery time and recovery point objectives measured in hours, not days. To achieve this type of recovery, today you need to have dedicated infrastructure (servers, storage etc.) at the alternate site.

In the past, many companies might have turned to a DR services provider for their needs. For cost reasons, they subscribe to shared infrastructure services. Because the infrastructure is shared, recovery is limited to recovery of system configurations and data from tape, which means that best case scenario for recovery is 24 hours to 48 hours. As result, many companies are brining DR “back in-house” and making the business case with better recovery objectives and the ability to use the investment in the alternate site for multiple purposes.

Thanks Stephanie, we’ll see you on the 24th. Want to hear more from Stephanie? View her posts on the Forrester Blog for IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals.

Register here for the webinar featuring Forrester Research.

For healthcare organizations and their IT departments, almost everything is mission critical, from patient information to registration systems and records management. Information needs to be readily available and data has to protected at all times to avoid compliance risk or calamitous consequences.

From what we’ve seen, the interest in virtualization for high availability and disaster recovery is driven by two key factors: cost savings and greater demand for 24x7 availability of health records. Like so many organizations in this tough economy, health care providers are under tremendous pressure to deliver the same quality services at lower cost. Using server virtualization for server consolidation can help. And the VMotion and XenMotion capability in VMware and XenServer respectively can provide these organizations with DR that is significantly easier to deploy and execute. On top of XenServer they can add everRun VM for fault tolerant, high availability protection that is much more affordable and practical than what they have had in the past.

Testament of the increased interest in virtualization from healthcare organizations comes from our own experiences here at Marathon. We’ve seen a positive uptake in healthcare customers who are deploying everRun VM to protect their virtual environments. Currently, about 30% of new customers that are in Marathon’s pipeline for sales are in the healthcare related space. We can only assume that the number of healthcare customers we service will continue to grow as we venture into 2009.

The changes these organizations are making are allowing them to stay ahead of the competition as they increase efficiency, ensure the availability of patient records and most importantly set the standard for inpatient and outpatient care.

Are you part of a healthcare organization that is starting to deploy server virtualization? Is more effective HA and DR a key goal?

While most companies using Microsoft Exchange still use Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 provides a new, more flexible architecture that provides real benefits worth looking at. This new architecture is based on server roles. All services and features are organized around five distinct server roles: Mailbox, Client Access, Hub Transport, Unified Messaging and Edge Transport. The big advantage to this approach is that you only have to deploy the roles that are needed and multiple copies of a role can be deployed for enhanced availability, DR and performance.

When Exchange 2007 is run in a virtual server environment each role can be implemented as a separate virtual machine. Individual services can be easily matched to resource requirements by selecting the number and location of the virtual machines implementing each service to be started. The number, location and configuration of these virtual machines can be dynamically adjusted as usage requirements change over time. Infrastructure components that support the Exchange environment, including Active Directory, DNS and DHCP that have traditionally required separate servers and distinct availability solutions, can now be implemented as virtual machines in a common resource pool and leverage the common availability solution that is used to address the entire virtualization environment.

Virtualization also makes disaster recovery easier to implement, more effective and less costly. Virtual machines separate the software configuration from the underlying hardware. This provides total flexibility in the hardware required for the disaster site. One set of hardware can provide disaster backup for multiple applications and cost effective configurations can be chosen strictly based on their disaster recovery role. Software configurations change over time and changes must be duplicated at the disaster site to ensure proper operation. This can be extremely time consuming and error prone in a physical environment. In a virtual environment, the configuration is contained within the virtual machine definition file. Simply copying this file to the disaster site is all that is needed to maintain configuration compatibility.

So how many of you have made the important step to moving to Exchange 2007? If you haven’t deployed 2007 yet, are you planning to? We would love to hear from you. If you have a minute, please take the poll to the left and tell us your plans. If you deployed it, are you taking advantage of the virtualization benefits? Leave us a comment and share your thoughts.

Yesterday, Matt Fairbanks, VP Product Marketing, Citrix, and Jerry Melnick, CTO, Marathon, presented the webinar “Virtualizing Exchange – The Cold, Hard Numbers on Why Citrix XenServer + everRun VM is the Best Platform.” Below are a few of the questions asked from participants with Jerry’s response to each:

Q: What happens in a case of a split brain scenario?

Jerry: In our SplitSite products, we have what we call a quorum services capability – it’s actually an additional component that’s added on to manage split brain and arbitrate when you lose all connections between the two machines.

Q: How long does it generally take to set up XenServer with everRun VM to create this kind of a solution?

Jerry: Citrix people have always mentioned “Ten minutes to Xen” which is a pretty good rule of thumb. We say it’s another ten minutes to add the Marathon software. It’s a simple script that gets run on each host, and then you’re off and ready to protect the machines. The actual protection process itself is really a matter of a minute. The simplicity and ease have never been seen before in this industry with this class of availability solution.

Q: In field of limitations and customers that have deployed this kind of technology, are there any things you would council people to consider to set up XenServer and everRun in the most highly available and robust way?

Jerry: With our system, we provide best practice guidelines for configuring networks availability, etc. One of the beauties of our technology – working in conjunction with XenServer – is that once everything is installed and running, we put everything into an active validation mode so that we know components are configured properly. If something is misconfigured or isn’t running redundantly, you’re going to see the status and receive a warning. A key benefit of this system is you will know how to fix it before there are any problems.

There are many cases in availability systems where you have simple failover technologies: you take an error, you failover, you get to that resource, and then you find out the network or disk isn’t working because it wasn’t configured properly. By having this active validation capability and the report out, the status is being monitored in a simple and reliable fashion – you know when you’re redundant and how you’re going to manage failures.

Thanks to everyone that attended. For those that didn’t have the chance to attend or ask questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section and we will do our best to answer them.

On October 21 at 10:00 a.m. EST, our CTO Jerry Melnick will be a featured presenter at the 2008 NorthEast Disaster Recovery Information X-Change (NEDRIX). Jerry’s presentation, Better Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery through Virtualization, will help attendees learn how and why server virtualization done right can:

• Make disaster recovery planning and execution much easier
• Simplify the notoriously difficult process of high availability maintenance
• Deliver high availability protection tailored for each application

Are any of you currently using virtualization for business continuity or disaster recovery? If so, what have your experiences been like thus far?

This year’s conference will take place from October 20-22 at the Hyatt Goat Island Newport, RI. For more information about the event and how you can register please visit NEDRIX’ website.

This afternoon I was fortunate enough to lead the “Breaking Through the Confusion About Disaster Recovery and High Availability” Webinar. I would like to thank everyone that attended and give a special thanks to Alex Jarret from the Technology Executives Club for hosting the event.

Unfortunately there was a minor error towards the end and participants did not have the opportunity to send me their questions, except for one individual who asked if I could provide them with the presentation. In response, I’ve made the presentation available in PDF format which can be downloaded here.

If anyone that attended the Webinar had any questions they haven’t yet had a chance to ask or new questions arise while reviewing the presentation, please feel free to email them to me directly at MBilancieri[at]marathontechnologies.com and I will do my best to answer them.

Virtually every company we talk to needs both disaster recovery solutions to recover their systems and data after a major disruption, and high availability to keep key applications always available. In my discussions with companies considering our everRun software, I’ve heard a lot of them say that they are confused by many vendors’ claims and counter-claims for DR and HA. One of the biggest sources of confusion is that some vendors with solid products for disaster recovery are trying to pass off their DR solutions as reliable HA solutions. If the feedback I’m getting is any indication, these DR solutions posing as HA solutions just don’t work.

It’s not hard to see why a DR solution doesn’t make a good HA solution. With a product that is good at DR, in most cases getting the data across to the other location is pretty straightforward. But when you try to use the same solution to get both the application and the data across to use it for HA, well that’s where it breaks down. Let’s look at why.

A good DR product is usually fairly easy to set up for data replication to another site. But setting up the same product to restart the whole thing, application and data, when a failover occurs is complex and prone to errors. To set it up, you have to script all the pieces to make it happen – fault detection, client redirection to the DR site, application reset, and the list goes on. No wonder we so often hear that scripted-DR-for-HA doesn’t work consistently – there are too many moving parts that have to managed and monitored. In addition, no matter how minor a failure is, failover to the remote site is required. Not every failure you face is a disaster; therefore each failure should not be treated as one. Based on these horror stories, we thought it was a good idea to put together this webinar, Breaking Through the Confusion about DR and HA. I hope to help you better understand when, how, and why DR is the best fit to meet your requirements, when to use an HA solution and how to combine the two for optimal protection.

Interested? You can register here.

We all like to think that we will be prepared in the event of an emergency, or a disaster. Hospitals exist if we fall sick; fire stations surround us if flames break loose; we are constantly preparing so if a catastrophe strikes, we are ready.

Preparing for a system’s disaster is no different. However, how to go about preparing for an event like this can be confusing. There are many options out there when it comes to protecting your system, each best suited for specific requirement. Unfortunately, many vendors use terms like disaster recovery and high availability interchangeably to describe their solutions when in fact they are usually designed for one or the other.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is the way to recover applications and from a system failure. DR is a reactive solution where if a failure occurs, IT relocates the data, builds the system over, and brings everything back up to working order. This takes time, a precious commodity that typically businesses relying on critical applications don’t have. In addition, recovering applications could bring about a number of side effects which you really don’t want to endure every time some minor failure happens.

But what if I could tell you that instead of worrying about how to recover from a computer system failing, you could simply prevent it from occurring at all?

Disaster tolerance (DT) is a proactive way to prevent system failure from impacting application and data availability. A disaster tolerant solution isn’t going to recover the data if there’s a disaster. Instead it will tolerate the fault if a disaster occurs – keeping an organization’s critical applications up and running at all times. It is not recovery, but rather prevention. And with solutions like our everRun SplitSite, separate servers don’t even need to be in the same building – they can be up to 100 miles apart with fault-tolerant protection between the two locations.

DR solutions are good for applications that can afford some downtime while you recover them. But for essential applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint, which need to be available all the time, disaster tolerance is often the best way to go.

So what combination of DT and DR protection would work best for your company’s applications?

After much speculation and blogosphere rumors, we decided it was time to let the cat out of the bag and officially launch everRun VM! Of course, for an announcement this big, we thought unveiling the news LIVE right here on the blog was the best way to inform the press, analysts and general public about the new product we’ve been working so hard on. So, tell your friends you heard it here first!

Wait a minute? The release crossed the wire this morning? Gary, Michael, Steve and Jerry have already been talking to the press?

Well, then….

You Heard it Here… Eighth (or Ninth)!!!

We’ve included some links to the everRun VM coverage below. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of everRun VM beta testing and the feedback we receive from testers. In the meantime, enjoy the articles and leave us a comment if your interested in learning more about the product. As you can tell from all the quotes in these articles, we’re always happy to talk!

Marathon Releases Virtual HA, Fault Tolerance
Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=149019&WT.svl=news2_1

Marathon's Virtualization Tool Simplifies Disaster Recovery
CIO
http://www.cio.com/article/print/202350

Get fault tolerant virtual servers
Computerworld
http://blogs.computerworld.com/get_fault_tolerant_virtual_servers

Marathon Launches Fault-Tolerant Software For Server Virtualization
CRN
http://www.crn.com/hardware/206905384

Marathon extends fault tolerance to VMs
IDG

• CIO
  http://www.cio.com/article/202450/Marathon_Extends_Fault_Tolerance_to_VMs
• InfoWorld
  http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/24/Marathon-extends-fault-tolerance-to-VMs_1.html
• Network World
  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/032408-marathon-extends-fault-tolerance-to.html

everRun VM Hits the Ground Running
Virtual Strategy Magazine
http://www.virtual-strategy.com/vsm-podcasts/everrun-vm-hits-the-ground-running.html

When businesses think of disaster planning they take the basic cautionary measures; boarding up their businesses, putting hard files in water-safe boxes in case of flooding and most importantly discussing evacuation procedures with their employees in case of a catastrophic event. However, organizations like the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) have started to evaluate disaster planning differently in regards to protecting data crucial to business operations.

After Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, it became evident that one of the primary concerns when dealing with disaster recovery is ensuring customers’ funds are safe. With Hurricane Dean marking the first major hurricane of the season, we hope that credit unions and other businesses in the hurricanes path took similar precautionary measures that the Texas Credit Union League and the Louisiana League utilized as highlighted here.

Since one of our primary concerns is ensuring application availability, we encourage you to re-evaluate your disaster recovery plans so that natural disasters won’t mean the end of your business or major monetary losses. With today’s reliance on critical applications, taking the initiative to protect your data allows you to spend more time focused on your personal life, knowing your business is safe.

Disaster recovery is a plan which enables the protection and restoration of critical information in the event of disruption. Disaster recovery management includes functions such as identifying the critical and vital information, determining recovery needs, developing backup solutions and implementing the backup/recovery solution.