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Blog

iX Magazin, a leading IT publication based in Germany, recently published an in-depth product comparison review of VMware’s vSphere 4 FT vs. Citrix XenServer with everRun VM in their September 2009 issue. In his article, “Fehlertolerante Systeme” or fault tolerant systems, reviewer Jörg Riether noted everRun’s ease of installation and intuitive setup process. Here’s a couple of additional highlights from the review:

“everRun has a very transparent way of handling the sudden total failure of a node without noticeable interruptions – this is true from the perspective of the administrator and from the viewpoint of the user working on the protected server. The Level 3 protected VM goes on running through each active application without any loss of performance. If the server is switched on again after being disconnected from the mains, everRun re-integrates it immediately and starts synchronization.

One of the fundamental advantages of everRun is demonstrated here: it doesn't require a data memory shared by both hosts. Marathon is able to replicate any virtual hard disks from one Xen host on the other and keep them synchronized. This eliminates the effort required for a SAN with synchronous mirroring and redundant paths as everRun itself includes the technology.”

To read the entire product review article (in English!), you can download the PDF here.

When it comes to high availability, taking a “one-size fits all” approach is highly inefficient. I recently spoke with Carryl Roy, editor of Virtual Strategy Magazine to discuss the different levels of availability, why these are important and how to select the right level of protection for each application. We also talked about how to set recovery time objectives and how tiered or selectable availability can optimize protection with less resources and at lower costs. I discuss these topics in the video below, which is featured on the Virtual Strategy website.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to Windows Server 2008, be sure to attend our July 30th webinar featuring guest speaker David Hanna, Information Architect at Microsoft. David will review the new Web tools, virtualization technologies, security enhancements, and management utilities available in Windows Server 2008. You’ll also have a chance to ask David any specific questions you have about Windows Server 2008 during the live Q&A portion of the webcast.

In preparation for the webinar, we asked David to answer a few of the common questions that we have been hearing from our customers in recent months.

Q: One of the biggest concerns we hear from our customers and partners is that in this current economy, IT departments are being asked to do a lot more with less people. How can Windows Server 2008 help with this issue?

Across all of my customers, everyone is talking about cutting costs, and getting more out of their current investments. When we start digging into the features of Windows Server 2008, customers are finding tremendous opportunity to optimize their environments. A few of the major areas of cost savings I’m seeing are:

• Reduced deployment time and costs with Windows Deployment Services
• Reduced management cost and effort with PowerShell and Server Manager
• Hardware and Workload Consolidation with Hyper-V
• Licensing consolidation with Enterprise and Datacenter models for virtual environments.

Q: What about the challenge of managing remote and branch office locations?

Branch offices have consistently been a challenge to manage, primarily due to lack of on-site staff. Windows Server 2008 brings some major new components to the picture that will greatly ease branch office management. These features include the Read-Only Domain controller, which makes the remote DC secure, and replaceable, Distributed File System, Windows Remote Management, Server Core (lower surface attack area), and improved Terminal Services for application delivery.

Q: A lot of our customers work in “always-on” industries like manufacturing, healthcare and broadcast media, where server downtime can be very disruptive to their business. How does Windows Server 2008 support these demanding environments?

Windows Server has always addressed high availability with Clustering Services. Windows Server 2008 has brought some huge enhancements to the Cluster Service that will reduce the complexity of clustering, while increasing availability. Failover Clustering in Server 2008 has a new validation wizard that will validate hardware and software configurations, resulting in easier, more reliable cluster deployments. The reliance on a quorum drive has also been removed, so there is no longer a single point of failure in the cluster. Also, Failover Clustering has been enhanced to support multi-site clusters to support organizations that need site-to-site failover. And, as always, when organizations need to take availability to the next level, Microsoft continues to work with partners like Marathon to extend the native capabilities of Windows Server.

***********************************************************************************************

During the webinar, Michael Bilancieri, Sr. Director of Products for Marathon, will discuss how to extend the high availability features of Windows Server 2008 to fault tolerant protection with Marathon’s everRun software and how organizations can now confidently migrate mission critical applications from Unix or proprietary platforms to realize big cost savings.

Registrations for this webinar are limited and we are expecting a large turnout, so be sure to save your spot by registering today.

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?

Marathon’s team at VMworld got to sit in on the VMworld session Tuesday morning that covered VMware’s newly announced technology for fault tolerant VMs. While not bad for FT rookies, from what we saw, it’s a less than perfect solution for a lot companies that want to run business critical and mission critical applications in VMs. Let’s look at the four primary reasons why.

1. No component-level fault tolerance. The most common failures that result in unplanned downtime are component failures such as storage, NIC or controller failures. Yet VMware Fault Tolerance doesn’t do anything to protect against I/O, storage or network failures. By not addressing these primary sources of failures, VMware appears to be saying that you/the customer are on your own do figure out how to protect your storage and network connections. This may be okay for the very largest IT staffs in the world, but for the other 98%; it will not be sufficient.

2. Complexity on top of complexity. In order to use VMware Fault Tolerance, you’ll first have to install both VMware HA and DRS. No small feat in and of themselves. Then, because VMware FT requires NIC teaming, you’ll also have to manually install paired NICs. Then you’ll need to manually setup dual storage controllers (with the software to manage them) because it requires multi-pathing. And to top it all off, you’re required to use an expensive, and often complicated, SAN.

3. Limited CPU fault tolerance. With VMware FT, you’ll need to setup what VMware refers to as a “record/replay” capability on both a primary and secondary server. If something happens to the primary server, the record is stored on the SAN and then restarted on the secondary server. Two things to point out here. First, the whole thing depends on the quality of the SAN. Second, in the words of the VMware engineer who presented at VMworld, “this can take a couple of seconds.” So what happens to your application state in those couple of seconds?

4. For VMware virtual environments only. VMware FT will only work in VMware environments. It won't work with other hypervisors, and most importantly, you can't use for business critical and mission critical applications that you want to keep on physical server platforms (i.e., non-virtualized environments which still represent the vast majority of customer use cases). Oh well, only the vast majority of critical applications run in physical environments anyway.

It’s great to see VMware recognizing the need for fault tolerance, but we’re puzzled why they decided not to address the biggest source of failures – component failure. And we wonder how many mid-market companies will be able to justify the cost and complexity of getting VMware FT setup and keep it running.

If you had a chance to attend the session what were your thoughts?

VMworld 2008 is an essential event for any IT professional looking for the latest products and innovations in virtualization technology – and we are readily preparing to demonstrate what we’ve got.

As a result of increased adoption and further consolidation, the virtualization market has grown tremendously, increasing the spectrum of presenters and attendees alike. Based on this growth, I expect to see more value-add products, more new start-ups and technologies. In previous years, the attention has been on hypervisors. Now, I think the emphasis will be on tools and layered products that sit on top of the hypervisor, such as availability, management and monitoring tools.

Are you a VMworld Rookie? Here’s a tip – Past shows have left me feeling that a lot of vendors make grand claims regarding their products and services, but many are still very early in the development stage. Everyone uses similar buzzwords – business continuity, disaster recovery, high availability, management, etc. These are all fairly broad terms and vendors use some form or hybrid of each at their booths and in their presentations to lure you in to hear “the pitch.” Finding solution providers who have real customers, products, references, and established technology is a much more productive approach when attending the event.

When it comes down to it, a lot of past VMworld happenings involve the issue of hype vs. reality. The challenge for anyone who is going to walk the halls, talk to vendors, and attend sessions is the ability to validate what is reality vs. what is hype.

I’ll be attending several sessions at VMworld, but I am most eager to attend the session where VMware will announce their fault-tolerant technology. I think that will be a beneficial session to all event attendees. Our assumption at Marathon is that it will be something like a fault management or fault handling system –something on a similar level to what we do. But this is definitely an advantage for us – it helps to validate what we have been saying for 18 months. As the market leader in virtualization, VMware sees the same problem as Marathon – customers need and are requiring more protection for applications that get consolidated. Traditional failover environments aren’t sufficient for the higher value applications.

If you have any recommendations for VMworld sessions, please leave me a comment and let me know – I’m always open for suggestions. And if you have any questions or if you see me walking around, don’t hesitate to reach out - I’d love to connect with you.

For those of you attending this year’s VMworld in Las Vegas, we will be demonstrating system-level fault tolerance for Citrix XenServer. This is what we refer to as level 3 on the availability dial.

If you’re interested please feel free to stop by our booth (#1047) to see it in action for yourself.

See you at the show!

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.

We’re constantly getting questions regarding the what, when, where, why, and how Marathon can help CIOs expand the use of virtualization and availability in their IT infrastructures. Jack Germain of LinuxInsider chatted with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick recently and asked him some of these same questions, which we have excerpted:

LinuxInsider: Numerous industry reports show that the rush to adopt server virtualization is run mostly by very large corporations with a large bank of servers. What part of the market is your company targeting? Are you following the big money trail?

Jerry Melnick: Our product is designed to work like a standard application taken off the shelf and installed right out of the box. Existing availability systems can cause more problems than they solve. Our system is different. That is precisely what midsized companies need.

LI: What barriers does everRun VM take down that you expect to drive a company's need for what you offer?

Melnick: For one, there is a cost advantage over high-end proprietary products. On the other end, data replication solutions don't provide all the functions needed. Replication is managing data only. The comprehensiveness of our solution is what makes it unique. The application is unchanged in our environment. In addition, our solution does not need lots of setup.

LI: What are you thinking about beyond the accomplishments of everRun VM as the next virtualization enhancement?

Melnick: Now we have taken the process to the next leap. What I mean is we can now take two servers with hardware virtualized and build a Xen server pool and manage it as a single entity. We can build a virtual machine in Windows by installing out software and give it an interface of all running servers. Our next vision is to have one mechanism to do availability with multiple uses. It will take six months to one year. This will add new levels of choices to select plug-ins for desired results. All of this will be possible through one product.

LI: How do you see this vision changing the industry?

Melnick: We're breaking through limitations. We are in a position to expand use. Availability is something that everybody is talking about. We are providing ways of doing it.

For Germain’s complete article visit here.

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

This past Monday millions of BlackBerry users were hindered with email downtime for three hours due to the company’s second major outage in less than a year. Customers immediately jumped into online discussions and on blogs like here and here to find the root of the problem. The outage is believed to have been caused by the failure of one of two Internet addresses that relay e-mail from corporate servers. Jack Gold, a technology analyst from J.Gold Associates stated something we are very familiar with:

“Any time you got a system that's got a NOC, a Network Operations Center, you have the potential for a single point of failure.”

A great point Gold raises (where our expertise in high-availability comes into play) is that if a company isn’t able to have enough redundancy in the NOC, then why don’t they have a technology in place to make sure there isn’t a single point of failure?

There’s no way of knowing how much business was lost for BlackBerry or BlackBerry cell phone carriers during the downtime; however one thing is for sure, if RIM had implemented a fault tolerant solution, then “routine upgrades” would not create such a fiasco amongst customers.

Hopefully they recognized this mishap as a lessoned learned.

Bill Murray’s character said it best in What About Bob, “Baby Steps” – In case you missed it, this week we announced our partnership with ADN, the largest Citrix distributor in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). ADN specializes in thin-client technologies. By incorporating the XenServer hypervisor and Marathon’s fault tolerant-class availability, ADN can now provide full-thin client packages for enterprises and medium sized companies.

How are we one step closer to VMWare? According to the folks at ADN, they are in the process of selling the XenServer Enterprise virtualization platform in the EMEA market – a market where VMWare has decided they are not looking to extend their current reseller base. This puts ADN in a prime position to work with the majority of EMEA companies that have not yet adopted virtualization, putting both Marathon and Citrix at their fingertips. :)

Read the full release here.

Last week our own Jerry Melnick sat down alongside Chris Wolf, an analyst for the Burton Group, and Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, for a Webinar to discuss the new technology bringing fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments. Overall feedback was positive, with comments that the session was informative and thought provoking. For those of you that may have missed it (or those that just can’t get enough) we posted a recording of it here at the bottom of the page.

Listen, Share, Enjoy!

For those of you who aren't able to attend iForum and have yet to see our fault tolerant virtual machines demo here is an interview with Virtual Strategy Magazine shot yesterday. Enjoy!

For those of you who might have missed it the first-time around at VMworld , here’s your chance . We will be demonstrating fault tolerant virtual machines for a second-time with our counterpart XenSource at iForum 2007. Our technology showcase received the Best of VMworld Award for New Technology back in September, so we are eager to enlighten those who were unable to attend. If you’re going to be in the Las Vegas area from October 22 – October 25, we encourage you to stop on by our booth at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino for a demo.

On another note, XenSource’s own Simon Crosby will be at the Westin Times Square, in New York on Wednesday October 24, as a keynote speaker at the 2007 Ziff Davis Enterprise Virtualization Summit. If you’re in the area and want to learn more about the evolving virtualization industry swing by and tell Simon Marathon sent you :)

VMworld 2007 has come and gone leaving us with many positive insights for the future of the industry. Michael Bilancieri, our Director of Products, attended the event and was rather impressed with the turnout as well as the growth in the “virtual eco system.”

As like last year, the business continuity, disaster recovery and high-availability protection-related sessions were well over sold and left many people unable to attend, indicating that this is one of the most prolific topics on the minds of customers.

The folks at VMware demo'd their R&D continuous availability project which was met with oohs and aahs from the audience clearly validating the need for solutions like this in the market. Continuous availability, or more specifically fault-tolerant availability in a virtual environment in Marathons’ case, is no small feat.

Interestingly enough Michael did have a conversation with an end-user industry veteran that stopped by our booth (seen below). He had been perusing the show and said that the everRun technology showcase was the most innovative thing that he’s seen in quite some time. He went on to say that in the availability/data protection space, innovation is typically incremental and is relegated to status quo paradigm views of the world.

Other insights come from our friends at XenSource who have done an incredible job enabling the ecosystem as evidenced by the number of software vendors supporting or soon to support XenSource. All in all we want to say kudos to VMware for building this market and opening up this event to all the virtualization players.

Next up: VMworld Europe in Cannes, France :)

Most of you are already aware, but next Tuesday kicks off VMworld 2007. We are really excited about this year’s event because we will be demonstrating an industry first -- true fault tolerant lockstepping for virtual environments with everRun software by Marathon Technologies. This milestone in technology enables the first true convergence of virtualization and availability in one complete integrated software solution and introduces the following:

• First and only lockstep solution for virtual machines
• Completely automated fault tolerance for virtual machines

What are the benefits of everRun lockstepping?

• Enables mission-critical applications to be virtualized/consolidated
• Completely automated setup, configuration, fault detection and management
• Application agnostic

If you’re going to be in the San Francisco area September 11 – 13, and plan on attending VMworld please stop by the New Innovators Section (Area 1301) of the Moscone Convention Center. In the meantime if you have any questions or want to talk to us more about this, please leave a comment and we will be happy to discuss it further.

Yesterday Network World released their “10 Virtualization companies to watch” list and we are pleased to say that yours truly has made the list. We were awarded the distinction for v-Available, the first-of-its-kind initiative, bringing fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments.

This story validates much of the hard work that goes on here at Marathon and reflects the advancements we have made over the last few months; announcing several strategic partnerships including one with the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions, XenSource. We encourage you to follow our lead moving forward and observe as we continue to develop solutions that provide companies of all sizes simple, reliable protection for critical virtual workloads.

Fault-tolerant architecture allows a system to continue working even when part of the system fails. Fault-tolerant servers provide continuous availability through hardware failures by utilizing and operating redundant components. Mark McCarthy posted this definition on Tech Target, which we feel is a great simplified definition. He states:

“Fault-tolerant describes a computer system or component designed so that, in the event that a component fails, a backup component or procedure can immediately take its place with no loss of service.”