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Blog

J. Knipper and Company, Inc. , a leader in the healthcare marketing industry recently implmented Marathon's everRun automated availability software for the continued successful management of two specific high-level downtime risks:

• the protection of building systems that regulate their refrigerated pharmaceutical samples. FDA regulations require stringent control of these systems.
• the protection of their MyPharmaSuite™ Software as a Service (SaaS) web applications. Downtime here could result in customer service headaches and frustration.

Founded in 1986, J. Knipper provides healthcare marketing solutions in direct marketing, sampling, compliance, information technology, and sales force productivity. Going beyond its roots in direct marketing and sample distribution, Knipper continues to offer innovative solutions to sales force challenges, including MyPharmaRep.com (online solution for vacant-territory coverage) and MySampleCloset.com (online sample ordering).

The company has invested considerably in its physical and data infrastructure over the years: the company currently has 270,000 square feet of space, with 12,000 of that for refrigerated and 7,500 for controlled substances, along with an advanced Data Center, fully protected for the secure and safe handling of database management and sample supplies. Knipper is one of a handful of companies approved as an AMA DBL (database licensee). With its new infrastructure and SaaS product suite, Knipper needed to find a high availability solution that would deliver the 24x7 reliability required for the safe handling of application hosting, database management, and enterprise services.

“We have several client-facing web applications designed to enable physicians to order products and to provide sales representatives with a means to order samples and access product literature. It’s extremely important that these web applications are available 24x7. Many of the reps and physicians that our products serve are ordering in the middle of the night, early in the morning, at all times of the day,” said Knipper’s web systems engineer Marc Gerardi.

Knipper was using automatic system health checks with third party tools and file sync technology to control these downtime risks. “It was a time consuming manual process of systems recovery requiring dedicated monitoring personnel and rapid group response to mitigate issues when they occurred,” said Tony Quintenz, Knipper’s Director of Network Services. “The overhead associated with mitigating downtime, including the administrative and operating costs, as well as the learning curve and time required to train employees in the process was a significant burden on the entire IT team,” added Mr. Quintenz.

Knipper is now using Marathon’s everRun software, running on standard Dell servers, to guarantee that its critical applications, including the warehouse management system and web applications, would be available and operational at all times with a lower overhead and higher ROI. everRun is used to protect many of Knipper’s enterprise production environments from downtime, including several Dell PowerEdge R900 servers with Microsoft SQL Server. Knipper purchased, installed and configured the everRun software quickly and easily.

“We chose Marathon because they offered the best package overall. everRun offered real-time synchronization which is key for our 24x7 operations, it’s cost-effective and required minimal training for our employees. Another winning factor was the simple implementation; we were set up within a matter of hours, not days,” said Mr. Quintenz.

Since Knipper finished the everRun implementation, its enterprise environments, including its warehouse management system and client facing web applications have maintained the highest level of availability in spite of planned and unplanned events. “It’s a great product, we are now able to maintain our high level of redundancy, reliability and flexibility for our web-based products and enterprise services in the most cost effective and efficient manner,” added Gerardi.

After realizing the disaster recovery and data protection benefits of supporting its critical applications with everRun, Knipper plans to expand its use for additional web applications and other solutions. “As we expand more of our services on the web and offer additional options for customers, we will look to everRun for the continued protection we need.”

Dan Kusnetzky from ZDnet has a great post on his blog today about The Sullivan Group, a Human Resources Outsourcing (HRO) company (and Marathon customer) based in Savannah, Georgia. Erika Simpson, Network Administrator, and Rob Jones, IT Director, at The Sullivan Group, gave some great advice that can be applied to almost any IT implementation. Here’s what they suggest:

• Having a powerful enough infrastructure is something to focus on. Although the economy is tight, it is worth acquiring sufficient hardware and software resources to test applications before deploying. They are happy that they selected 64-bit industry standard systems as a platform because it has offered more than enough performance to handle their workloads.

• Test until you can’t test any more. This will allow you to make mistakes, learn from them and yet not have a negative impact on customers and their data.

• Read the instructions. If you don’t understand the instructions look for help from the vendor, from blogs, from forums and if all else fails, Google it!

Since implementing Citrix XenServer and Marathon’s everRun VM, which The Sullivan Group is now leveraging to protect their Microsoft Dynamics-based SamWare applications, the company has had zero downtime, even during a significant failure.

You can read the full article on the ZDnet Virtually Speaking blog here.
 

Using the Adobe Flex framework, Marathon teamed with UI Foundry to develop a rich Internet application (RIA) console that manages and monitors the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software (everRun VM) for server virtualization. The software integrates with Citrix XenServer environments, all through one-click operation.

“The value proposition of using Adobe Flex lies in how we cost-effectively built a rich, elegant user interface that consolidates and simplifies huge amounts of data across complex server environments – positioning our product line even further ahead of the product curve.”- Jerry Melnick, CTO, Marathon

 

See the complete case study on Adobe’s site here.

Every day, companies around the world rely on the features of Microsoft Exchange for their business-critical applications like email, calendaring, contacts, mobile support, web-based information accessing and data storage support. While we’ve discussed the importance of maintaining Microsoft Exchange high availability and steps to simpler Exchange HA, we thought this would be a good opportunity to share a case study from one of our customers.

Connecting Employees, Vendors and Customers Without Interruption

A large U.S. furniture retailer was becoming increasingly dependent on Microsoft Exchange 2003 for internal communication and collaboration, and for communication with both vendors and customers. Since the retailers primary revenue-generating activities relied on e-mail, downtime would have resulted in serious consequences. As a result, Exchange protection became a requirement and top priority for senior leaders.

everRun –An Alternative to Clustering

The IT staff had previous experience with traditional clustering and was looking for an easier, more robust solution. They selected everRun and implemented a solution using a pair of IBM servers with local boot disks and a fibre channel SAN for the datastore. Currently, the system supports close to 1200 users.

No Exchange Failures = Increased Competitive Advantage

In over a year of operation, they have not experienced a single unplanned disruption of their Exchange system. In turn, this has allowed them to keep their revenue-generating activities operating at full speed. As a result, they are currently looking at adding the everRun SplitSite option to allow geographical separation of their systems for additional protection.

Do you have a story when protecting Exchange would have been a better option than what resulted? How did it affect you or your company?

In the vehicle manufacturing industry, companies want an efficient and economical way to ensure smooth operation of all servers, software and applications. Any instance of unscheduled downtime could lead to a loss of data, or in a worst case scenario, to a complete disruption of production and services.

Serve customer needs online without interruption

One European vehicle manufacturer, who understands the importance of protection against downtime, has been using Marathon solutions since 2000. As their security needs as an organization have grown, so has their relationship with Marathon. They began by using the Endurance 4000 system to help protect their forklift management system. Three years later, they upgraded to everRun FT to further safeguard files and applications and to ensure continuous server availability.

The implementation of everRun FT gave the company the opportunity to undertake other IT projects to maximize efficiency and reliability. They were able to establish a centralized network to allow the entire staff to access all applications and system updates remotely.

Defend 24/7 operations with Marathon everRun FT software

With these new initiatives in place, one company executive says that it is now more important than ever for applications and servers to be accessible 24/7 – no matter what. “A disruption to the provision of data and applications would affect every employee, and in the worst case scenario, halt operations altogether,” said the executive.

The company uses both Marathon’s everRun FT and SplitSite to allow two servers to operate simultaneously in 100 percent lock-step. SplitSite provides an additional layer of protection against larger scale failures and disasters. This means that the two servers create a single virtual environment and if one fails, no downtime will occur and all software, applications and data will continue to run on the remaining server.

The organization utilizes several levels of security, including a single server, a Windows cluster, and a Marathon System, but all of their most important and mission-critical applications are operated on everRun FT.

Elimination of system failure and increased competitive advantage

Any instance of unscheduled downtime would impact not only the company’s main factory, but also their several hundred other outlets. If an employee was unable to connect to the network because the server was down, all data on customers and products would become unavailable – this could mean a stall on productivity and unhappy customers. The company executive maintains that this is no longer a concern, thanks to Marathon. “With everRun FT, we no longer have to worry about downtime.”

Casinos want a simple, affordable way to make sure their casino management and player tracking applications don’t suffer outages and the repercussions that follow. Because IT staff are usually not onsite at each casino location, casinos need software that doesn’t require manual intervention to restore operations after a failure. Over 90 casinos in the U.S. currently use everRun software to prevent outages and data loss in their Windows-based slot and casino management applications. Since the gaming industry is highly competitive, it is important to maintain customer loyalty by rewarding players with bonus points and prizes for playing. A failure on one of the servers running the management applications can knock out the entire rewards system for that location, resulting in inconvenience for hundreds of guests and potentially a negative impact on customer loyalty.

Looking for “Self Maintaining” Availability

IT executives at casinos we’ve worked with evaluated several options for protecting their casino management applications before selecting Marathon. The "cold standby" servers they had used in the past were only effective if the necessary IT staff was immediately available on the premises. Many also considered clustering, but the gaming applications they used often were not "cluster aware," and wouldn’t operate effectively in clusters without a lot of app scripting. What they were looking for was “a sound technology to protect their applications capable of self maintenance.”

Selecting Automated High Availability and Redundant Servers

As one executive at a Casino that selected everRun put it, I have no IT staff onsite at most of our locations. What appealed to us so much about Marathon’s everRun was that if a server fails, everRun restarts correctly and recovers properly on its own. As another IT exec told us he was “impressed with the automated redundancy of everRun because it would help prevent outages due to administrative errors."

Getting Reliable Protection for Casino Locations without Onsite IT

In the words of another Casino IT exec, “Over time we came to appreciate the “self-maintenance” aspects of the Marathon software …you install it and it just works as advertised with little to no IT intervention. With the Marathon systems, the slot system applications have operated continuously. The systems deliver 99.999% availability and full protection from failures."