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Blog

Tom Reed, Marathon’s Senior Systems Engineer and MCSE, hosted our most recent webinar on SharePoint High Availability. We’ve summarized the Q&A portion of the webinar below. A recording of the webinar is also available for on-demand viewing.

Q: Do I have to have identical servers to use everRun?

The servers don’t have to be exactly the same; however, the CPUs should be identical as a best practice. For what we call our Level 2 protection (for component level protection of the network and disk), you can use different RAM and spindle speeds on storage. Level 3 protected workloads require the servers to be alike. You can view a complete list of supported processors on our website. 

Q: What kind of storage do I need to use everRun?

One of the great things about everRun is that it is storage agnostic. It doesn’t matter what type of storage you are running. You can work with SAS drives, and iSCSi, local or fibre SAN, pretty much any type of storage and it doesn’t have to be the same on both sides. Some customers using everRun SplitSite are using SAN at the primary data center and local disk at the secondary data center, which can save storage costs.

 Q: Does everRun DR integrate with SRM from VMware and how does this work with VMs as a second server?

VMware SRM, or site recovery manager, is designed to asynchronously replicate the actual virtual machines to a secondary site. It does this by using replication software at the SAN level. So once you purchase SRM you have to purchase SAN replication software as well. If you didn’t want to replicate the actual virtual machines over, what you could do is use everRun DR, the difference being that we do not bring over the current virtual machine. We have a separate vm built and we have the capability to start and stop service, recover from a single point in time, and drag and drop recover files on a replicated data drive. If you are looking for an in-depth comparison of VMware SRM vs. everRun DR, you can contact us at 800.884.6425 or via email for more info.

 Q: How much overhead does everRun place on the protected server?

General use cases today are 3-10%. We have application performance documentation for Exchange 2007 and XenApp that you can download from our website. We will have a similar document for SharePoint in early 2010.

 Q: How does everRun differ from a backup solution?

We have found that there is a lot of confusion in the industry around the difference between backup vs. high availability. Backup solutions are designed to provide a disk-to-disk or disk-to-tape scenario for recovery of data. Backup is a recovery option, not a prevention option. It lets you recover to your last point in time, last snapshot, or last tape. Again, this will not prevent downtime or provide availability for users. It is a means of recovery. everRun DR can provide this type of solution if this is what your business needs. If your goal is to prevent outages and data loss (rather than recover from them), what you really want is a local high availability solution. 

Q: What version of Windows does everRun support?

everRun supports Windows Server 2003 SP2 Standard and Enterprise Editions, 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise Editions, 64-bit.

 Q: Does everRun work with SQL 2008?

Yes. everRun supports any Windows application without requiring changes or customization. Because everRun resides below the operating environment, we are protected underneath that. We have a number of ISVs that use our software with their applications and they use us because they don’t have to make any changes to their software. It’s not tied into the application, and doesn’t need to be “cluster aware” or anything similar to that.

 Q: Can I use everRun between two VMs? Meaning two VMs instead of two physical servers?

We build out the virtual machines when you install our software, so if you’re using our VMs to build out your machines, then we can do that.

 Q: Do you have experience using everRun in education environments?

Yes, a couple of examples of everRun being used in education environments include Michigan State University in the US, and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. We have several additional education customer examples and references that we can provide to you. Give us a call at 800.884.6425 for more information.

Q: How do you determine when to use everRun HA vs. everRun DR solution?

A good method for determining which solution is most appropriate for your situation is to take a closer look at your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). How long can you be down and how much data can you lose? If you can be down for several days, then you want to look at a DR solution. Just take into consideration that while DR failover is sometimes necessary, it can be a lengthy, complex process and is sometimes invasive to your environment. First you have to failover to the DR site and then failback when the primary site is restored, which can be very time consuming. 

The majority of failures are not catastrophic. Most are pretty common like network issues or hardware failures. For this scenario what you should really look at is local high availability protection. For the most complete protection overall, best practices are to have local high availability protection and then DR as a back-up for a major disaster. Then at the DR site you should also have an HA solution because if you do have that major catastrophe and failover, you want to make sure that secondary environment is protected while you are re-building the primary site.

 Q: What are some large county government examples using everRun software?

everRun has been deployed by many different government agencies. You can read about deployments at the Brookline Police Department, the County of Chester (Pennsylvania), and the City of Santa Rosa, California Utilities Department on our website. We also have many more government customer examples and references that we can provide to you. Give us a call at 800.884.6425 for more information.

 Q: When using everRun, can I use the secondary server to backup the data to avoid impact on the primary production server, or will both servers feel the impact during the backup window?

You should run your backup on the active server. On the secondary server, the workloads are in paused mode, so you can’t run a backup agent there. If you run it on the primary server, then it’s cloned over to the secondary server automatically.

 Q: Does everRun guarantee no downtime, or 99.999?

Yes,we provide 99.999% (5 9’s) protection with our Level 3 system fault tolerant protection.

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?

Can virtualization move beyond test and developmental in most companies and become a key component of the core enterprise IT infrastructure? Jerry Melnick discusses the necessity of high availability in a virtual environment and how it can be achieved with Mike Vizard of eWeek.

If you’re interested in using virtualization for essential applications like Exchange but haven’t yet because you’re worried about keeping them available, we encourage you to listen to this podcast and learn about the proliferation of different virtual machines, why there are different types available, and how Marathon’s HA solution can make virtualization of applications like Exchange and SharePoint a reality.