Chester County PA Relies on Marathon to Keep Essential Services Applications Available

THE COMPANY

Located 30 miles outside of Philadelphia, Chester County is home to more than 470,000 citizens making it one of the most populated counties in Pennsylvania. With its offices in West Chester, the County Government and its Board of Directors are charged with managing the large and diverse municipalities with a mission to provide quality services in a resourceful and cost-effective manner. The county, which is comprised of fifteen boroughs and fifty-seven townships, is home to 73 municipalities that strive to provide excellent local services and facilities for everything from emergency training services to community recreation programs.

“The Marathon software really was as easy to setup and keep running as advertised,” Scott Brion network analyst.

THE SITUATION

In the event of a disruption such as a power outage or natural disaster, data and applications critical to the county’s ability to deliver essential services could be compromised. To ensure that its data networks and applications were protected and continuously available to employees and town officials, the Chester County Government needed a dependable IT solution that could give them piece of mind.

“From the countywide alert system to the 911 call center, downtime is unacceptable,” said Scott Brion, network analyst for Chester County Government. “It was important that we were able to identify a solution that would continuously protect out critical applications. We needed to ensure our Emergency Operations Center and communication networks could tolerate multiple failure types.”

After evaluating various high availability solutions, county IT Managers, who had previous experience with Microsoft Clustering solutions, agreed that Clustering was not a good fit for the county’s IT infrastructure. “I had managed Microsoft Clusters before, and based on my experience Cluster failover scenarios were unacceptable for what we needed,” said Brion. “Clusters may only result in five minutes of downtime, but they also mean a half day of recovery. We just couldn’t afford that. Plus, our consulting costs would have been much higher—getting everyone trained on how to manage the Cluster environment.”

THE SOLUTION

After its detailed evaluation process, the County of Chester selected the full suite of everRun™ solutions to meet their varying availability needs: everRun FT, everRun HA and SplitSite. “We selected Marathon for three primary reasons,” said Brion. “One, there was no application learning curve with everRun. Two, we could ensure up-to-the-second data integrity. And three, we could geographically disperse the servers.”

The county uses Marathon’s everRun FT with SplitSite to protect Microsoft Exchange. everRun FT synchronizes two standard Windows servers creating a single Exchange environment that runs on both servers simultaneously. SplitSite enables the county to geographically separate the two servers to alleviate the risk of downtime due to complete site outages. With this integrated protection, the county is able to maintain continuous email communications for essential services…under any circumstances.

The county uses everRun HA to protect their PeopleSoft, Oracle, ImageNow and Web server applications. everRun HA provides these applications with a significantly greater level of protection than clusters and other failover solutions, but at a lower cost and with far greater simplicity.

The county was pleased with the ease of implementing Marathon’s everRun HA, everRun FT and SplitSite solutions at its data centers. “The Marathon software really was as easy to setup and keep running as advertised,” Brion added.

THE RESULTS

Since implementing Marathon’s everRun solutions, the Chester County Government has had zero downtime—even during significant power failures.

“After implementing everRun, we no longer needed to bring in the system designers and administrators to reboot our systems, and we no longer needed to train our employees on how to reconfigure our systems,” said Brion. “We look forward to protecting other applications with Marathon.”

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