Marathon eyes a wider server market

EverRun HA is its third product since the company emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2004.

As director of technical systems for the radiation medicine program at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Terry Michaelson is intimately familiar with the idea of fault tolerance.

"The radiation medicine program at Princess Margaret is one of the largest in the world and one of the most advanced," he says. "We need systems that give us maximum uptime. . . . There are a lot of moving parts in a radiation therapy treatment, and you want the session to continue. In case of a failure, you don't want the session to stop."

To get that kind of reliability, Michaelson brought in servers from Marathon Technologies. Five years after acquiring those systems, Michaelson is upgrading his hardware to support updates to his application package and plans to take advantage of new high-availability software from Marathon.

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As director of technical systems for the radiation medicine program at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Terry Michaelson is intimately familiar with the idea of fault tolerance.

"The radiation medicine program at Princess Margaret is one of the largest in the world and one of the most advanced," he says. "We need systems that give us maximum uptime. . . . There are a lot of moving parts in a radiation therapy treatment, and you want the session to continue. In case of a failure, you don't want the session to stop."

To get that kind of reliability, Michaelson brought in servers from Marathon Technologies. Five years after acquiring those systems, Michaelson is upgrading his hardware to support updates to his application package and plans to take advantage of new high-availability software from Marathon.

EverRun HA, introduced last week, is the third product from Marathon since it emerged from bankruptcy protection and reinvented itself as a software company in 2004. EverRun HA creates highly available environments for Windows applications and supports a range of industry-standard hardware platforms.

EverRun HA offers more flexibility for the underlying hardware than Marathon's first software product, EverRun FT, which was introduced as FTvirtual Server in 2004. The third product Marathon introduced is EverRun SplitSite, which provides for business continuity by enabling a pair of servers to be as much as 100 miles apart.

Both EverRun HA and EverRun FT use a virtualization layer so that a pair of servers presents itself as a single system with one IP address. EverRun FT, however, provides true fault tolerance with two physical servers operating in lockstep.