Microsoft brings fault tolerant technology to Windows

Microsoft and Marathon Technologies last week unveiled a partnership and a joint development agreement to bring fault tolerant options to companies running Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V.

Microsoft is moving to create a more highly available Windows environment by offering a selection of options to protect business-critical applications.

Marathon offers a fault tolerant platform that supports Windows called everRun. The vendor will offer support for Windows Server 2008 before the end of June and for a version of Hyper-V that will ship in a future edition of Windows Server. Microsoft officials would not confirm if it would be the next version after the Windows Server 2008 R2 version, which went into beta last week. 

Marathon and Microsoft officials said integration with System Center management tools also are in development.

Marathon's everRun has its own management component.

Windows Server 2008 includes failover clustering, but Marathon adds a level of fault tolerance that includes options for minimal downtime or none at all.

The two companies plan to combine development efforts in building a platform so fault tolerance and high availability can be built on Hyper-V.

"That provides the platform element that other partners could [build on]," says Mike Schutz, director of product management for the Windows server division at Microsoft.

Marathon supports Citrix Xen Hypervisor and the company said once the Hyper-V support ships, everRun will work across both platforms to create a single fault-tolerant environment.

The fault tolerance will come in three levels: the failover clustering shipping in Windows Server 2008; a component level fault tolerance via everRun that protects storage and system components with little or no down time; and an everRun system level setting that ensures availability including memory for applications that require zero downtime.