A few years ago, things weren’t looking too good for Marathon Technologies. The maker of high availability hardware was having a hard time competing with companies like Stratus and NEC. So management made a smart move. In 2004, Marathon emerged from bankruptcy and reinvented itself as a software company.

Marathon is still all about high availability and it’s still all about being anti-clustering. But it’s no longer about hardware. Today, it’s all about software.

Over the last few years, the company has introduced three different high availability software packages for Windows applications: everRun FT, everRun HA and everRun SplitSite. Both everRun FT And everRun HA use a virtualization layer that enables a pair of servers to present itself as a single system. EverRun FT provides more fault tolerance, however, because it enables two physical servers to operate in lockstep, while everRun HA simply has a second server connected by Gigabit Ethernet ready to step in should a failure occur.

EverRun SplitSite, meanwhile, allows the paired servers to be as much as 100 miles apart, enabling business continuity.

This week, Marathon is adding another layer to its high availability platform. It is introducing everRun Dynamic Upgrade. With Dynamic Upgrade, Marathon customers won’t have to take systems down for maintenance, patches or other upgrades.

The software, which runs on Windows servers without requiring modification to the operating system or applications, enables one of the two servers running the high availability software to be upgraded and tested while the other server runs the application. When the update has been successfully installed, the second server is upgraded and tested while the first runs the application.

Dynamic Upgrade is available as part of updates for everRun FT and everRun HA. It is a no-charge upgrade for all Marathon customers who have an everRun One Premier Services contract. EverRun FT is priced starting at $16,000 and everRun HA starts around $7,500.

Marathon claims that its software provides the high availability of clustering without the cost or headaches. You can download Marathon’s software for a free trial. Find out if you qualify here.