* Latest version of Marathon Technologies’ fault-tolerance software
Marathon Technologies last week announced software that creates fault- and disaster-tolerant computer environments for Microsoft Windows networks.
Marathon FTvirtual Server 6.1 is the next release of its fault-tolerance software, which lets x86 computers act in lockstep to maintain availability. Marathon also plans to sell an option called SplitSite that allows each of the servers to be located as much as 100 miles apart.
Two standard Intel-based servers or blades are linked together by dual Gigabit Ethernet connections and Marathon software to create an FTvirtual Server. Both servers operate in lockstep, meaning that as data is written to one server it is written concurrently to the other server. Thus, if either server fails or needs maintenance the data is protected on the other server.
The city of Fresno, Calif., runs its emergency services dispatch system on FTvirtual Server.
“We would be interested in the SplitSite capability at some point,” says Claudia Favors, senior IT analyst for Fresno County Emergency Services.
“If the building where our dispatch system is running were flattened, we would have trouble recovering that system right now,” Favors says. “If we had the SplitSite product we could easily activate the other site.”
The software comes in two versions – one that is limited to 1,640 feet and another that can support sites 100 miles apart. The SplitSite option can be used for servers in different rooms, at different campus locations or separated by a metropolitan-area network. The version of SplitSite a user chooses will depend on the type of WAN connection they have.
“Latency does limit how far apart the sites can be and the type of networks that can connect them,” says Gordon Haff, senior analyst for Illuminata. “But Marathon’s performance testing seems to show that so long as latency is kept below certain levels, app-level performance isn’t noticeably affected.”
Marathon’s software is similar to implementations of Stratus computers. It is software-only, though; Stratus relies on a proprietary hardware interconnect between processors. Stratus also does not have the ability to split its servers in half to implement this split-site disaster recovery capability.
The new version and the SplitSite option will ship in the second quarter. The short-distance version of SplitSite is $5,000; the long-distance version is $20,000. Marathon’s FTvirtual Server starts at $12,000 for a single-processor version.
