Microsoft and Marathon Technologies working together
We keep being asked about this so thought it sensible to post the entire press release here so it’s easy to find!
Microsoft and Marathon Technologies Expand Relationship to Provide Fault Tolerant Computing to More Businesses
In January 2009, Microsoft and Marathon Technologies signed a development and marketing agreement that focused on high availability solutions with Windows Server.
The collaboration is focused in three areas:
- Help provide customers who deploy Windows Server 2008 and Marathon everRun® software a seamless path to extend high availability protection to their critical applications.
- Help provide Windows Server and Marathon everRun customers with the ability to select the appropriate level of availability, from failover clustering all the way up to system fault tolerance, for each application.
- Help customers deploying a future version of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualization technology, to use Marathon everRun for a fault-tolerant virtual infrastructure.
“Marathon has been working for years to take the complexity and cost out of fault tolerant computing to bring business resiliency to the mainstream,” said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon Technologies. “This expanded relationship with Microsoft will help provide customers with practical fault tolerance for Windows Server 2008 today and for those customers wishing to consolidate mission critical, Windows-based applications on Hyper-V in the future.”
The development work is designed to benefit customers in the following ways:
- Streamline setup and installation – Windows Server administrators will be able to install Marathon everRun’s additional levels of availability in minutes.
- Seamless integration between levels of availability – When administrators add Marathon everRun, it will automatically provide them with a choice of availability levels.
- Confidence to run the most critical applications – Windows Server and Marathon everRun customers, in both physical and virtual environments, will be able to select the business and mission critical applications to get component-level and system-level fault tolerance protection.
The combination of Windows Server and Marathon everRun will help enable customers to deploy an appropriate level of availability for each application:
- Level One: Failover Clustering included with the Enterprise and Datacenter Editions of Windows Server 2008 for high availability that helps eliminate single points of failure – helping reduce downtime and guard against data loss.
- Level Two: Marathon everRun Component Level Fault Tolerance for critical applications with a requirement for little or no downtime and zero data loss.
- Level Three: Marathon everRun System Level Fault Tolerance for the most critical applications with a requirement for zero downtime and zero data loss.
“Our work with Marathon sets a course for more customers to deploy Windows-based applications, both virtual and physical, on cost-effective fault tolerant systems,” said Mike Schutz, director of product management, Windows Server division at Microsoft Corp. “Marathon has been delivering fault tolerant solutions for Windows Server for more than 15 years. This work represents the value of Microsoft’s ISV ecosystem to our customers, which allows software ISVs like Marathon to develop Windows-based solutions so customers can confidently use technology as a business advantage.”
Marathon everRun is available today for Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2008 customers can use failover clustering today and for those customers who require component level or system level fault tolerance, they can use Marathon everRun® with Citrix XenServer™ in Q2 of 2009. Customers who deploy a future version of Windows Server with Hyper-V along with Marathon everRun will be able to easily migrate their fault tolerant application deployments and enjoy all three levels of protection.
Tags: everRun, fault tolerance, High Availability, high availability solutions, Marathon Technologies, Microsoft, server virtualisation, Virtualisation
