News

Marathon Ships High Availability Solution for W2K

• By Scott Bekker
• 05/08/2001

The product gives IT administrators a product that is roughly the cost of a two-node cluster that can match or exceed the availability guarantees provided through the exclusive Windows Datacenter Program.

"We promised we would deliver five-nines by May 15," said Craig Jon Anderson, vice president of market development for Marathon, drawing a comparison with Stratus Technologies.

Stratus and Marathon have been in heated race to deliver fault-tolerant systems to the Windows 2000 marketplace. Stratus originally planned to ship systems in September 2000, but has encountered repeated delays.

Marathon, which has been shipping fault-tolerant Windows NT systems for several years, also took more than 14 months after the shipment of Windows 2000 to get a Windows 2000-based system on the market.

Marathon on Monday announced its first customer shipment of a Windows 2000-based Marathon Assured Availability solution to the Utilities Protection Center in Duluth, Ga.

The system will undergird a call center where people planning excavations can check that they won't hit utility lines.

Marathon's systems run vanilla Windows 2000 Server as opposed to the more expensive Advanced Server and Datacenter Server flavors.

The systems use four industry standard servers to create a high availability environment.

Two compute subsystems run the application in lockstep so if one fails, the other completes any pending transactions and continues to run. I/O is handled by another two servers run asynchronously to prevent against flaky driver errors.

Marathon also introduced pre-configured systems with Exchange 2000 Server. Anderson said the company took its first order for one of those systems last week. –