Marathon to Bring Fault Tolerance to Linux in 2008

Published: May 1, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of its announcements recently to make its fault tolerant server technology from Windows compatible with the open source Xen hypervisor from XenSource, Marathon Technologies quietly announced that it would be porting its everRun fault tolerant software for X64 servers from Windows to Linux.

Marathon's everRun software, which is itself a kind of virtualization software layer that abstracts the underlying software to provide fault tolerant on a two-node network of machines, runs on any Windows box. With fault tolerant setups, two machines are kept in exact lockstep and if any component of one machine or its software fails, the other machine in the cluster keeps running and users see no failure at all. This is distinct from other clustering approaches, which have a production system failing over to a hot standby system and replication software to keep applications and data synchronized.

Marathon was formed in 1993 by some fault tolerant computing experts from the former Digital Equipment, who just so happened to be involved in the development of DEC's VAXft fault tolerant server line who saw a market opportunity for fault tolerant Windows servers when Microsoft launched Windows NT that year. Windows was not a very highly available operating system back then, which helped Marathon, and even as Windows has improved its availability through the generations, the demand for continuous uptime has grown among corporations. Marathon provides high availability products as well as fault tolerant configurations and a split-site disaster recovery configuration that can cluster Windows machines over a LAN or WAN.

Marathon has over 1,200 customers, 125 resellers, and has just closed $12 million in second-round venture funding, and at least some of that money will be used to move the everRun products to Linux.

In the fault tolerant implementation of everRun, there is a thing called the everRun Virtual Server, which is the secret sauce that makes two physical servers look and act like one. This software virtualizes CPUs, memory, disks, and other I/O and provides the lockstep processing. The machines can be lashed together by Gigabit Ethernet links, or with faster networking if customers want higher bandwidth.

Marathon will have the everRun software ported to Linux sometime in 2008, and is not being more specific about a launch date at this time.

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