Virtual Tools Can Simplify Disaster Recovery Strategy

With the development of virtualization technology, disaster recovery has become one of the most important tasks in IT tasks.

If the new products of Marathon technology company are indeed introduced as they do, this task will become more feasible.

Marathon launched its everRun VM products at the 2007 autumn VMworld Exhibition Conference, mainly targeting high availability and disaster recovery.

Today, the company officially released the product, which is currently released in the Beta version and released in April this year.

Marathon said that the product will increase the cost of XenServer Enterprise version of the license certificate by 2000 US dollars, but there is no limit to the number of virtual machines on that physical server.

As Chris Wolf, a Burton research analyst, recently said, more information executives of companies are looking for high availability virtualization solutions, because virtualization technology has shifted from the past testing and development stage to the field of practice for important commercial applications.

If these applications run on a virtual machine, then the company's greatest concern is the stability of business users.

The larger the load applied, the more needed the high availability of the virtual machine.

Wolf said that in 2008, when the improvement of virtualization technology allowed more and more high-end enterprise applications to run on the virtual machine, the high availability of virtual machines was everyone's concern.

Marathon expects its products to be particularly attractive to the information executives of those intermediate market companies. Some of them have had a difficult phase to assess the cost of traditional high availability / disaster recovery solutions, which generally require the addition of a storage area network (SAN), while requiring professional SAN technology staff.

Another company's competitive advantage is that VMware's high availability solution also needs SAN.

Marathon products can be stored in direct connection, which is especially attractive to company heads of information who do not need SAN and do not want to spend money on installing and maintaining the SAN.

EverRun's solution is also appealing to IT managers of large companies. These people mainly focus on simplification of disaster recovery management for the product.

Marathon estimates that a IT organization can run everRun in 30 minutes to protect the server, while the traditional group solution will need to be built and installed within days or even weeks.

At the same time, the product can also carry out automatic error and policy management, saving IT staff's time in this regard.

Using the Marathon's so-called geographic fault tolerance function, you can build multiple virtual machines on one data center site (or several sites) to have another location automation fault tolerance capability; this allows you to run the local virtual machine, even if a geographical location suffers from natural disasters, such as floods.

For Marathon, the most troublesome thing for IT stores is that Marathon products can only work on the Virtualization Server Architecture of Citrix/Xen, but not on the leading VMware virtual machine.

While Microsoft's Hyper-V support plan will be completed in the late stage, VMware's support has no plans. According to Marathon, the company believes that it is one of the many reasons for the decision to bring its products to the market and ensure that the Citrix/Xen architecture has certain performance.

The location of the software

On a physical server running virtual machines, the everRun software is located below the virtual machine layer and is above hypervisor.

This is very interesting, because many tools are on the level of virtual machine or operating system, Michael Bilancieri, product director of Marathon, said.

At the same time, he pointed out that this method has many advantages, including Marathon software can directly see the way of I/O activities, which can relocate an application on the virtual machine without the need for application to the user level.

At the same time, the product also provides diagnostic support for Windows applications, as well as traditional application support on virtual machines, and does not require customization of any client.

Currently, the everRun VM solution provides fault tolerance at component level (protection system from I/O failure, such as a bad hard disk condition).

In the late part of this year, Marathon will launch the everRun VM Lockstep option to provide fault tolerance at the system level, mainly for those who will lose the entire server for some reason, such as a fire destroyed the entire building.

The company said that this is an additional solution for everRun VM, and customers can set up the virtual machine protection level they want to ensure that those virtual machines that do not require high-level protection cost savings.