Jeremiah's Blog

Just because I reference some good notes from a Marathon blog doesn’t mean I love the Marathon product per se.

 

I still think the Neverfail Group offers a better solution for most, if not all of my customers for High Availability and Replication.

 

http://www.neverfailgroup.com

 

 

Here are some of my Marathon Gripes I have with Marathon, Neverfail doesn’t have these same problems, wait for another Neverfail blog post:

 

-Requires a complete manual build of the secondary server as well as the virtual server

 

-Requires a migration from existing systems to the virtual server

 

-Only supports Windows 2003 SP1, 32-bit versions

 

-everRun FT requires identical processors between servers, and only supports 1-2 processor configs

 

-Does not support virtualization (VMware or MS Virtual Server), meaning they can’t support many-to-one

 

-Does not Eliminate single points of failure from the software perspective

Their virtual server is a single point of failure, any problems with it will result in loss of availability)

This also means that any maintenance (patches, updates) to the virtual server will result in downtime

 

 

So Marathon is very cool and I like the idea of zero downtime, but in reality it isn’t a great overall solution for most of my business customers.  However, I am sure there are some business customers that it would work great for.  If Marathon and Neverfail would somehow merge their products together, now that would be powerful.

 

I think Marathon is a decent MS Cluster alternative for the LAN but  for Site to Site failover, there are some big hang-ups.

 

To protect against disasters with Marathon,  Splitsite is an additional $10,000, and requires less than 10ms round-trip latency between sites, Also a 3rd server is required to act as a witness/quorum

 

Reader beware, some of my data could be inaccurate but this is my take.

 

Jeremiah