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Blog

We had a very lively presentation and Q&A during last week’s webinar “How to Cut Risks and Costs with a Downtime Analysis and Action Plan.” A summary of the Q&A is below.

Q: Should branch offices be included in a downtime assessment?
Absolutely – you can’t ignore branch offices. Forrester estimates that 20% of your business comes from branch offices. IT needs to make sure to include those in your assessment plans and budget.

Q: How often should I conduct a business and risk impact assessment?
We’ve found with our customers that an annual assessment is usually sufficient, unless you have some significant kind of change like an acquisition or new location. In that situation you obviously need to do a refresh. You can then use that info moving forward as you conduct your annual assessment.

Q: Is there any available information about rough cost estimates of down time impact in control systems like DCS or SCADA and Historians like the one you showed for IT systems in one of your slides?
We work with a number of ISVs in the process control space including GE, Johnson Controls, Rockwell and many others. We conducted an assessment in a pharmaceutical plant where one minute of downtime lead to the discard of an entire batch, which resulted in a loss of $950,000 to $1.1 million. In process automation and process control, downtime also effects efficiency. We had one company doing waste water treatment and they couldn’t handle the processing levels because of the downtime that they were having, and they were considering opening up a second facility. The assessment revealed that they could actually just retool their existing applications to increase their efficiency and not have to open a second facility. There’s a huge safety element here as well. When some types of systems go down, it can cause significant safety hazards to employees and others. This should also factor in to your downtime risk assessment.

Q: What about hosted applications? How can I incorporate those into my assessment?
Very often, some of your most critical applications are no longer hosted at your site. There’s still obviously extremely important to the business and need to be included as part of your assessment. Treat them exactly the same as your on-site applications, but just make sure that the vendor has the protections in place to keep your applications at the necessary levels to ensure their availability.

Q: With the increased reliance on the Internet, how do you factor the loss of the Internet (i.e. nationwide cyber attack) in risk/mitigation planning?
What we covered in the presentation is mostly what’s under your control, but you do also need to factor in security needs as well. Look at the areas out of your control as well. For example, what would happen to your business if my internet connection is down? Should you have a secondary carrier? ARe you going to go from a T1 connection to some other kind of connection?

Q: Are Marathon’s assessment services delivered primarily as a way to introduce Marathon software into the account, or do you sometimes recommend other software solutions that may be a better fit?
It depends on what you need. Sometimes we’ll go into an organization and do an assessment and they’ll have applications that aren’t necessarily mission critical and they can deal with several hours or days of downtime. What they already have in place might be acceptable for that situation. Or they may be in a situation where they just need disaster recovery. For the instances where there are mission critical applications involved and they can’t tolerate downtime or data loss that’s where we come in.

Q: Would you ever recommend the use of cloud-based VMs for disaster recovery?
It depends on your needs. When you look at the spectrum of availability, there are just so many buzz words and acronyms out there. Fault tolerance, high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, replication, and on and on. There are efficiencies with cloud-based DR, but the reality is that a lot of these services use a “recovery” model, which means there is downtime involved. These type of services don’t keep your business going during an outage, they just help you to recover after the fact. At Marathon, our focus is on the prevention of downtime and the continuation of business.

Q: Is there a tactic (rule of thumb) you'd recommend to avoid departments classifying everything as mission critical, as everyone believes there app is mission critical.
Every department likes to think that their particular applications are critical to the business. This is why companies like to engage third parties to help them with this process. Companies like Marathon can come in with an objective perspective, ask detailed questions, and provide guidance without any of the internal politics getting in the way.
 

Thanks again to everyone who joined us for last week’s webinar “Top 5 Low Cost Tips for Preventing Exchange Downtime” where Marathon’s availability experts reviewed their key tips for the prevention of downtime, including:

1. Reduce human error with process
2. Document your infrastructure
3. Remove single points of failure
4. Don’t forget to test
5. Understand your requirements

There’s a lot of great information in this 40-minute webinar, so be sure to check it out. We’ve summarized the Q&A portion for the webinar below.
 

Q: What type of storage does everRun support?
everRun supports any type of storage that you have. The most common storage configuration we see is local disk drives for the servers themselves. That would have the same amount of data protection as even a SAN would, and in some cases would be even better protection, because you have total redundancy from both servers and everRun is protecting that as if it’s a single storage device. You could also have iSCSI connected storage, or any kind of SAN storage that you wanted to have. Again, everRun supports any type of storage.

Q: Which versions of Exchange do you support?
The beauty of the everRun architecture is that is can support pretty much any Windows-based application. Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010 – everRun supports them all. Some other high availability solutions require specialized scripting to support applications, but everRun does not require this. Also, with solutions like clusters, sometimes you have to buy the higher-end more expensive “enterprise” versions of the application software to support that configuration, but with everRun, we can provide complete protection for the standard versions of Windows and Exchange Server or any other application.

Q: What is the load on the systems when using everRun?
The good news here is that there is very little overhead associated with everRun – about 5% to make things run redundantly. That’s a very small performance price to pay to get such a high level of protection for Exchange.

Q: How does everRun handle the mirroring of data that’s loaded in memory?
There are a couple of ways that is done. Since the application is actually running both severs simultaneously, that means the memory is being replicated on both servers simultaneously as well. Keep in mind that as the applications execute, they are storing to storage, and because of the redundancy built into the everRun solution, that data is being written from memory down under the storage element redundantly as well.

Q: Is it possible to run servers in two different locations?
Absolutely. In the slide where I showed the everRun architecture with the two servers, you can take those two servers and separate them geographically. They could be in different rooms in the same building, different buildings on the same campus, or even separated further, by about 100 miles, depending on the bandwidth and latency of your connection. We call this our SplitSite configuration.

Q: How is this different from a cluster solution?
The major difference of everRun vs. a cluster solution is that we are doing operations on two servers simultaneously. The application is actually running in tandem on both of these servers. With a cluster solution, you’re running your application on one server, while the other server stands by and waits for a failure to occur. That means that with a cluster solution, when the first server fails, the cluster then has to do something to start up the application on the second server and then continue from that point. But that means downtime, data loss, and loss of connectivity. With everRun, that doesn’t happen. Because the other server is already doing the same thing, there is no downtime and no data loss, because there is no “recovery” – even when there is a failure.

Q: So are both servers “hot” in an everRun configuration?
Yes – that’s exactly right. Both servers are active and run simultaneously, unlike a cluster. So with everRun, you could have a failure of a component on one server and then another type of failure on the second server and still be operational. With a cluster, this scenario is not possible. If you have failures on both systems at the same time with a cluster, then you are down.

Q: Does everRun require dedicated servers just for Exchange?
No – everRun protected servers do not need to be dedicated to one specific application. You can run multiple applications on this pair of servers, and even chose which ones you do or don’t want to protect with everRun. This is good for small businesses, who want or need to consolidate several applications on to fewer servers.

For more information about protecting Exchange from downtime, be sure to check out our white paper "Six Secrets to 24x7 Exchange Availability."
 

Earlier this week, we hosted a webinar on the topic of “How to Cut Risks and Costs with a Downtime Analysis & Action Plan.” We know from our experience in application availability that many companies avoid these types of assessments – they either don't know where to start or decide that they don’t have the time or experience to conduct an assessment, so they just live with the unknowns and hope that nothing bad happens. (We’ve seen the consequences of downtime at many companies and don’t recommend this method!)

Our VP of Services & Support, Beth Shea, explored this topic in detail and provided a simple framework that companies can use today to uncover their risks and put measures in place to minimize the impact of downtime. To learn more, be sure to watch the 30-minute webinar. You can also check out the Q&A session from the webinar, summarized below.

Q: When looking at the impact of downtime, it is just unplanned downtime, or should you include planned downtime as well?
You absolutely need to plan for both planned and unplanned downtime, as there’s a real cost and business impact to both. They both need to be included in your impact assessment.

Q: What about branch offices – should they be included in a downtime assessment?
According to Forrester Research, about 20% of a company’s business is tied up in branch and remote offices, and IT needs to include these offices in any assessment that they are conducting. You shouldn’t overlook these offices when putting together your downtime and business impact assessments. They have to be factored in.

Q: How often should I conduct a business impact and risk assessment?
What we’ve found with our customers is that conducting an annual assessment is sufficient, or in some cases, twice a year, depending on the type of business. You can then use these as your benchmark going forward to determine the success of the initiative and ensure that you have the key metrics to report to your management team.

Q: How do you determine when to use local high availability vs. a disaster recovery solution?
Fault tolerance, high availability, disaster recovery - all of these different terms can be confusing and they can have different meanings to different people. The way we think of this is that when you’re implementing high availability or fault tolerance this is to ensure that locally you are protected against the everyday, nuisance failures that cause downtime. If you lose a fan or a drive for example, you would automatically route to another server within the same building or local area. Disaster recovery solutions are really for recovery from catastrophes (fire, flood) or other events where you need to failover to a much more distant location. You don’t want to use this type of solution for everyday failures, as it can be very time consuming to failover and failback, and you can potentially lose some data. For local protection, you want high availability/fault tolerant solutions.

Q: What about hosted applications like salesforce.com, how do I account for those in this type of assessment?
In today’s world, so many applications are offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or sometimes called hosted applications, where they are no longer hosted at your site. However, they are still important to your business and need to be included as part of your overall assessment. Our approach is to conduct the assessment for your SaaS applications as if all they were onsite. Then use your tiered analysis and make sure that your SaaS vendor is meeting your availability requirements for that application, and that they have the necessary protections in place to protect that application to the same level that you would protect if it were in-house.

Q: Does Marathon offer any services to conduct this type of assessment?
Yes – this is a service that we provide for our customers. Most customers are very satisfied with the service, because it usually has an immediate ROI for their business. If you are interested in this type of service, please feel free to us at 978-489-1100.

Q: Does Marathon have any templates available to build a framework for this type of assessment?
Absolutely. From our 16+ years of working with customers on the assessment and prevention of downtime, we’ve put together an extensive list of questions to ask about the business risks and impact of downtime. Please feel free to contact us if you would like more information.

Q: How do you measure or put a price on the intangible impacts of downtime?
This can be tough to nail down, but what we recommend is developing some basic estimates. This isn’t meant to be an exact number, what we are really trying to achieve here is to prioritize applications, put them into the tiers that we discussed and make sure that you are putting the right amount of resources against the right applications. From a productivity perspective, one metric you could use is to look at the cost of employee salaries and how much it would cost in salary costs to have employees not be able to work for a certain amount of time. This is just one example.

Q: Does everRun handle quick switch over to back up site if the main site goes down?
Yes, within seconds.

Q: What are the requirements for the backup site?
The machines at the backup site are in the same pool as the primary site, so the backup machines must meet the requirements to be in the same pool as the primary site machines.

Q: How about regular data sync between main site and backup site?
Since the primary and backup site are running in lockstep mode, the application and the data are always in sync between the primary and backup sites.

Frank Ohlhorst, former Executive Technical Editor for eWeek and award-winning IT expert, was our expert guest speaker this week for the webinar, “Cut Your DR Costs and Get Better Data Protection.” During his presentation, Frank reviewed why he believes that now is the time to rethink traditional approaches to disaster recovery. He explained why the total cost of ownership for disaster recovery solutions is on the rise, and why changing data protection dynamics are making it more economical to focus your time and budget on the prevention of downtime and data loss, rather than recovery.

Below is the summary of the audience questions from the Q&A portion of the webinar.

Q: You talked about how HA can give you a geographic advantage. What do you mean by that?
Frank Ohlhorst: High availability systems are designed to work with multiple servers and there’s no reason why you can’t have those servers located hundreds or thousands of miles apart. You get a geographic advantage because your data centers is in multiple places and regional areas, so if a weather-related or other event occurs, let’s say a blizzard up north with a power outage, your data center down south can pick up the slack without kicking users off the system. The same can be said about a data center located in an area with hurricanes or other natural disasters. The geographic separation gives you added protection.
When high availability is paired with load balancing, it helps to locate the data resources closer to where the users are requesting them. Let’s say you have users in Utah, it’s better performance-wise to have them talk to the data center in Nevada rather than Virginia. It helps on that level also. HA solutions also have the tools for monitoring what is going on with your users and network, to help you plan out how you should assign users to specific data centers for the most efficiency.

Q: I understand how high availability can handle unplanned downtime, but what about planned downtime? Can it help there as well?
Frank Ohlhorst: Yes, the idea there is being as you have multiple active systems to meet the user’s needs, you can take one of those systems down for maintenance and have the users serviced by the active machines while you make the updates and improvements. Then when you are done, just resynchronize with the other systems, move the users over to those systems and update the rest of the servers.
Another great benefit of this is for testing upgrades and changes. So take one system offline and test your upgrades to see if they work properly before you return that system to production.

Q: If I have an HA solution in place, is back-up still necessary?
Frank Ohlhorst: 99% of the time the answer to that question is yes. It depends on what your corporate needs are. There are certain situations where HA might not deal with your catastrophe. Those are usually software-damaging events, like a virus infection, that winds up getting replicated across the system. Of course, that should really be part of your security planning to prevent events like that from even happening. With today’s security technologies, it’s pretty easy to prevent that. But if you did ever have one of those events, you do need something to roll-back to, and that’s where the back-up comes in to play. Ideally though, you should be preventing that type of event, because you also have the potential to lose active data if that happens. When it comes to compliance or auditing, you have to restore data relevant to that time period to meet the needs of e-discovery, compliance, accounting audits and other similar requirements. So you can’t just say, “I have HA in place, so I don’t need to back-up.”

Q: What about data de-duplication technologies, don’t they help solve this problem of managing large volumes of data?
Frank Ohlhorst: They reduce the data footprint for sure, but what we’re talking about here is availability of the data. They can certainly reduce the size of your data footprint, you can use de-dup to speed up backups. At the end of the day though, if the system or application is not accessible to the user, then it’s not available and you haven’t met your objectives. It’s a simple matter of business logic that data de-duplication can improve performance and reduce the size of the footprint, but it doesn’t solve the problem of providing access to users during catastrophic events.

Q: Do you see continuous availability and high availability as the same, and if so, how do you differentiate between the two and the costs?
Frank Ohlhorst: There was a time when those technologies were very, very different. That was way back when we relied on expensive hardware-based solutions or appliances that provided continuous availability. High availability at that time was thought of as a method to switch from one server to another using a manual process in the case of an emergency.

High Availability technology has evolved significantly since then. Now, the two are really one in the same from a planning and software point of view. Today’s HA solutions eliminate that step of manual switchover. What you see with the vendors today is automatic HA technology that really delivers continuous availability. And the cost gap today is pretty much zero, since the technology for continuous availability and high availability has evolved to be almost one in the same.

Q: With an SRDF/S-type solution, how can we get around the fact that being geographically more separated to mitigate regional disruptions can mean slower primary system response times due to the need to remain synchronous?
Frank Ohlhorst: Let’s look at this first from the ideology of what we’re trying to do which is business continuity. So, if you encounter a situation when you lose connectivity to a system and it’s still available at another location, then you’ve met the goal there of providing continuity. And you’re in much better shape than you would be at that point if you had a disaster recovery solution instead of a business continuity solution.

The question you have to ask yourself at that point in time is: Is reduced performance better than no performance at all? For most businesses, the answer is yes. For others, if the performance lag is significant enough it can impact business. In those cases, you’ll have to work out a way to develop geographically dispersed sites can that can provide enough performance to the user sets that need access to the data. You also need to make sure that your connectivity has enough bandwidth to support your BC/HA solutions, which means the ability to replicate the data in real time across the wire. You might have to invest in larger pipes for better connectivity to support that. But again, that depends on your particular business and your needs. There is no one correct answer to this question, but the good news is that there are several solutions today that can help you solve this problem and meet the levels of availability that you need for your business.

Earlier this week, we had a great webinar featuring guest speaker Greg Cullen, Sr. Director of Technology at Marathon. Greg provided tips and advice that government agencies can use to ensure optimal availability for their critical applications at minimal cost. He also reviewed  three different government agencies that protected their data and applications from downtime with Marathon’s everRun software.

These included the Brookline Police Department, which kept their 911 system available – even during a hardware failure on Christmas day when no IT staff were on duty; the City of Santa Rosa utilities department, that protects its water treatment facility against outages from earthquakes, power outages and other natural disasters; and a county court system in California that protects its virtualized Exchange server and other paperwork processing applications from downtime.

The transcript of the Q&A session with Greg from the live webinar is below.
 

Q: Can you deploy the two everRun servers in different locations or do they have to be in the same location?
You absolutely can. You can deploy the two servers in the same room, or different rooms in the same building and even in two separate buildings. We call that configuration SplitSite. That’s one way to get disaster tolerance in the event that you have a site-wide outage, rather than having them in the same room or building.

Q: Is there a limit to how far apart the servers can be?
In general, they can be separated by as much as 100 miles, although it really depends on your bandwidth and latency on the connection between the two sites.

Q: What are the hardware requirements for everRun?
You’ll need Intel-based servers that have a moderate amount of memory, or as much as the application requires. And you’ll need enough networks to do the production side of it as well as maintaining the redundancy between the severs. Generally speaking, having four network adaptors in each server and somewhere in the order of 100GB of disk drive is sufficient.

Q: How does the everRun software compare with a clustering solution?
One of the biggest difference between everRun and clustering is that everRun is a single image for the application. Instead of installing and managing two instances of your application like you do with clustering, everRun is just a single image to install and manage. Changes happen on both servers simultaneously through that single image.

Also, everRun software does not require cluster-aware applications. everRun is application agnostic, and can support almost any Windows application. And one more thing, with most clustering solutions, you also need to have a shared storage container that both servers are connected to. everRun can support that model as well, but doesn’t require it like clusters do. In fact, to remove single points of failure, it’s much better to have local storage connected to each of the servers and everRun will manage that storage as a mirrored device.

Q: I’m confused by your use of DR. Can you define what you mean by disaster recovery?
We’ve found that everyone has a different definition of what they mean by disaster recovery. At a very high-level, we see disaster recovery as the need to protect your data. By comparison, we see high availability as the need to protect your application, data and network connectivity. DR means you’re trying to copy your changed data off site to protect it in the event of a true disaster. After the “disaster” is over, you then need to bring that data back to the primary site, or configure an alternate server to use the data in the DR site.

Q: Does everRun work with Siemens building security systems?
Yes, we have been working for several years with building automation and security companies including Johnson Controls, Tyco, Andover Controls, Siemens and many others. As long as the building system runs in Windows Server 2003 or 2008, we can provide availability for it with no custom scripts or custom coding. We have many deployments of everRun protecting these building security systems around the world.

Q: Does everRun work with e911 systems?
Yes – absolutely. Generally speaking, everRun is application agnostic and can work with almost any Windows application. We have many solutions out there where these emergency 911 centers are protected by everRun so that if there is some type of disaster, these systems continue to run.

Q: Is everRun available on a GSA schedule?
Yes, through our channel partners. Contact your Marathon account representative or call 978.489.1100 for specific partner information.

Q: How does everRun differ from data replication solutions?
A lot of times when people look at availability, they simply try to replicate the data. There’s a big issue with that though. That’s only one part of what you need to recover in the event of a failure. everRun not only replicates the data, but also keeps a redundant set of your application environment and network connectivity, and everything else that is required for the application to not see any failures at all, or to recover very quickly in the advent of certain types of failures.
 

Earlier this week, Craig Resnick, research analyst from ARC Advisory Group, joined us to discuss Best Practices for Preventing Downtime in Automation Systems. Craig's presentation was very well-recieved, with several attendees commenting on the high quality of the information Craig provided. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, the on-demand recording is here and the recap of the Q&A from the webinar is below.

Q: Has the hierarchy at manufacturers changed where the groups that mange these different domains have converged, or are they still separate?
Craig Resnick, ARC Advisory Group: Over the last five years, we’ve seen the convergence of IT with the automation and operations groups. Five years ago we used to joke about the “civil wars” between these groups. IT used to poke fun at the factory floor about the age of the equipment, which can be 10, 20 or even 30 years old in some cases. The Factor Floor used to poke fun at IT because, as they put it, IT didn’t understand what “real-time” means. We’re finding now that there are many initiatives between these groups to converge different processes at different levels. This is an ongoing process that will take a while, but from what we’ve seen, once the convergence is made, it usually has very positive results for the business.

Q: Is everRun tested and approved by Siemens, Rockwell, etc.?
Yes. everRun works with a number of different automation systems and applications from Rockwell, Siemens, Johnson Controls, Dematic, Wonderware and many others. We’ve done qualification and certification testing with many vendors in the automation space. Because of the way that everRun is designed, it is almost transparent to the application, so we really can work with most vendors and have a very quick validation/certification process.

Q: Will a TCP connection from a SQL client to a SQL server be maintained through a failover?
At Marathon, we take a different approach to application availability. It’s not about failover and recovery, it’s about keeping systems up and running, even during a failure, with no impact to the users or the data. Failover isn’t something that we really do. We can actually maintain those connections, even with a failure, at all times if that’s what you need. We can maintain all connectivity, transparent to the user and the IP connections, and keep the system states intact.

Q: Does everRun work in both physical and virtual environments?
Yes, everRun works in both physical and virtual environments. We can protect both single and multiple workloads.

Q: What is the typical integration period to get everRun up and running at a site?
A typical engagement is about 2-3 days. The software itself installs very quickly and then after that there is the deployment and migration of applications, testing and training. WE provide these services through our everRun ONE program.

Q: What is the typical overhead of everRun?
That will vary based on the application. Anywhere from 5-15% depending on the characteristics of the applications – storage intensive, I/O intensive, etc. But 5-15% is a typical estimate.

Q: Are the partnerships validated in both physical and virtual environments? We use the Dematic voice picking application.
We do support Dematic applications in both physical and virtual environments. Some of our vendors have only tested physical, some virtual and some both. Our technology is very similar for both physical and virtual, and in most cases will work with most applications in both. If you have a specific application that you would like to check on, just give us a call.

Next week Craig Resnick, research director and automation expert at ARC Advisory Group will be the guest speaker for our webinar "Best Practices for Preventing Downtime in Automation Systems."  We recently sat down with Craig to discuss some of the recent trends in the manufacturing and automation industries.

Q: What are some of the newer trends that you are seeing in the automation space?

Craig Resnick: A primary trend that we see at ARC is the convergence of automation and IT systems. Nearly every manufacturing company uses a variety of plant automation and enterprise IT systems to manage its operations. Plant floor systems, such as distributed control systems (DCS), programmable automation and logic controllers (PACs/PLCs), and a wide range of plant floor applications provide a wealth of real-time information regarding productivity, efficiency, equipment health, capability, and quality. Business systems, in turn, provide information on raw material costs, product orders and inventories, manufacturing resources, production schedules, etc. This wide range of information often remains isolated in systems such as manufacturing execution systems (MES), laboratory systems, maintenance systems, scheduling systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, supply chain management (SCM) systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Decisions based on data from any one of these system will always be less than optimal because, without the corresponding information from the other systems, the information will be incomplete.

To close this gap between automation and IT systems, and to address the trend of the plant floor becoming more IT-centric, ARC has defined a new space, defined as Collaborative Production Systems. These new systems consist of platforms in which the controls layer domains of process, logic, motion, building automation, and power control systems converge with the information layer domains of production management and MES systems. These converged systems enable, for example, the required data and information to be directly tied into applications such as corporate reporting and manufacturing compliance. Collaborative Production Systems will become the industrial blade server that provides full monitoring and control of the enterprise, from the office to the plant floor, sharing that information with the supply chain to, for example, procure materials and resources and purchase or sell power at the optimal times and prices from the smart grid, while providing full financial metrics and KPIs to ERP systems to maximize profitability.

Q: Now that corporate reporting and systems are heavily tied into the “factory floor”, how is that changing the need for system availability and data protection?

Craig Resnick: The need for system availability and data protection continues to expand, driven by a combination of issues ranging from global competition to regulatory requirements. Process safety and critical control are primarily focused on system availability and process uptime. As a specific example, take the Pharmaceutical industry, where data and batch information can never be lost or interrupted. System availability and data protection needs are also forcing E-records regulations to evolve across the globe. In the US, this includes 21 CFR Part 11, as well as the FDA’s Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and Process Analytical Technology (PAT) initiatives. In Europe, this includes Annex 11 of the EU GMPs, electronic Signatures Directive 1999/93/EC, and Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. The European Data Protection Directive requires even more protection on data than the current FDA regulations and extends this requirement to clinical trials patients, as all clinical trials data requires maximum protection to remain compliant with regulations.

Unscheduled downtime is expensive. It often impacts production’s ability to meet its schedule and may cause missed customer commitments. Unplanned downtime, which also includes unexpected stoppages resulting from equipment failure, operator error, or nuisance trips, is the nemesis of all manufacturers. Statistics on the impact of unplanned downtime on plant operations show that it accounts for 2 to 5 percent of production lost in, for example, the petrochemical industry. Unscheduled downtime is also costly in terms of equipment damage, environmental harm, and worker safety. The cost of downtime is reflected in a primary key performance indicator (KPI) used by manufacturers known as Dynamic Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), which helps determine the real-time impact of the performance of any individual process or piece of equipment on the overall efficiency of the plant. Unscheduled downtime is a primary factor that significantly lowers Dynamic OEE, which translates to the manufacturer decreasing both its efficiency and profitability.

Q: What are some of the basic steps that companies can implement to ensure the availability of their systems?

Craig Resnick: The first step that companies can implement to ensure the availability of their systems is to maximize their operator’s effectiveness in the control room, which is essential to minimize the risks of accidents, eliminate unscheduled downtime, and maximize production quality. The global process industry loses $20 billion, or five percent of annual production, due to unscheduled downtime and poor quality. ARC estimates that almost 80 percent of these losses are preventable and 40 percent of those preventable losses are primarily the result of human or operator error. Maximizing operator effectiveness requires automating as many functions as technology will allow, as well as reducing complexity wherever possible. For example there are still many plants where operators monitor the processes and collect data manually or semi-automatically using chart recorders. This process is both tedious and error prone, and does not provide appropriate process insight or instill a sense of ownership among the control room operators.

The Abnormal Situation Management Consortium (ASM) points out that most incidences occur from multiple modes of failure. Preventable human error is a contributing factor to these losses, but is hardly the only cause. Preventing abnormal situations requires a multilayered multi-discipline approach focused on maximizing production throughput, efficiency and quality while minimizing lost production time and preventing damage to assets and endangerment to personnel. This approach requires deploying collaborative production systems designed and implemented to be able to deliver high levels of availability and fault-tolerance expected from any other mission critical industrial system. This typically requires effective data backup mechanisms, redundant controllers for critical applications, plus industrial grade software. Manufacturers are also deploying more fault tolerant server technology to ensure continuous availability of these mission critical applications; the continuous flow of vital products to the market; and the avoidance of the potentially negative financial, social, or environmental impact that operating without high availability fault-tolerant systems might bring.

To learn more about preventing downtime in your automation applications, be sure to attend next week's webinar where Craig will provide expert info on steps for reducing the human error that leads to downtime, how to protect your hardware, storage and networks for complete availability coverage, and how to protect against a complete site failure. You can register here.
 

Tom Reed, Marathon’s Senior Systems Engineer and MCSE, hosted our most recent webinar on SharePoint High Availability. We’ve summarized the Q&A portion of the webinar below. A recording of the webinar is also available for on-demand viewing.

Q: Do I have to have identical servers to use everRun?

The servers don’t have to be exactly the same; however, the CPUs should be identical as a best practice. For what we call our Level 2 protection (for component level protection of the network and disk), you can use different RAM and spindle speeds on storage. Level 3 protected workloads require the servers to be alike. You can view a complete list of supported processors on our website. 

Q: What kind of storage do I need to use everRun?

One of the great things about everRun is that it is storage agnostic. It doesn’t matter what type of storage you are running. You can work with SAS drives, and iSCSi, local or fibre SAN, pretty much any type of storage and it doesn’t have to be the same on both sides. Some customers using everRun SplitSite are using SAN at the primary data center and local disk at the secondary data center, which can save storage costs.

 Q: Does everRun DR integrate with SRM from VMware and how does this work with VMs as a second server?

VMware SRM, or site recovery manager, is designed to asynchronously replicate the actual virtual machines to a secondary site. It does this by using replication software at the SAN level. So once you purchase SRM you have to purchase SAN replication software as well. If you didn’t want to replicate the actual virtual machines over, what you could do is use everRun DR, the difference being that we do not bring over the current virtual machine. We have a separate vm built and we have the capability to start and stop service, recover from a single point in time, and drag and drop recover files on a replicated data drive. If you are looking for an in-depth comparison of VMware SRM vs. everRun DR, you can contact us at 800.884.6425 or via email for more info.

 Q: How much overhead does everRun place on the protected server?

General use cases today are 3-10%. We have application performance documentation for Exchange 2007 and XenApp that you can download from our website. We will have a similar document for SharePoint in early 2010.

 Q: How does everRun differ from a backup solution?

We have found that there is a lot of confusion in the industry around the difference between backup vs. high availability. Backup solutions are designed to provide a disk-to-disk or disk-to-tape scenario for recovery of data. Backup is a recovery option, not a prevention option. It lets you recover to your last point in time, last snapshot, or last tape. Again, this will not prevent downtime or provide availability for users. It is a means of recovery. everRun DR can provide this type of solution if this is what your business needs. If your goal is to prevent outages and data loss (rather than recover from them), what you really want is a local high availability solution. 

Q: What version of Windows does everRun support?

everRun supports Windows Server 2003 SP2 Standard and Enterprise Editions, 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise Editions, 64-bit.

 Q: Does everRun work with SQL 2008?

Yes. everRun supports any Windows application without requiring changes or customization. Because everRun resides below the operating environment, we are protected underneath that. We have a number of ISVs that use our software with their applications and they use us because they don’t have to make any changes to their software. It’s not tied into the application, and doesn’t need to be “cluster aware” or anything similar to that.

 Q: Can I use everRun between two VMs? Meaning two VMs instead of two physical servers?

We build out the virtual machines when you install our software, so if you’re using our VMs to build out your machines, then we can do that.

 Q: Do you have experience using everRun in education environments?

Yes, a couple of examples of everRun being used in education environments include Michigan State University in the US, and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. We have several additional education customer examples and references that we can provide to you. Give us a call at 800.884.6425 for more information.

Q: How do you determine when to use everRun HA vs. everRun DR solution?

A good method for determining which solution is most appropriate for your situation is to take a closer look at your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). How long can you be down and how much data can you lose? If you can be down for several days, then you want to look at a DR solution. Just take into consideration that while DR failover is sometimes necessary, it can be a lengthy, complex process and is sometimes invasive to your environment. First you have to failover to the DR site and then failback when the primary site is restored, which can be very time consuming. 

The majority of failures are not catastrophic. Most are pretty common like network issues or hardware failures. For this scenario what you should really look at is local high availability protection. For the most complete protection overall, best practices are to have local high availability protection and then DR as a back-up for a major disaster. Then at the DR site you should also have an HA solution because if you do have that major catastrophe and failover, you want to make sure that secondary environment is protected while you are re-building the primary site.

 Q: What are some large county government examples using everRun software?

everRun has been deployed by many different government agencies. You can read about deployments at the Brookline Police Department, the County of Chester (Pennsylvania), and the City of Santa Rosa, California Utilities Department on our website. We also have many more government customer examples and references that we can provide to you. Give us a call at 800.884.6425 for more information.

 Q: When using everRun, can I use the secondary server to backup the data to avoid impact on the primary production server, or will both servers feel the impact during the backup window?

You should run your backup on the active server. On the secondary server, the workloads are in paused mode, so you can’t run a backup agent there. If you run it on the primary server, then it’s cloned over to the secondary server automatically.

 Q: Does everRun guarantee no downtime, or 99.999?

Yes,we provide 99.999% (5 9’s) protection with our Level 3 system fault tolerant protection.

We had some great questions during last week's webinar High Availability Doesn't Have to be Expensive. A recap of the Q&A is below, including the questions that we weren't able to get to because of time constraints. Be sure to check out our library of on-demand webinars, for this webinar, as well as other topics including SQL availability, Windows Server availability, everRun product demos and more.

Q: How is everRun different from replication solutions?
To understand how everRun is different from replication solutions, you need to take a look at the key differences between disaster recovery and high availability. Availability is about preventing outages instead of just recovering from them; about maintaining the user state with minimal interruptions. With disaster recovery (DR) and replication methods, if there is a failure, you lose connectivity for a period of time and then you have to recover your data and system state. Conversely, availability is about reducing and preventing downtime and keeping users online, even through a failure.

everRun is used for availability, both locally and for short-distance geographic separation as well. We have a replication and recovery solution as well that can be used for disaster recovery for long distances. You should determine what your objectives are: do I have to keep my applications up and running or do I just need to recover it if something fails? What’s the recovery time objective for each application? It’s up to your individual applications and what level of protection you need for each. Oftentimes, availability is a priority as downtime is not desirable, with DR also a requirement on top of that to ensure recovery in the event of a major outage.

Q: What kind of bandwidth requirement is needed for a two-site solution?
As a general rule of thumb, an OC3 connection is required per application workload being protected. Latency is really more critical than bandwidth and this will vary based on the applications and environment.

Q: How does everRun software compare with EMC’s RepliStor and AutoStart applications?
everRun is different from these products because it provides high availability in an automated way with fault tolerant capabilities to prevent user interruptions when hardware fails. This goes back to prevention rather than recovery.

RepliStor is a DR/replication product. While it does provide a failover/restart capability, as do most DR solutions, it is really best used for failover in the event of a major disaster. There’s usually a substantial amount of downtime and a manual failover process to get the systems back online at the secondary site and to failback once the primary site is back online. For DR, you probably want to be able to specify when your systems fail over. But, you will lose some data because this is an asynchronous solution. For minor outages, you really don’t want this. For example, let’s say the power goes out in your primary location for an hour. It can take even longer than that with DR systems to failover to the secondary DR site. You would have been better off just waiting an hour for the power to come back on and restarting the primary systems. RepliStor is more suited for major disaster scenarios, rather than just minor local or regional failures.

Auto-Start is more of a clustering type of product designed for availability and application restarts. It’s not designed to prevent downtime due to failures, but rather to recover from them.

Q: Can everRun be used for planned downtime?
Planned downtime for patches, upgrades, etc. can sometimes cost as much or more to your company as unplanned downtime. The answer to this question will depend on the type of updates. Some OS upgrades do require that there be a restart for the changes to take effect. For some types of planned maintenance, everRun can eliminate the need for downtime. For the others, one of the main things everRun can do is to reduce the risk of updating a system and not having it come back online. For example, you’ve just overwritten your production system and it worked in a test environment, but now it won’t come up in production. We can reduce that risk greatly, by getting it back online quickly without the need to rebuild the server.

Q: What is the difference between everRun and vMotion and VMware HA?
These are two different products, so we'll start with VMware HA. The HA product is a failover/restart capability. If you lose a host, the system will try to restart the virtual machines on another host on the pool. There’s no real guarantee here though. It’s going to try to find resources when a failure happens, but they might not be there. There are some checks in place to warn when over using resources will impact the recovery plan but there is nothing to prevent this. When there’s a critical RTO though, it’s better to have something that is more assured like what everRun provides. everRun uses mirrored systems, so you always know that you have resources available in the event of a failure. everRun also protects the data – we don’t require a SAN. everRun can mirror data between to two systems or two buildings and it doesn’t have to be the same type of storage on both sides. It can be SAN on one side and NAS on the other. everRun can move the data between locations and keep it tied to the applications to keep your business running, even when there is a failure.

As far as vMotion, that is primarily used for planned downtime. Motion capabilities in general allow virtual machines to be moved or “motioned” while they are running from one host to another host. everRun can provide that capability as well. We call it online migration. If you want to take host offline for planned downtime for upgrades for example, we can do that. Motioning is really for planned downtime. If something fails unexpectedly, vMotion can’t help you there. everRun provides capabilities for both planned and unplanned downtime.

Q: What versions of Windows does everRun support?
everRun supports Windows Server 2003 SP2 Standard and Enterprise Editions, 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Windows Server 2008 Standard and Enterprise Editions, 64-bit.

Q: In considering using everRun across two sites, is everRun doing real-time synchronization between the sites?
Yes it is. It’s writing the data on both systems in a synchronous manner, so that data is always complete—system data and applications are secure and exactly mirrored on the secondary server. It protects the entire environment—the operating system, registry, every setting, etc. is completely cloned. You can turn on that system on the other site and not have to rebuild the server. We maintain exact mirror copies of both servers. That goes back to our message about prevention and computing through failures, rather than downtime and recovery.

Q: Does everRun work with SQL 2008 and SharePoint 2010?
everRun sits below Windows. It’s not in the operating environment. We protect the entire environment, so anything in that environment is automatically protected, whether it’s SQL or Exchange or anything else, even custom applications. There is no customization needed for everRun to protect any Windows applications.

Q: What are the storage requirements for everRun?
everRun offers two storage configuration options: mirrored storage and a shared storage model. When using mirrored storage, everRun will synchronously mirror all storage between paired hosts; this includes the OS, the application, data, etc. This does not require similar storage vendors or types. One host can have SAN-attached storage while the other has local SCSI storage.

In a shared-storage configuration, the everRun paired hosts must be connected to the same storage device with access to the shared LUN’s. In this configuration, everRun does not mirror the data or protect against failures within the storage subsystem. Because of this, it is critical that you ensure proper configuration of the storage devices to protect against failures.

Q: Should everRun be set up on a seperate server?
everRun is typically deployed on two new servers, however an existing server can be utilized, requiring only one additional server.

Q: How is everRun different from the NeverFail product?
Neverfail is an asynchronous DR solution with failover/restart capabilities.
 

Thanks again to those who joined us for the everRun 2G live demo. An on-demand recording is now available to watch at your convenience.

We had quite a few questions and couldn’t get to all of them during the webinar, so we’ve put together a recap of all of the questions and answers below, including the ones we weren’t able to get to during the live event.

Q: You said that everRun supports any Windows application. Does that include Oracle DB too?
Yes. Any application that runs on Windows is supported by everRun. Custom applications that run in Windows are supported as well.

Q: Does workload mean a virtual machine that is running inside of everRun 2G?
Yes, that’s correct. A workload is a virtual machine that has its own Windows environment, its own application environment, and its own identity.

Q: Can you upgrade to everRun 2G from 7.1 or is it a new installation?
everRun 7.1 is the previous version of our product, and sits on a Windows base. everRun 2G is based on XenServer. As such it requires a new installation. We have a process to help you migrate your virtual machine from everRun HA or FT to everRun 2G. We also offer services to perform this migration.

Q: In everRun FT we need 3 windows licenses, 2 for co-servers and 1 for FT... how many Windows licenses do we need for 2G?
We always recommend that your check with your software vendors and license agreements on this question. For Windows, you do need a valid licensed copy of Windows on both hosts. If you have the Enterprise version of Windows, you can have multiple workloads there using the same enterprise license. Be sure to check with your Microsoft representative or other vendors for specific licensing questions.

Q: What is the base operating system running on Xen Hosts?
XenServer is the base operating system. everRun runs on top of XenServer.

Q: In an environment such as the one shown on your slide, would you be paying for two licenses of MS Exchange?
You should always check with your vendor and/or license agreement to ensure you have your applications licensed correctly.

Q: Can everRun be deployed on an existing server without a rebuild of the OS or server?
It can be if the existing server is running Citrix XenServer. In this case you would simply layer on everRun. If you have a Windows server with Windows on the bare metal, you would have to reconstruct that environment.

Q: What are the benefits of moving to everRun 2G for customers who are currently running everRun HA or FT?
everRun 2G is the next generation of everRun HA and FT, enabling multiple levels of protection within a single solution. While there are a number of new capabilities within everRun 2G, one of the most significant enhancements is the ability to protect multiple Windows workloads on a single pair of servers. With everRun HA and FT, only a single Windows workload can be protected on a pair of servers. everRun 2G allows multiple workloads to be protected on the same pair of servers to help reduce hardware costs and take advantage of more powerful servers. From a supported platform standpoint, everRun HA and FT support Windows Server 2003 32-bit Standard and Enterprise. everRun 2G supports Windows Server 2003 32- bit and 64-bit Standard and Enterprise as well as Windows Server 2008 64-bit Standard and Enterprise.

Q: How would you plug the NICs from each server to your network so that a faulty switch would not mess up the redundancy?
As a best practice to remove any single point of failure, redundant switches would be deployed.

Q: What is the maximum distance/geographic location for two physical servers to work using everRun?
The answer to this question is based on latency and bandwidth. It depends on the network connection. We have a latency requirement of 5ms roundtrip between the two servers to maintain the synchronous state that we provide. We have customers that separate servers campus-wide, and customers that run up to 50-100 miles with a dedicated fiber connection between the two servers. It depends on what your needs and requirements are and the network that runs between the two locations.

Q: At what intervals does everRun monitor the standby server?
It checks constantly. One of the things everRun does that is unique is active validation. We are constantly utilizing and validating the secondary server and all its devices. We’re doing disk I/O, we’re doing network reads, taking packets in from the network so that we know the network is good and the CPU is good. We’re actively validating all of the components. With a back-up site, it could be weeks or months since anything has run on the secondary server. So if there’s a failure that goes unnoticed on the backup server, and then there’s a failure on the primary, it has nowhere to go. With everRun, the secondary system is being actively validated at all times so that you know it will work in the event of a failure.

Q: Does Level 3 protection require shared storage?
It does not. everRun offers two storage configuration options; mirrored storage and a shared storage model. When using mirrored storage, everRun will synchronously mirror all data between paired hosts; this includes the OS, the application, data, etc. This does not require similar storage vendors or types. One host can have SAN-attached storage while the other has local SCSI storage. In a shared-storage configuration, the everRun paired hosts must be connected to the same storage device with access to the shared LUN’s. In this configuration, everRun does not mirror the data or protect against failures within the storage subsystem. Because of this, it is critical that you ensure proper configuration of the storage devices to protect against failures.

Q: How much hardware similarity do you need between the hosts in a pool?
It’s really tied to similarities in processors, not servers or disks. For a complete list of hardware that is supported, view our Supported Processor List.

Q: Does everRun having rolling upgrade support?
There are capabilities to assist with applying updates and performing maintenance. To be clear, everRun does not allow applying a service pack without having to reboot the server, if the service pack requires it. Contact Marathon for more information on this capability.

Q: Do you have plans to support Hyper-V?
We plan to support Hyper-V in a future release.

 Q: Do you have some experience about Oracle Applications in that (virtual) environment - are there any references?
We do have customers running Oracle. Please contact our sales department for references.

Q: Is the Xen server running over Windows, Linux, Unix?
XenServer runs on the bare metal. It does not run ‘over’ any other OS.

Q: If you have an Exchange server that is separated by a WAN, how does the client connect to the 2nd server when we lose network connection on primary?
Each of the everRun-protected hosts must be in a common subnet or vLAN.

Q: Will the system still run in this scenario: disk is not working / has fault on host 1 while host 2 has a problem on the NIC both at the same time?
Absolutely. everRun will handle each of these failures simultaneously without any disruption or interruption to the application.

Q: Can a workload be running on Linux?
Linux workloads are not currently supported for protection by everRun. Unprotected Linux workloads can be created, however.

Q: How do you remotely monitor the system and get automatic notification of hardware failures – e.g. SNMP?
SNMP will be available in the near future.

Q: Will everRun work over WAN and if so what is required?
5ms latency and 155Mb bandwidth per protected workload.
 

We had a fantastic presentation last week from IT expert and author Niel Nickolaisen. Niel shared his proven methods for reducing downtime and improving the alignment of IT resources to better support business goals. If you weren’t able to attend the live event, you can watch the recorded version here.

If you prefer a white paper format, Niel’s strategies and best practices have also been summarized in a brand-new 8-page white paper, “Reduce Downtime by 70% - Without Spending a Dime” which you can download here.

The Q&A session from the live webinar with Niel Nickolaisen and Michael Bilancieri of Marathon has been summarized below:

Q: Can you give some tips on how I can educate my branch offices about my business continuity plan?
Niel Nickolaisen, CIO: At Headwaters, Inc., we have 120 remote sites. We approached this from an SLA perspective. We translated how the SLAs affected the operations at our branch locations. Then we communicated it and got them to buy into the SLAs and the things we were doing and suggested that they followed our lead.

Q: How often should you update your disaster recovery plans?
Niel Nickolaisen, CIO: In our case at Headwaters, Inc., we have Sarbanes-Oxley regulatory requirements. We do an annual formal risk assessment both for our business and for IT. When we’re done with that assessment we update our disaster recovery plans, which are based on the risks. Our disaster plan is designed to mitigate or recover from the risks that we’ve identified.

Q: How does everRun work?
At a high-level, everRun takes your entire Windows environment and protects it as a whole. Most protect from within the OS but we protect from underneath the OS. We clone to a second system for redundancy in a synchronous fashion. A good way to understand how everRun works is to watch our product demos videos and flash demos available on our website.

Q: How does everRun fit into a virtual environment?
everRun allows the ability to create multiple workloads on a single server. Our technology is based on virtualization technology – we’re virtualizing two instances to appear as one. You can create multiple workloads and put them on the same server and protect them. It’s based on Citrix XenServer.

Q: Will this work in conjunction with SAN offhost backups using Vertias Netbackup and FlashSnap option?
We are agnostic to the storage. If you’re using back-up right from the SAN, that’s fine. You can also use a mirrored option, where we can mirror the entire system in a synchronous fashion. That allows you to have SAN on one side and NAS on the other, or direct-attached, or both. It’s your choice, which gives you greater flexibility. You can separate the servers as well between buildings. The other option is a single copy of storage, not mirrored and both systems can connect to that storage, but the SAN device will then have to protect the data.

Q: How can Marathon contribute to companies considering a move to SAP?
everRun can provide availability and fault tolerant protection to that SAP environment. If you’re considering a move to SAP, I would assume you have had some discussions about how to protect that—the SLA, the data, availability and disaster recovery. everRun can protect and provide disaster tolerance disaster recovery, and high availability for that application, as well as data protection. We don’t cause any changes to the application.

Q: Should Marathon be brought in as a consultant before SAP is contracted?
Sometimes it’s a good idea to have a joint discussion with vendors. A lot of times when you look at availability and redundancy or data replication, it’s doing things to the applications and data and can cause interaction issues. Sometimes the application has to be configured in a certain way, so you want to know up front how your high availability solution could affect the data and application. We can certainly do a call with any other software vendors to have that conversation up front.

Q: What version of Windows does everRun support?
everRun supports Windows Server 2003 32-bit and 64-bit and Windows Server 2008 64-bit.

Q: What kind of performance impact does the synchronous lock-step have on the system?
That varies by application, users, data, I/O, and other factors. In general, it can range from 10-20% on your application – we’ve seen less than that and more than that, depending on the system.

Q: Do you recommend WAN optimization to be used?
Our requirements are around bandwidth between the two systems if you want to separate the systems. WAN optimization tools don’t always help. It’s really a latency requirement to maintain good performance.

If you'd like to learn more about Niel's best practices for aligning business and IT resources, be sure to check out his new book, Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility.

Congratulations to Thomas Burgdorf of Mii Management Group, the winner of a $100 American Express gift card from our recent everRun 2G demo webinar. If you weren’t able to attend the live event, a recording the everRun 2G demo webinar is now available for on-demand viewing here.

Be sure to join us for our next webinar on Oct. 8th, featuring IT process expert and author Niel Nickolaisen. We're really excited to have Niel as our guest speaker for this webinar. In addition to his 25+ years of IT experience, Niel is the CIO and Director of Strategic Planning at Headwaters, Inc. and also writes regular columns for the CIO Leadership Network and TechTarget's Search CIO. Niel is going to share his proven methods for reducing downtime, including:

* Conducting a gap analysis of your current IT processes
* Identifying weaknesses that can lead to downtime
* Simplifying IT processes so that your entire staff can understand and follow them

We're expecting a large group for this webinar, so be sure to register today to reserve your spot.

Thanks again to those who joined us for last week’s webinar, "Windows Server 2008 High Availability: Technology Comparison." The on-demand recording of last week's webinar is now available to watch at your convenience (here).

We had a lot of good questions from our attendees during the Q&A portion of the webinar, which are summarized below.

Q: How do you determine when to use an HA solution vs. a DR solution?
When it comes to availability vs. recovery, the most important question to ask is what are your recovery time objectives (RTO)? What is the amount of time your application can afford to be down? If the applications have strict requirements, then you want an availability solution. Disaster recovery is data replication often times with a failover capability, not availability. For critical applications, this may not be sufficient.

Q: If I have an HA solution in place, do I still need a solution for backup?
Availability and backup are two different things. That question comes up a lot, along with the need for disaster recovery. Backup will never likely go away completely. You still need to backup your data to ensure recovery in the future should that be necessary.

Q: Is everRun available for Linux applications?
Yes. We can provide basic failover capabilities for Linux applications today.

Q: How does everRun differ from replication solutions?
everRun 2G is used for availability, both locally and for short-distance geographic separation as well. We have a replication and recovery solution as well that can be used for disaster recovery for long distances. You should determine what your objectives are: do I have to keep my applications up and running or do I just need to recover it if something fails? What’s the recovery time objective for each application? It’s up to your individual applications and what level of protection you need for each. Often times availability is a priority as downtime is not desirable, with DR also a requirement on top of that to ensure recovery in the event of a major outage.

Q: Can everRun be used for planned downtime (i.e. to keep one host running for end-users while the application on the other host is being upgraded)?
Yes, everRun can be used to help facilitate certain system updates to reduce interruptions and mitigate risk.

Q: Can it work between two virtual machines and on x64 based systems?
Yes, we support XenServer and 64-bit hardware and Windows Server environments.

Q: What is the performance impact of using everRun 2G?
That’s variable depending on your application. It can be anywhere from 3-15%. We’ve done some performance testing specifically on XenApp and Exchange. You can download those white papers here:
• Understanding and Characterizing Performance Implications for Running Exchange 2007 with everRun
• XenApp 5.0 High Availability Performance

Q: Does Marathon offer backup solutions for everRun users?
We have methods to backup your systems and we’re working improving on our current offerings to make them quicker, easier and more granular.

Q: Can everRun work with dissimilar hardware? Can everRun work with more than two servers?
From a server standpoint, you just need similar processors; storage does not need to be similar. You can have SAN on one side and NAS on the other or any other combination. On the second question, yes, everRun will work with more than two servers. You can build a pool of servers and protect within that pool.

Q: Does everRun have backward compatibility with older OS?
Yes. It will work with Windows Server 2003, and also Windows Server 2008.

Q: Can everRun run on the Foundation Server Edition of Windows 2008?
It does not. everRun supports the full implementation of Windows Server 2008. everRun runs underneath Windows, it does not install into Windows.

Q: How does everRun handle data stored on NAS?
Storage is transparent to everRun. We look at storage as just a LUN.

Q: What is difference between everRun HA and everRun 2G in Windos Server 2003?
The differences are the ability to create multiple workloads. HA can protect one workload. everRun 2G can protect multiple workloads. There is also a new and improved graphical interface with better reporting and management capabilities.

Q: Does everRun work with XenServer 5.5?
Yes, everRun works with XenServer 5.5.

Q: Are there any changes in WS 2008 & WS 2008 R2 in the way that HA improves?
Yes. You can find an overview of those changes directly from David Hanna of Microsoft in our recent webinar and white paper “The Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows Server 2008.” You can also read the Q&A with Microsoft from that webinar here.

Q: Is everRun 2G available for Microsoft Hyper-v?
We will provide support for Hyper-v in a future release.

Q: With applications using various DNS names, how does this solution integrate with DNS changes? (failover to remote office for true DR-different IP/network)
everRun availability solutions pairs systems within the same subnet of vLAN, eliminating the need to make any DNS changes.

Q: Question is tied to what permissions are needed to do a recovery. For recovery in active Directory most items need to replicate around that there was a change and we do not want to hand out Admin control over the domain(separation of access)
everRun is designed to not require any changes to Active Directory during or after a failure or recovery.

Thanks again to those who joined us for last week’s webinar, “How to Get at Least 2x Greater Cost Savings from Server Virtualization.” An on-demand recording is available to watch at your convenience (just click the link.)

We had a lot of good questions from our attendees during the Q&A portion of the webinar, which are summarized below.

How does everRun synchronize and how often?
everRun synchronizes as the data is written to the virtual machine. It’s not done on a time stamp. It is synchronously written to both physical hosts. We do a bit check to make sure both sides are written prior to responding back to the application, stating that it has been written, so that the data is always in a constant state and there is no data loss.

If I already have XenServer installed, can I install everRun on top of it, or do I need to reinstall XenServer?
everRun can be installed into existing XenServer environment. We do have resource pool requirements, so as long as you in a resource pool or can join yourself to a resource pool with a second server, or multiple servers for multiple host pools, we can be installed into an existing XenServer environment.

How does it support local storage? If the server that is hosting the storage goes down, what happens?
We mirror the virtual machine across two servers, so there are two copies of your virtual machine. Where we sit in dom0 (Xen domain zero), we have filter drivers sensing that type of situation. When using Level 2 protection with everRun, if you lose local storage, we leverage the copy of the info on the second server for zero downtime. If you were to lose the entire server, it would failover to the other side and start in Windows services. In Level 3, the same procedure applies to local storage. If you were to lose the entire server with Level 3, everRun allows it to simply continue functioning because we are running active-active.

Have you used this with a building automation system, such as Andover Controls Continuum which runs on a SQL Server?
We have a very large building automation practice here at Marathon and have worked with all flavors of SQL server. We have been working for years with building automation and security companies such as Johnson Controls, Tyco, Andover Controls, Siemens and many others. As long as the building system runs in Windows Server 2003 or 2008, we can provide availability for it with no custom scripts or custom coding.

What's the overhead with regards to CPU, memory, disk space of the host?
Generally in the 3-5% range. We’ve done some performance testing on XenApp and Exchange. You can download the results papers here:
• Understanding and Characterizing Performance Implications for Running Exchange 2007 with everRun
• XenApp 5.0 High Availability Performance

Can everRun be used with homegrown or custom applications?
Yes. everRun is completely transparent to the application and can support any and all Windows applications without any modifications, customizations, or scripting.

Can everRun protect a workload that is physical on one side and virtual on the other?
We do not support P2V today, but we have an ongoing research project on this topic. You can contact your sales rep for more info.

What is the maximum number of workloads that can be run using everRun?
The best way to answer this is to look at your virtualization planning assessment, including power capacity planning and hardware capacity planning. If you can support 10 virtual machines on a server, then you can support 10 virtual machines protected by everRun on that server with no problem. We also require a similar machine as the secondary server running on the same resource pool. It really comes down to how much your hardware capacity can handle.

How to take care of software corruption?
Because we are a synchronously written high availability solution, if there is software corruption on one side, we are going to replicate it to the other side. We sit at an asynchronous block-level filter driver location, so we have no ties to the software. So if it corrupts, it will corrupt on both sides.

Are you currently developing for Exchange 2010?
Yes, everRun will support Exchange 2010.

Does everRun support Small Business Server?
Yes we do. We’ve tested and qualified it for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server Edition.

Does everRun replicate all server data including application data like a SQL database?
Yes. We replicate synchronously at a block level. We sit inside dom0. We then send the info block level to the other side. We do a block check and then we check our bit map to make sure the blocks are synchronously written on ongoing basis.

Can everRun be installed on top of XenServer 5.5 ?
Yes. We will support 5.5 in our next release scheduled for September.

Can we achieve DR?
Marathon offers a couple of options for disaster recovery (DR). Our SplitSite product can be used for metropolitan/campus DR, up to 150 miles apart, depending on your network conditions. We also offer everRun DR, for DR sites that are more than 150 miles apart.

Is the disk mirroring full copy or delta?
Upon initial protection we do a full copy. After you have a failure, such as an iSCSI card failure, we will do a delta copy back over to what’s missing. If you lose the entire RAID set, then we will need to do a full copy again.

Is the price of implementation based on the server capacity?
You need to purchase a license for each server in the pool. In terms of virtual machines (VMs), the license covers as many VMs as you can support in a box.

There are at least three straightforward steps that best practices companies are implementing to achieve aggressive costs savings with their server virtualization initiatives. I'll be reviewing these three steps in more detail, along with customer use cases, in a webinar on August 19th, "How to Get at least 2x Greater Cost Savings from Server Virtualization." To register for the webinar, go to: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/72241968

1. Expand Ratio of Virtual Machines to Physical Hosts - One of the simplest steps companies are taking to realize larger cost savings from server virtualization is increasing the ratio of virtual machines per physical host. The average ratio for companies who’ve adopted server virtualization is five virtual machines per one physical host. But the improved performance of the latest hypervisors and Intel processors can easily support 2X greater virtual to physical ratios.

2. Increase the Percentage of Applications Running in Virtual Environments - Another step best practice companies are using to increase their virtualization costs savings is to increase the percentage of their applications running in their virtual environments. According to Goldman Sachs research on IT spending and trends, 90 percent of respondents currently virtualize only 15 to 30 percent of their applications. Best practice companies, including one showcased in the webinar, are virtualizing 90% of their applications.

3. Decrease Virtual Storage Costs by Avoiding Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks – Early virtualization platforms required shared or networked storage to take advantage of the most compelling features of server virtualization including live migration, high availability, provisioning templates and other valuable features. However, newer virtualization platforms and high availability solutions no longer require expensive FC SANs.

Our July 30th webinar “Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 Now” was very well attended, and as expected, generated a lot of good questions. So many questions, in fact, that we weren’t able to answer them all during the live Q&A portion of the webinar.

For your convenience, we’ve captured all of the questions below. Answers have been provided by our speakers, David Hanna, Infrastructure Architect at Microsoft, and Michael Bilancieri, Senior Director of Products at Marathon. The questions are grouped by topic, starting with Windows Server related questions and then Marathon everRun related questions following after.

How seamless is the migration from Windows Server 2003 to 2008?
It really depends on the workload. Active Directory upgrade is similar to the 2000 to 2003 upgrade, and should not be disruptive. Cluster migrations require a rebuild of the cluster. For IIS, many applications can be migrated easily. It’s best to look on Microsoft.com for migration info that is specific to your workload. Simply introducing a Windows Server 2008 server into a 2003 environment should be seamless.

Going from Windows Server 2003 to 2008, do you recommend upgrading or re-installing the operating system?
Microsoft supports an upgrade of the OS only – no applications. Most customers however, choose to reinstall with Windows Server.

What are the hardware requirements for this Windows Server 2008?
Minimum is a 1ghz processor, 512mb of RAM, and 20GB of disk space. Details can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/system-requirements.aspx

Do you have an actual laboratory so that I can practice Windows Server 2008?
You can find the TechNet Virtual Labs here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/virtuallabs/bb512925.aspx

Any difficulties adding a Windows 2008 Server into a 2003 domain? Anything to watch out for?
Adding Windows Server 2008 Member servers to the domain should not be an issue. There are no special things to watch out for, until you start adding Domain controllers. Note that if you add a 2008 member server, and do not extend the schema, some things will be unavailable, like the enhanced DFS capabilities in 2008.

Where can I get a copy of the Windows Server 2008 trial version?
You can obtain the trial version here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/try-it.aspx. Starting August 20th, you will be able to get R2 in the same location.

Can I do in-place upgrade AD server 2003R2 to Server 2008 without any problem? Also, can I do that same thing with Exchange 2007 server on SRV2003R2?
Microsoft only supports the upgrade of the Operating System from 2003 to 2008. We do not support the upgrade of Windows Server 2003 with applications, so the Exchange 2007 upgrade would not be supported.

Is it possible to use the same imaging deployment method for Windows 2008 physical and virtual machines (in VMware) for consistent builds?
It is possible to use traditional imaging methods for physical and virtual, however in the virtual environment, most customers tend to use template Virtual Hard disks to deploy systems, as it is faster and more flexible than imaging.

What is the difference between GPO and NAP?
Group policy is a part of Active Directory that allows for management of users and computers. NAP, or network access protection provides endpoint health checking for network clients. This integrates with network components to restrict or allow network access. Client NAP configurations can be controlled by GPO, and some GPO settings can be enforced by NAP.

Does NAP work for VPN connections as well?
Yes. It is integrated with Microsoft VPN as well as some partner solutions.

Does XP pro and 2008 Server talk well together? What’s a better path, upgrade your clients to Win7 then servers to 2008? Or vice versa?
XP will work in a 2008 domain environment, but it won’t be able to take advantage of all of the features of 2008. Vista is designed to complement 2008, and Windows 7 works best with 2008 R2 (or 2008). I would recommend deploying Windows Server 2008 for workloads that will gain the most benefit – this will allow you take advantage of it immediately. Then follow with Windows 7 when you are ready.

Do terminal servers have central management to manage users and applications?
There are a number of tools to centrally manage the environment. R2 adds a connection broker component that will publish apps from multiple servers. However, apps still need to be published on each server, and permissions need to be set that way as well. Citrix provides some great centralized mgmt tools that enhance the native tools.

Will 2008 support XP clients?
Yes. 2008 will support XP for many things including Terminal Services, with RDP 6.1 client, NAP, with XP Sp3, Group policy preferences and many other features. Windows Vista and Windows 7 however, are able to take advantage of more features.

I have two Windows 2008 servers that are going to be setup as a cluster for Exchange 2007. Is there a document for setting up the “heartbeat” connection between the two servers?
There are many documents on technet that will help. When you build the cluster, the validation wizard will check the configuration of the heartbeat network to make sure its configured appropriately. Typically, a 2 node cluster will use a cross-over cable, although a non-routed VLAN on a switch also works. Some docs:

Step-by-step guide for basic 2-node cluster: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731844(WS.10).aspx
Validating an Exchange 2007 Cluster: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676379.aspx

Is Server 2008 with Exchange supported on VMware?
Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows 2008 is supported – see here for details: http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm

Is it possible to run a 2008 DC with 2003 DCs without any sort of hacks or work-arounds?
Yes – it is possible. You’ll need to extend the AD Schema and install a 2008 member server, then promote it to a DC. There are some documents here: https://blogs.msdn.com/canberrapfe/archive/2009/04/08/adding-a-2008-domain-controller-to-your-2003-forest.aspx

Regarding the NAP, once a client is quarantined, is there a policy or rule that the admin must create to get the client healthy? Meaning, is it automatic or does the client sit there until someone checks the quarantined clients and fixes the issues?
NAP can be configured to auto-remediate certain things – turning firewall on, turning on autoupdate, etc. For AV, or patches, users can be directed to a web page with simple instructions or links to update the client.

Has load balancing improved with 2008 and TS?
It has been made simpler. Many customers found NLB to be complicated for what was needed on Terminal Services. TS on 2008 uses DNS round robin for initial connection with the TS Farm, then load balancing across nodes is handled by using RDP session load balancing.

How many CALs are included in the bundle of Windows Server 2008?
There are different bundles with 5, 10, or 25 CALS. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

How many machines can run on a single user MS Windows Server 2008, because we want to move to VMware soon.
Microsoft supports up to 192 VMs on Windows Server 2008, and 384 on Windows Server 2008 R2. Typically numbers will not be anywhere near this, as other system resources will bottleneck. Details can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-faq.aspx#HyperVWindowsServer2008Specific

Is MS Windows Server 2008 VMware built-in?
Microsoft’s virtualization solution, Hyper-V, is built in to Windows Server 2008 and R2.

How would Hyper-V handle the VMware over committing resources, for example, is ESX server only have 8GB RAM but it can assign 16GB RAM to the VMs because it holds the memory and only releases it when it is required. The main reason for Exchange on a ESX box is not a good idea.
Hyper-V does not support over-commit of memory resources. To assign 8gb of RAM to a VM, you must have 8gb available. This improves performance and security.

What happens when a file which has been transferred/shared to a branch using Branch Cache is opened in the main office? Will the branch be informed about this and vice versa?
When clients use branch cache, each file is referenced by a hash. When a client tries to retrieve a file from the central office, it checks the hash of the file, then compares it to what is in the local cache. If the file has changed, then the hash would have changed, and the client would retrieve the updated version. The branch is not informed if the central copy is opened, only if it is changed, through the hash mechanism.

What is the maximum supported DFS server in 2008? In 2003 I think it is less than 70GB and that was not enough for me.
The File Replication Service in Windows Server 2003 had trouble with replication when data sizes got too big. Windows Server 2008 uses DFS-R (Distributed File System Replication) for replication – this uses an algorithm call Remote Differential Compression, which compresses files, and replicates only changes. This makes replication more efficient, an able to support large volumes of data. The limits that existed in 2003 for data size are either removed, or raised greatly.

What is the standard vs. reduced footprint for Windows 2008?
Processor requirements for Server Core and full Windows Server 2008 are the same. Minimum memory recommendations of 512mb are also the same. While the system requirements on Microsoft.com don’t list separate requirements for Server Core, it typically requires less disk space than a full installation. Additionally, Server Core has fewer roles to install (only 9), fewer services running, and has no GUI.

Are there any plans to integrate snapshot technology within Hyper-V?
Hyper-V already supports snapshots at two levels. First, it supports snapshots of the Virtual Machine itself, through use of memory copies and differential disks. The other snapshot capability is a snapshot backup, performed by the host Hyper-V system, using Volume Shadowcopy Services to back up the running VMs.

When will Hyper-V R2 be released?
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 released to manufacturing on July 22nd. General Availability will be in October. Volume license customers should have access to the code on August 19th. More details are available here: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/when-to-expect-windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx

Can everRun protect a workload that is physical on one side and virtual on the other?
everRun does not install INTO a Windows system, so it isn’t able to protect a ‘physical’ system in this sense. Many of our customers choose to keep some of their applications isolated to a physical server with no other applications or VMs on that host while protecting them with everRun. This is done by creating a single Windows environment within the everRun environment. Although the capability is there to create multiple, a single is the desired approach.

How does everRun handle data stored on NAS?
everRun can use any product data that resides on any type of storage. everRun sees the storage repository as a disk volume and can mirror between any two.

How many licenses for the operating system do I need for this solution? Do I need two licenses for the application (i.e. Exchange) as well?
Typically two licenses of Windows are required, however the Enterprise edition provides benefits when running in virtual environments. Please check with Microsoft on this and with your application vendors as all vendors have different licensing terms for redundant/high availability systems.

How well does everRun work with dissimilar hardware (i.e. at the DR site using older servers)?
There are some requirements for similar server components. If two supported servers are utilized and one happens to have a slower processor, the application may run at the slower speed, depending on the level of protection chosen within everRun.

Does everRun replicate all server data including application data like SQL databases?
Yes. The entire operating environment and all disks, including the OS, application, and application data are mirrored.

Is everRun effective for small companies? For example, an Exchange environment for less than 200 users?
Absolutely. Many of our customers are smaller to mid-sized businesses who require an availability solution that is simple, effective, and doesn’t require SAN storage or dedicated IT staff to manage.

Does everRun support MS Small Business Server?
Yes. Our everRun solution will work with any version of Windows Server, 64-bit or 32-bit. We work for small scale solutions all the way up to enterprises.

Will everRun support Exchange 2010 DAG location geographically?
We are still researching Exchange 2010 capabilities and how they can best be supported by everRun. At this time we are not yet clear on how DAG will or can be supported.

How are system upgrades handled in the everRun environment?
A single upgrade is performed on the single exposed Windows environment. Both of the redundant systems will be updated automatically by everRun. everRun also offers mechanisms to reduce the risk and associated downtime of system upgrades.

How does the actual SQL server app run in the everRun environment?
Exactly the same as it does in a non-everRun environment. everRun sits below the Windows environment therefore there are no application changes required.

The everRun software sounds great, but it requires two physical servers. Any hope of moving forward to do the same work within a VMware or Hyper-V environment?
Today everRun supports virtualized environments running on Citrix XenServer. We announced a joint development agreement with Microsoft back in early 2009 to provide everRun Fault Tolerance within a future version of Windows/Hyper-V.

How is everRun migrated with Windows 2008 hypervisor?
everRun will support a future Windows/Hyper-V release as part of the joint development effort between Microsoft and Marathon.

What system resources are used by everRun?
A small (varies a bit by the application that is running) bit of CPU and memory overhead is consumed by everRun.
 

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our webinar yesterday with Microsoft, Direct from Microsoft – The Top 10 Reason You Should Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 Now:

Here are the AMEX Gift Card winners who were randomly selected from the attendee list:

$50 AMEX Gift Card Winners:

• Jeff Wotring, PEBTF
• Scott Dukart, Lehman Brothers
• Raminder Chhatwal, Syswizards
• Gerard Wubben, Raxco Software
• Anthony Fabisiak, Fellowes Inc.

$250 AMEX Gift Card Winner:

• Jon Maynard, Quality Distribution

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to Windows Server 2008, be sure to attend our July 30th webinar featuring guest speaker David Hanna, Information Architect at Microsoft. David will review the new Web tools, virtualization technologies, security enhancements, and management utilities available in Windows Server 2008. You’ll also have a chance to ask David any specific questions you have about Windows Server 2008 during the live Q&A portion of the webcast.

In preparation for the webinar, we asked David to answer a few of the common questions that we have been hearing from our customers in recent months.

Q: One of the biggest concerns we hear from our customers and partners is that in this current economy, IT departments are being asked to do a lot more with less people. How can Windows Server 2008 help with this issue?

Across all of my customers, everyone is talking about cutting costs, and getting more out of their current investments. When we start digging into the features of Windows Server 2008, customers are finding tremendous opportunity to optimize their environments. A few of the major areas of cost savings I’m seeing are:

• Reduced deployment time and costs with Windows Deployment Services
• Reduced management cost and effort with PowerShell and Server Manager
• Hardware and Workload Consolidation with Hyper-V
• Licensing consolidation with Enterprise and Datacenter models for virtual environments.

Q: What about the challenge of managing remote and branch office locations?

Branch offices have consistently been a challenge to manage, primarily due to lack of on-site staff. Windows Server 2008 brings some major new components to the picture that will greatly ease branch office management. These features include the Read-Only Domain controller, which makes the remote DC secure, and replaceable, Distributed File System, Windows Remote Management, Server Core (lower surface attack area), and improved Terminal Services for application delivery.

Q: A lot of our customers work in “always-on” industries like manufacturing, healthcare and broadcast media, where server downtime can be very disruptive to their business. How does Windows Server 2008 support these demanding environments?

Windows Server has always addressed high availability with Clustering Services. Windows Server 2008 has brought some huge enhancements to the Cluster Service that will reduce the complexity of clustering, while increasing availability. Failover Clustering in Server 2008 has a new validation wizard that will validate hardware and software configurations, resulting in easier, more reliable cluster deployments. The reliance on a quorum drive has also been removed, so there is no longer a single point of failure in the cluster. Also, Failover Clustering has been enhanced to support multi-site clusters to support organizations that need site-to-site failover. And, as always, when organizations need to take availability to the next level, Microsoft continues to work with partners like Marathon to extend the native capabilities of Windows Server.

***********************************************************************************************

During the webinar, Michael Bilancieri, Sr. Director of Products for Marathon, will discuss how to extend the high availability features of Windows Server 2008 to fault tolerant protection with Marathon’s everRun software and how organizations can now confidently migrate mission critical applications from Unix or proprietary platforms to realize big cost savings.

Registrations for this webinar are limited and we are expecting a large turnout, so be sure to save your spot by registering today.

We had a number of questions during the Q&A session of our June 24th webinar with Stephen Wynkoop, founder of SSWUG.org. I’ve posted the questions and responses here on our blog for everyone’s benefit. This webinar was recorded in case you weren’t able to attend, click here to view the webcast!

Q: Does everRun require a SAN?
A: It doesn’t require a SAN. We can also mirror storage between two different systems, if that’s what you chose to do. A lot of our customers do that, either locally or separated geographically. We can support a SAN in multiple ways. We can support a SAN where you have a single copy of the data. And both servers will connect too the single copy of the data. We also support a SAN where one of the servers is connected to that SAN and the other server has its own storage and we can mirror between that. A lot of our customers are using that option to provide data protection and fault tolerance at the data level. We can use different types of storage on either side.

Q: With your SplitSite product, are there distance requirements?
A: There are no pre-determined distance limitations – it’s really the latency and bandwidth requirements that determine the distance that can be supported.

Q Does everRun work with Exchange 2007 as well?
A: Yes it does. everRun supports any Windows application without requiring changes or customization.

Q: Does everRun work with iSCSI?
A: We have an agnostic approach to storage as well. Pretty much any type of storage will work. iSCSI, fiber, direct attached, etc.

Q: What are the requirements between the paired local servers?
A: A gigabit Ethernet connection with crossover cables is usually used between the two servers.

Q: What is the performance impact of using everRun with SQL?
A: Our preliminary testing has shown that the overhead is very small. There are variance rates depending on the servers and applications that you are using, but the impact has in general been shown to be very small.

Q: How does everRun handle the mirroring of data that’s loaded in the memory?
A: With our level 3 fault tolerance, we actually mirror the memory and CPU between the two systems, so they are running in lockstep. This provides a 100% uptime solution. Our everRun software makes sure that the memory and CPU state are mirrored and completely synchronized between the two servers at all times.

Q: Does everRun work with SQL 2008?
A: Yes. everRun supports any Windows application without requiring changes or customization. Because everRun resides below the operating environment, we are protected underneath that. We have a number of ISVs that use our software with their applications and they use us because they don’t have to make any changes to their software. It’s not tied into the application, and doesn’t need to be “cluster aware” or anything similar to that.

Q: Does everRun work with the free XenServer?
A: Yes, everRun VM for XenServer supports the free version of XenServer as well as Essentials for XenServer Enterprise and Platinum Editions.

Q: How would you tackle a shift from a single server to an everRun setup to have minimal downtime during the changeover?
A: It’s pretty straight forward. You could buy new servers if you wanted to refresh your hardware. Then you would perform a P2V migration. There are tools like PlateSpin to help you do that. It’s a standard migration process. If you wanted to use your existing server, you could buy one additional server and pair those up. We also offer migration services if you want additional help with the process.

Q: If using everRun with SQL Server, is the secondary server available for query/reports by other processes?
A: It‘s not because the two SQL environments have the same identity and exposed to the network as just a single server instance. Since they both have the same identity,you can’t access one by its production identity and then the other. They look and act as a single environment. They have the same MAC address, host name, and IP address. If you make a change, it happens to both of them.

Q: In a SplitSite implementation, if one hardware platform fails and the backup is used, how is the data re-synchronized once the primary hardware is available again?
A: everRun is completely automated, including the recovery process. When you have a failure and get that system back online, everRun will automatically synchronize the two systems to be identical again. There’s no additional work to do the syncing, it’s completely automated.

Protecting SQL Server and its related applications continues to be one of the most common concerns we hear from our customers. With that in mind, we’ve pulled together some SQL-related info and links for your reference below.

While you’re here, be sure to sign up for our free June 24th webinar “SQL Availability: Protecting Your Database and Applications”. The featured speaker will be SQL MVP Stephen Wynkoop, founder and editor of the SSWUG.com website and user group.

SQL Server User Groups and Communities:
SQL Server Worldwide Users Group http://www.sswug.org/
Professional Association for SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org/
Microsoft SQL Server Community http://sqlcommunity.com/
SQL Server Professionals Group on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=54395&trk=anet_ug_hm&goback=%2Egdr_1243518339929_1

SQL Server Publications:
SQL Server Magazine http://www.sqlmag.com/
TechTarget’s SearchSQLServer.com http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/
SQLServerPedia Wiki http://sqlserverpedia.com/

Listing of SQL MVP/User Blogs:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb671052.aspx

Listing of SQL Experts to follow on Twitter:
http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Twitter

SQL Server Job Boards:
SQL Jobs.com http://www.sqljobs.com/
Contract and Permanent IT jobs in Europe http://www.theitjobboard.com/
Dice –tech-focused career board http://www.dice.com/
Common SQL Server DBA/Developer interview questions http://vyaskn.tripod.com/iq.htm
 

(also check out the User Group and Community websites above for SQL related job postings and message boards)

Do you have any favorite SQL links? Do you host a SQL blog or community? Feel free to share your links in the comments section.