Dungannon Meats Beefs Up Protection of Production Systems with Marathon Technologies
THE COMPANY
For any firm involved in manufacturing and
processing, ensuring continual operation of
production systems is absolutely critical to the
business. Any downtime has immediate impact on
productivity and profitability as well as serious knockon
effects in terms of customer service levels and
damaged reputation. As a leading supplier of fresh
meat products to several of the UK's largest retail
supermarkets, Dungannon Meats has selected
continuous availability software from Marathon
Technologies to ensure applications will continue to
run regardless of any hardware failure.
THE SITUATION
Dungannon Meats operates in one of the fastest
moving, high pressure retail supply chain
environments. Customer orders arrive via EDI early to
mid morning on the day of production, and all orders
are manufactured for same day dispatch to customer
depot. Should the IT systems controlling production
and order fulfillment fail for even half an hour, an
entire day's orders could be lost.
In a very competitive market, Dungannon can ill
afford to let its customers down. With that in mind,
the company sought to implement IT systems that
would be immune to the potentially devastating
consequences of hardware failure. Following a review
of requirements, Dungannon's IT partner, Real
Time Systems, introduced the Company to
Marathon Technologies' everRun FT™ software as a
potential solution.
THE APPROACH
Marathon's everRun software protects Windows
applications from downtime in the event of server
failure. everRun creates a 'virtual server', running all
applications simultaneously on two standard Intel
servers. If one of the servers fails, the virtual server
will ComputeThru® the failure and continue to operate
on the remaining server. The users experience no
interruptions to IT service. Meanwhile, the IT
administrator can repair the failed server, safe in the
knowledge that the business will continue to function
unaffected. The system does not require complex,
costly equipment and has a very low administrative
overhead.
PUTTING MARATHON TO THE TEST
Brian Murphy, IT Technical Manager at Dungannon,
commented, “Marathon promised 99.999% reliability
of our system. We couldn't quite believe it but after
rigorous testing we were convinced that this was the
best solution to deliver maximum availability for our
business critical applications.” Using the SplitSite¨
option Dungannon Meats has reduced its risk of
hardware failure further by locating the two windows
servers on separate manufacturing sites served by
independent power sources.
THE SOLUTION
Marathon's software works in conjunction with
Microsoft Windows operating systems and
Dungannon's server hardware to create a virtual
Windows application environment. Applications
running in this fault tolerant environment continue to
operate seamlessly even in the event of a hardware
failure. Marathon's everRun software protects all
Windows applications on the system, providing high
availability computing; mirrored data storage;
uninterrupted network access; and continued service
through faults and failures. Unlike some of the more
conventional clustering alternatives this is achieved
without needing to modify applications or develop
custom scripts.
The solution uses three copies of standard edition
Windows operating system. A copy is installed on
each of the two identical servers. The third is used on
the Marathon FTvirtual Server, a virtual Windows
environment that operates as a guest OS across the
two servers. The everRun FT software keeps two
servers running in synchronized “lockstep”,
performing identical operations on both at the same
time. The virtual server environment created by the
everRun software is identical to a standard Windows
server environment and appears on the network as a
single Windows host server. Applications are
installed, configured, and run in the same way that
they are on a standard Windows server. Because
applications are operating within the everRun virtual
environment, they are completely protected from
hardware and many operating system failures. In the
event of a failure, applications continue to operate
without loss of transactions, data, or network
connectivity. All in-process disk transactions are
maintained throughout the failure and application data
is protected by disk data mirrored on redundant drives
associated with each server.
THE RESULTS
Thanks to Marathon, risk of system downtime and
associated business loss has been virtually eliminated
at Dungannon Meats. Brian recalled one particular
incident when Marathon proved its worth, “We
recently had a network card failure on the production
server. Under normal circumstances this would have
resulted in system downtime, but with the Marathon
solution it was business as usual!” He continued,
“With increased resilience in our critical systems, we
can be completely confident that we will meet our
customer's expectations, everyday.”
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