Virtual systems gain high-availability armour

Two companies are queuing up to add high-availability features to virtualised servers.

Marathon Technologies is working with the XenEnterprise virtualisation hypervisor to bring fault-tolerant features to the VM world.

Marathon plans to integrate its EverRun software-only high-availability product with Xen to remove complexity for mid-market firms.

“Today, there’s a gap between innovation in the virtualisation space and what’s going on in the availability space and we require a higher level of availability when we create workloads for virtualised environments,” said Marathon chief executive Gary Philips. “[With virtualisation] you have all your eggs in one basket and the implications of downtime are very significant.”

With its V-available products and services, Marathon is targeting small and medium-sized enterprises rather than the blue-chips that have been the main early adopters of virtualisation on low-cost servers. Products will support Windows servers running Windows and Linux guests and deployments will not require a storage-area network. Administrators can also set appropriate levels of availability for each application with most important programs taking precedence.

V-available products and deployment services will go on sale from mid-year.

“The solution Marathon has is quite innovative but the biggest issue they might have is around the size of the target market," said Neil Macehiter of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton. " It’s still early in the adoption cycle for the mid-market and some of these firms will say they can live with an hour’s downtime.”

Other companies are also pursuing the protection of virtualised systems. SteelEye Technology has released Protection Suite for VMware Infrastructure 3, a product that replicates data across clusters and monitors VMs for problems.