King's Cross Station selects Marathon EverRun to eliminate server downtime

Network Rail wanted 'no noticeable downtime in any server switchover'

Contractor Four Way Communications is to deploy Marathon's fault tolerance solution, EverRun, in an effort to eliminate server downtime at King's Cross Station, which is undergoing a major systems overhaul.

Four Way Communications IT solutions architect Russell Bennett said the station owner, Network Rail, needed a solution that ensured 99.99 per cent uptime.

"The contract clearly stated that the product we use to ensure this would have to have ‘no noticeable downtime to the operators in the control room in any server switchover situation'," he added.

Bennett explained that the station's CCTV, PA and back-end systems are all tied into a station management system (SMS), which integrates with NICE's Situator situation management software.

"The NICE Situator application creates incidents so that when anything happens it is tracked and the data is recorded," he said.

"We had a list of fault tolerance products that are approved to work with the NICE Situator including Double-Take, EMC Replistor, Microsoft Cluster Server and Marathon EverRun," he said.

He said the key factor in deciding which product to choose was an ability to maintain service availability even when the server fails.

"Unlike a datacentre we have no IT support onsite so the software has to be entirely automatic. The speed of switchover of Marathon EverRun was the best of the products and we chose to go with it," he said.

He added that Marathon EverRun also fitted the requirements of supporting Windows and the Microsoft SQL Server database.

Marathon UK's reseller, 24/7 Uptime, helped with the implementation.

"Marathon EverRun had some hardware requirements that 24/7 Uptime helped me to source.

"I procured all the licenses and hardware, and 24/7 Uptime installed the virtual machines and wrote the software applications on to them," said Bennett.

Bennett said that the solution was installed along with other applications in just half a day.

"It has worked better than I had hoped. Its main benefit is of course that if one of the servers fails, users are unaware. We have undertaken heavy tests and the software has delivered every time," he said.