David and Goliath join server forces

By Adam Gifford

Hewlett Packard has entered a partnership with a small Boston company, Marathon Technologies, to sell a server bundle which gives NT servers the non-stop availability previously achieved only by expensive mainframes and high-end Unix servers.

Marathon was set up by a group of former Digital Equipment Corporation engineers convinced they could bring some key concepts from the mainframe and Digital Vax environments to the world of commodity computers which use Intel chips and Windows operating systems.

It came up with the Marathon Endurance 4000 kit set consisting of two pizza-box sized switches, four cards and some cabling and software. Take four Intel servers, designate two as computing units and two to handle the I/O (input/output) processing, put the cards in the servers and the switches between each set, and load the Windows NT operating system and application software.

Jon Affeld, Hewlett Packard's Enterprise NetServer division product manager, said the result was not a cluster of servers but an array which behaved as a virtual single server.

The servers can be mounted in a single rack, or, for the disaster-tolerant version, separated into two symmetrical halves or "tuples" connected by fibre up to 1.5km apart.

Mr Affeld said that while clustered servers allowed for disaster recovery, requiring some interruption while data was backed up and systems reboot, the Marathon solution was disaster tolerant, with no interruption of service.

Joe Winthrop, Marathon's vice-president of business development, said the company commissioned research in July from the Harvard Research Group into the performance of the 600 kitsets sold in the 21/2 years since the product was launched.

It discovered 71 per cent of the systems had some hardware failure and 14 per cent had suffered software failure. About 7 per cent had an operating system failure and the same percentage had a failure caused by operator error. Despite that, there has been no service interruption in any of the 600 systems and no unscheduled downtime.

Mr Winthrop said a filament manufacturer who used a disaster-tolerant version of the Marathon Endurance 4000 to run its process application had had a fire destroy one of its computer rooms, but the application kept running.

The same customer had a contractor cut up the cable link between its two buildings, with no downtime.

Under the partnership agreement, Hewlett Packard picks up servicing responsibility for previous Marathon customers and has exclusive rights to the technology for a limited time, so it can gain "time to market" advantage.

The HP bundle was launched in August, and Mr Affeld said the company expected to more than double total sales before the end of the year.

Marketed as NetServer Assured Availability Solutions, a number of configurations will be available. The starting price is about $US55,000.