December 2004

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October Webinar Report :.

Yes…..Affordable Fault Tolerance for Windows Applications!

Architecting Solutions with Marathon Technologies – October 26th

Key’s October webinar explored the value of applying fault tolerance technology to the Windows environment. The speakers were:
  • Greg Cullen, Director of Systems Engineering, Marathon Technologies, Inc.
  • Pete Elliot, Director of Marketing, Key Information Systems, Inc.
    • During this web-based seminar, the speakers discussed how affordable Fault Tolerance is being achieved for mission-critical Windows applications. Speakers also discussed how to achieve continuous operations during planned and unplanned failures with no interruption in service and no loss of application data. Case studies were presented. Here’s a summary:

    Audience
  • Windows administrators, MIS Directors and Network Administrators
  • Responsible for mission critical applications in a Windows or NT environment; Windows Business Continuity Managers
  • Have applications or services that cannot be down for any reason
  • Servers are being consolidated onto Windows 2003 requiring increased business continuity
  • Need non-stop availability that is simple and affordable
    • Issues addressed
  • How Fault Tolerance differs from High Availability
  • How consolidation increases the need for business continuity
  • Application candidates for FT
  • Why traditional technologies have failed to prevent downtime
  • Diagnosing your needs for Windows Business Continuity
  • Choosing a Windows Business Continuity Technology
    • For an archived recording of this and all past KEY Webinars, go to: http://www.keyinfo.com/resources/web_arch.htm. Portions of the content of this webinar are summarized below.

    Greg Cullen of Marathon covered the application uptime risks that exist today, evaluating those risks and determining the best solution for your Windows environment. The wide range of recovery options available for responding to unexpected downtime deliver recovery times that range from instantaneous to a recovery time over five days. Part of the process of determining what type of recovery capability you need is to evaluate your tolerance for risk; also a company-wide Business Continuity Plan should be developed.

    Greg warned about regulatory risks, where fines may be levied in certain industries if your server should go down. The greatest risk is the loss of customers through impacted customer service due to unscheduled downtime.

    A recovery facility (disaster tolerance facility) may be necessary even in those cases where full fault tolerance capability is implemented to protect against the loss of a complete installation.

    If your servers are in the medium to high risk area, then fault tolerance should be considered as the appropriate level of protection to be applied. Fault tolerance uses two servers to execute applications simultaneously, so that in the event of a failure, the server that is still operating computes through the failure with no failover from one server to another required.

    The Marathon FTvirtual Server™ product is providing complete, simple and affordable fault and disaster tolerance for Microsoft Windows applications. The result is continued operation during planned and unplanned failures with no interruption in service, no loss of application data, no need for transaction rollback and no loss of performance.

    Pete Elliot, Director of Marketing at Key, highlighted the experience of their client Aristocrat Technologies. Aristocrat wanted to implement a gaming application across multiple casinos that tied all casino jackpots together. The gaming commission required that all jackpots from all casinos had to be online if the game was to be offered. This was a clear need for fault tolerance. Aristocrat evaluated several products and selected Marathon FTvirtual Server™. The result was a fault tolerant system they could manage on one screen, making it simple to use. Revenue from the growing multi-site jackpot application is now protected. Also, the solution provided RAID1 disk protection without a RAID controller. Key was able to implement the solution with the client quickly and inexpensively. For more information, see Field Report below, or go to: http://www.keyinfo.com/downloads/Mrthon_Arist.pdf

    To review this entire webinar, and others Key has sponsored, see Key’s index of archived webinars: http://www.keyinfo.com/resources/web_arch.htm.

    Reader Feedback:.

    We value your comments. Please send us your ideas and suggested topics to: pelliot@keyinfo.com.

    Key Information Systems, Inc., (www.keyinfo.com) a Premier Business Partner with IBM, is a systems integration company located at 22120 Clarendon St., Suite 110, Woodland Hills, CA 91367, USA. Founded in 1995, the company provides corporate infrastructure architecture for business continuity, storage, and e-business solutions. Key Information Systems is a leading provider of IBM server solutions for the iSeries, AIX (UNIX), NT, and Linux platforms and has distinguished itself by extending its high availability infrastructure solutions to the Internet economy. The company delivers a complete range of professional services including education, maintenance, and IBM Global Financing. For more information, please visit the company online or call 1-877-442-3249.

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