Marathon Technologies will next month release what it claims is the first fault-tolerant, high-availability software for server virtualisation.

The new package, called everRun VM, is aimed at mid-sized companies and makes virtual environments, based on Citrix's XenServer technology, more resilient. It also ensures that high availability and disaster recovery become standard components of virtual environments, said Gary Phillips, chief executive of Marathon Technologies.

“From an IT manager’s perspective, the three primary things we’re trying to sort out are the costs, the complexity and the reliability of the infrastructure,” added Phillips.

Marathon claims firms using everRun VM can complete the set-up and configuration of the applications they want to virtualise in around 30 minutes.

Phillips said firms can dial-in in the level of protection they require according to how business-critical they view the application. So for file-and-print services assigned the lowest priority, while critical applications such as databases, could be assigned the highest level of protection.

“Level 1 protection is basically best efforts failover, similar to what VMware’s ESX Server does. With Level 2 protection, which will be available this April, we’re giving so-called ‘component-level fault tolerance’,” said Phillips. In the event of a storage or network failure, everRun can redirect I/O to the redundant system, while the faulty system was repaired.

“After the repair we prompt the IT manager and synchronise all the data from the system that took over,” said Phillips.

The third level of protection which Phillips said would be available in Q4 would allow everRun to work round a full CPU failure by running firms systems in lockstep. “We’ll be allowing firms the capability of geographic fault tolerance across a WAN for disaster recovery if they experience a CPU failure on one of their systems situated in one datacentre. The data would be mirrored across the WAN so that of you lost one location, you would still be up and running from your secondary datacentre,” said Phillips.

EverRun VM is currently in beta, with general availability slated for April.