Boxborough, Massachusetts-based Marathon Technologies Corp has launched its fully resilient fault tolerant system for Windows NT in Europe. With a starting price of 25,000 pounds ($42,000), the Endurance 4000 system enables any four standard Pentium or Pentium Pro systems to be linked together to form a single fault tolerant server with no single point of failure or repair. Two simultaneous systems work together, unaware that the other is present so, if a fault should occur with one system, the other will carry on working oblivious to the fact that a problem has occurred. Endurance 4000 doesn’t require any special clustering Application Programming Interfaces or scripts, and standard applications and in-house software runs on the system unmodified. The four year-old company, which launched the product in the US back in April (CI No 3,118) says it has already shipped many more of the systems than it originally expected. Marathon, which employs 35 people, sells its products only through value added resellers and London-based systems house Just Associates has been selected to sell Endurance to customers across Europe. Marathon is also giving customers a two year warranty to provide cover for the cost of data recovery and reconstruction if the system should fail in some way, something it believes to be unique in the industry. Richard Fiorentino, co-founder, vice president and treasurer of Marathon believes the Endurance product will enable the company to expand across the world, and will contribute to an increase in the fault tolerant market’s current $3,000m value. Endurance 4000 is apparently aimed at any organization that is dependent on mission critical applications and users in the US includes the 911 emergency service system as well as within the financial, Internet service and process control sectors, among others. Fiorentino says the product has proved particularly popular for use as electronic mail servers and in the electronic commerce area. Marathon has been working on the development of the system since 1993 and Fiorentino believes the company was destined to make fault tolerant systems after its building was struck by lightning which sadly destroyed work that had been carried out. It was a message from God, he commented.
