24/7 Uptime & Marathon Technologies are just the ticket for eCommerce

24/7 Uptime has completed a project with Interdirect, a full service marketing agency, to address their virtualisation and high availability requirements. Interdirect creates online shopping and payment systems, as well as online booking systems that allow users to check availability in real time. Many of these systems interface to third-party back-office systems providing completely integrated sales order processing systems.

Interdirect has always employed its own dedicated staff to handle client hosting because this has provided a faster response when issues have arisen. However, in an increasingly 24/7 world, clients cannot afford a single minute of downtime as revenues and reputations are at stake. Interdirect also needed a solution that would reduce power consumption, a critical issue in a data centre environment.

After reviewing the options available with 24/7 Uptime, Interdirect agreed that everRun software from Marathon Technologies would address their virtualisation and high availability requirements. Now all of their environments are running on just two standard Dell servers. If either server suffers component failure, the computing environments continue to operate. This level of fault tolerance allows IT administrators to repair disk failures, network card outages, etc, without incurring any downtime.

The Interdirect team tested the system rigorously - even pulling out all the server cables at the data centre to check the system's fault tolerance in a live environment. As expected, all systems continued to work without interruption.

Nick Mann, managing director at Interdirect, commented: "We are extremely impressed with the power and simplicity of the Marathon everRun solution. This installation has given us increased confidence in our server hosting platform. The 24/7 Uptime team have been consistently efficient and have provided us with a very high standard of support which, in turn, has enabled us to provide a high level of service to our clients."

Chris Robinson, sales & technical director of 24/7 Uptime, confirms: "Our clients rely on us to prevent application downtime, eliminate data loss and reduce operational costs. Any downtime has an immediate impact on productivity and profitability as well as serious knock-on effects in terms of customer service levels and potential damaged reputation. We work with our clients to prevent that."