Where there's fire, there's a solution - Hoechst Celanese's use of Gensym G2 application - Product Information

Communications News, August, 1999

Hoechst Celanese's devastating fire emergency at its manufacturing facility in Narrows, Va., early last year crashed every computer in the affected building, except the server running G2 and the Endurance 4000 assured-availability disaster-tolerant solution for Windows NT.

Jim Frazier, senior systems analyst at Hoechst Celanese, explains, "A fire in the computer room of building 32 shut down all the power, including half of the Endurance 4000 system." Frazier continues, "The other half continued to run in building 7 and didn't miss a lick! All of the Unix systems shut down. While my colleagues were running around trying to figure out how to switch to other computers, I was saying, `The NT-based G2/Marathon server is still running. I love it!'"

The Gensym G2 application running on Endurance 4000 controls the process for producing a filter material that is distributed around the world. The G2 product is a powerful environment for developing and deploying intelligent systems that manage complex, dynamic operations for improved performance of an operation, while Marathon Technologies' Endurance 4000 delivers nonstop processing, continuous data access, persistent connectivity, and disaster tolerance, all with constant performance. Marathon's Compute Thru technology continues processing through all component failures and hot swaps, while its SplitSite capabilities enable the two halves of the Endurance 4000 to be located up to 1.5 kilometers apart, creating a disaster-tolerant server.

As part of Hoechst Group, an international network of leading suppliers of pharmaceutical, agricultural, and industrial chemical sectors, with 150,000 employees, Frazier points out that, at Hoechst Celanese, "Downtime is not an option. We must continue to run. With the cost of downtime, clusters and fail-over systems just won't do--we've promised our users nonstop processing and disaster tolerance." Circle 255 for more information from Marathon Technologies