Source: http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/services/disaster-prevention-and-recovery.aspx

disaster recovery, double take, high availability, Neverfail, replication, wansync

Windows IT Pro magazine and SQL Server Magazine announced the winners of their Best of Tech Ed 2008 IT Professional Awards yesterday evening. Jeff Lewis, the Group Publisher of the Windows IT Group, presented the awards at a ceremony at Universal Studios in Orlando. Out of over 223 product nominations that were received for the Best of Tech Ed Awards, editors chose 29 finalists in nine categories.

* * * Read this article online at WINDOWSITPRO.COM

Winners were chosen based on innovation, competitive advantage, and value to customers.

In the Messaging category, the winner is Azaleos OneServer Virtual Edition. Our judges liked the features of this innovative virtual appliance, ranging from its polished interface to its wealth of management and analysis options.

The winner in the Business Intelligence category is SoftArtisans OfficeWriter. OfficeWriter can connect to SQL Server, Analysis Services, and other databases and deliver fully functional Microsoft Excel and Word documents over the Web.

In the SharePoint category, the winner is the AvePoint DocAve Software Platform. SharePoint use is exploding, and the DocAve Software Platform provides an integrated environment for SharePoint management, disaster recovery, and real-time backup.

In the Hardware, Networking, and Storage category, the winner is Strangeloop WS1000. The WS 1000 can increase the performance of Web services by an order of magnitude. Its advanced caching technologies enable plug-and-play performance optimization without requiring any changes to the Web services application code.

In the Database Administration category, the winner is SQL diagnostic manager. SQL diagnostic manager provides the ability to monitor SQL Server performance as well as diagnose and analyze performance problems.

In the Productivity and Collaboration category, the winner is Colligo Contributor Pro. Giving users access to company information on the road is essential, and Colligo Contributor Pro allows users to access and edit Microsoft SharePoint content both online and offline.

In the Security category, the winner is Trend Micro ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange. ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange provides comprehensive e-mail security including anti-virus, anti-spyware and zero-day virus protection.

In the Virtualization category, the winner is VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. Virtualization is taking the IT world by storm, and VMware has been driving that change more than anyone.

In the Systems Management and Operations category, the winner is Athena by Odyssey Software. Athena is a management solution for Windows-based mobile devices. The product seamlessly integrates into the Microsoft System Center management interface to provide remote tools, extended asset reporting, and provisioning for mobile devices in the enterprise.

The Breakthrough Product award winner is Quest Software’s PowerGUI, a scripting and command shell platform that enhances ease of use of Windows PowerShell.

This year’s Attendees’ Pick award winner is Syntergy Replicator for SharePoint.

avepoint, MOSS, replication, replicator, sharepoint, syntergy

AUSTIN, Texas – Jan. 26, 2010 – Neverfail®, a leading global software company specializing in affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, today debuted the Neverfail Continuous Availability Director. Part of the Neverfail suite, the Continuous Availability Director is a centralized management console for Neverfail implementations, which enables a business-centric view of high availability and disaster recovery across systems, processes and services that are dependent upon multiple applications. Eliminating down time for end-users and business-critical systems requires full protection and management across all key application servers. However, traditional solutions to manage and protect availability of these systems have been complex and time consuming because each application server must be managed and protected independently. Neverfail Continuous Availability Director solves this problem by providing a single point of management and control for all business-critical systems. “The primary focus when architecting for continuous availability should be the user experience,” said Donna Scott, VP at Gartner. “That experience will depend on the availability of multiple IT services and applications supporting business processes so it’s important that any continuous availability and disaster recovery architecture protects and assures service levels across multiple IT services.” Through centralized monitoring, management and configuration for all business-critical systems and underlying application servers, Neverfail Continuous Availability Director provides a truly business-centric view. This is done through a user interface that, for the first time, lets organizations visualize availability at the group level. Now they can view availability by business process (manufacturing, quality assurance), business system (SharePoint, mobile messaging), business service (accounting, payroll processing) or organization structure (London office, Media division, Finance Dept.). “Business systems and applications cannot exist in vacuums,” said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development for Neverfail. “By providing a centralized view of each piece in the continuous availability puzzle, Neverfail Continuous Availability Director provides the unifying element so end-users never lose access to the critical applications required to do their jobs.” Neverfail Continuous Availability Director sits on top of Neverfail’s Application-Aware Management Framework (AMF), which controls how continuous availability is optimized for different applications. The Continuous Availability Director’s centralized management console adds a layer of business-level insight into application availability, including: ? A Business-Centric view of business systems, underlying application servers and their interdependencies ? Centralized Global Health status (alerts, alarms, etc.) ? Detailed graphical representation of switchover, failover status progress ? Simplified roll-up status of rules and events through collapsible display options (for memory, disk, processor, etc.) ? Simplified visualization and configuration of alerts Availability Neverfail Continuous Availability Director is available now as part of the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite. About Neverfail Neverfail is a leading global software company providing affordable data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail’s software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail’s mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime and enables the more productive use of IT resources. Neverfail is a member of the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Program, the Microsoft US Managed ISV Alliance Partner Program and is a member of the Microsoft SQL Server Always On Alliance. More information can be found at www.neverfailgroup.com.

Disaster Recovery Software, high availability, Neverfail

Recent studies have shown that the average worker checks email once every 15 minutes, with some users checking email as often as 40 times per hour. In addition, growing use of personal mobile devices means that employees have become literally attached to their email at all times, with some checking their device as soon as each email arrives. Now that email has evolved into a critical business communications tool, employees have come to expect access to their email 24×7, with very little tolerance for downtime.

Meeting the “always on” expectations of employees creates challenges for the IT administrator. Service-level agreements (SLAs) are increasingly stringent and demanding as users require non-stop access to email and other collaborative features of Microsoft Exchange. Availability of Exchange is paramount, as well as protecting the integrity of your Exchange data. In order to maintain Exchange availability, every component of the Exchange infrastructure needs to be considered. You can protect your mailbox server to the highest degree, but if your DNS server fails, the Exchange server may not be accessible.

To help your company protect its Exchange environment, Marathon has developed a series of steps for achieving optimal Exchange availability. The tips are designed to help identify what availability levels should be designated in order to achieve Exchange SLA commitments with fewer resources and lower costs.

Define Availability Objectives
Creating availability objectives is an important first step in formulating Exchange protection strategies. This is typically done by establishing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), the time it takes for an application to be running again, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the point in time to which the IT professional can recover data in case of a failure, for your Exchange environment.

RTO and RPO baselines establish the SLAs you commit to for the overall company, business units, or specific internal groups. You may even have different Exchange SLAs for different users within your company. For example, you may have an executive group that requires 24×7 email access, while the rest of the company can withstand Exchange downtime of up to one hour. In addition, consideration should be given to what level of protection is needed for the other components of your Exchange infrastructure, such as Active Directory and DNS servers.

Understanding the Levels of Availability
There are multiple levels of availability to consider for different applications and their support infrastructures, starting with basic failover and recovery, moving up to high availability, and all the way to continuous availability for extremely transaction-sensitive applications.

1. Level 1 – The Recovery level is for those applications for which recovery time (RTO) of a day or more is often acceptable. Some downtime is acceptable, and even significant downtime won’t have a detrimental effect on the business. Assurances that recovery will happen is not a requirement.
2. The High Availability level is the home of the majority of applications that run the business, such as email, CRM, financial systems, and databases. These are systems with high downtime costs, and therefore short RTO requirements. These applications require assurances that they will not be down for extended periods should failures occur.

3. The highest level of availability is Continuous Availability in which even brief moments of downtime or a single lost transaction can be extremely detrimental and/or costly to the client or business.

As you establish availability objectives for different groups of Exchange users, you need to consider the protection requirements for your entire Exchange infrastructure, beyond just the mailbox server. You will need to protect all of the components of the Exchange environment, in addition to the different workloads deployed on the mailbox server. Also, don’t rule out that the way you use Exchange today may not change in the future. You may use Exchange today for general correspondence, but within the next year you may plan to use email to process orders. This adds to the need to have multiple levels of availability to assign to the components of the Exchange infrastructure and Exchange user groups. Additionally you’ll need flexibility to change those levels as your business changes.

Assigning Levels of Availability to Exchange Environments
A meaningful exercise to undertake is to apply various levels of protection to your Exchange infrastructure based on your SLA commitments. First look at the users and their requirements for Exchange access. Do you have a single SLA in place for all users, or do you have multiple user groups with different SLAs? If you have a single SLA in place company-wide, you can deploy those users in workloads based on email usage and assign them a single level of protection. However if you have different SLAs for different business groups, you can divide those into multiple workgroups on the mailbox server based on their SLA requirements.

For example, if you have an executive group that needs a 24×7 uptime, then you should consolidate those executives in a dedicated Exchange workload and assign a level of protection that will provide continuous availability. Sales people can often fall into this category as well, requiring non-stop access to email and Exchange collaboration features. Other employees may have less stringent SLAs in place and would require a lower level of protection.

It is also important to keep the components of Exchange, including the DHCP server, DNS server and Active Directory server, up and running. If one or more of these components goes down, requiring the IT administrator to manually intervene could cause excessive downtime for Exchange and exceed your SLAs. Automatic recovery from failures enables you to keep the Exchange environment operating to meet your SLA commitments. Assigning a level of protection to the supporting systems, including  the DNS, DHCP, and Active Directory servers, equivalent to that necessary to meet your Exchange SLAs is as important as protecting the actual Exchange servers. Any single point of failure could bring down a well protected Exchange server.

For remote employees and “road warriors”, your company may also have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and/or Client Access Server (CAS) implementation, to serve as a secondary or backup method for remote email access. The BES and CAS implementations should be protected to the level you require based on your remote email access strategy and user SLAs.

Establishing RTO and RPO for SLA commitments, determining the right level of availability protection to meet these commitments, and protecting all components necessary to support an Exchange environment will help create n robust and reliable messaging system.

availability, data, software, virtualization

Hardware
Taunton-based MooBella Inc., which makes technology to produce on-demand ice cream, has named Robert Beauregard as national sales director. Most recently, Beauregard served as key business development manager, Southeast region, for Van Houtte USA/Filterfresh, a provider of office coffee service. Prior to his stint at Van Houtte USA, Beauregard was the director of chain and national accounts, eastern U.S., for Oneida Global Foodservice Ltd. Earlier in his career, he was associated with Empire Beef & Redistribution Co., Benchmark Sales and Marketing and Dole & Bailey Inc.

Wireless
M/A-COM Technology Solutions Inc. has hired Michael Murphy as vice president of engineering. Most recently Murphy served as vice president of engineering of TriQuint Semiconductor’s networks and standard products business unit. Prior to that he led TriQuint’s New England Design Center, which he initially launched for Infineon Technologies in 1999. TriQuint purchased the Infineon GaAs IC business unit in 2002. His early career included a 13-year tour with M/A-COM where in the late 1990s he served as product line manager.

Services
Everything Channel has promoted Robert C. DeMarzo from senior vice president and editorial director to senior vice president strategic content, brought back on board Kelley Damore as vice president, editorial director. In this newly created position, DeMarzo will help focus and shape the company’s event offerings as well as its custom content offerings. For more than 20 years, DeMarzo has helped solution providers and IT professionals analyze complex issues facing their businesses and drive technology sales. Damore was formerly the editor-in-chief of CRN Magazine from 1999 to 2002 and served in a number of roles at the publication for nine years including senior executive editor, executive editor, news editor and senior editor/hardware editor. Most recently, Damore was an editorial director at TechTarget Inc. Earlier in her career, Damore was senior writer at IDG’s InfoWorld and a staff writer for Ziff Davis’ PC Week.

Brian F. Connolly has joined Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. as a vice president on the leasing team. He will focus on representing midsize portfolio companies in the delivery of multiple services across markets. Prior to joining Jones Lang LaSalle, Connolly was a vice president with Richards Barry Joyce & Partners where he specialized in domestic and international transaction management, complex financial modeling, deal structuring, consulting and portfolio management for clients. Connolly holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Bentley College.

Information Technology
Wakefield-based Edgewater Technology Inc. has appointed Timothy R. Oakes as its permanent chief financial officer. Oakes has been serving as the company’s interim CFO since September. Since joining Edgewater in 2004, Oakes has been responsible for the company’s overall financial operations and controls of the company, while directing the overall accounting, audit, tax functions and associated practices. He joined Edgewater as a director of finance, was promoted to vice president of finance in 2007 and chief accounting officer in 2008. Prior to joining Edgewater, Oakes was a senior director of finance within Symmetricom Inc.

Networks
Stratus Technologies Inc. has appointed Roy T. Sanford as chief marketing officer, a new position at the company. Prior to coming to Stratus, Sanford held a number of senior executive positions during his 14 years at EMC Corp., most recently as vice president coordinating the company’s entry into the software-as-as-service business. Prior to EMC he ran worldwide marketing and alliances with then startup ON Technology, and has held leadership roles at Bull HN and Data General.

LineSider Technologies Inc., a Danvers-based provider of network services virtualization, has appointed John Donnelly III as executive vice president of sales and marketing and will lead the newly expanded sales and technical team based in Boston, New York and London. Donnelly joins LineSider Technologies from MetaCarta, where he was executive vice president of sales and marketing. Prior to that, he was vice president of the Americas sales team for Interwise, an IP conferencing software company, which was acquired by AT&T.

Software
Marathon Technologies of Littleton has hired Rafael Costa as its new vice president of worldwide sales. Costa joined Marathon from CDC Software, where he served as CDC Global Services group general manager responsible for five business units. Prior to CDC Software, Costa worked as general manager of Vis.align, vice president of sales at Bang Networks and worldwide vice president of indirect and OEM channels at Inktomi. He was also instrumental in leading sales efforts at Hitachi Data Systems and IBM Corp.

Burlington’s Veracode Inc. has named James Cash, Jr., of Harvard University Business School to its board of directors. Cash is Emeritus James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University Business School, where he served from July 1976 to October 2003. He also served as chairman of the MBA program and the senior associate dean and chairman of HBS Publishing while at the Harvard. He serves as a director of The Chubb Corp., General Electric Co., Wal-Mart, Microsoft Corp. and is a limited partner in Banner 17, the entity that owns the Boston Celtics.

XOS Technologies Inc., a Billerica company making software for managing digital media assets for sports teams, has appointed Christopher R. McCleary as its new chief executive officer. Co-founder Randy Eccker has been promoted from CEO to the executive chairman of the company’s board of directors. McCleary has held several senior executive positions including partner at Blue Chip Venture Co., chairman of Radware Ltd., founder and CEO of Evergreen Assurance Inc. and USinternetworking Inc., CEO of Digex Inc., president of Radiation Systems Inc., vice president of American Mobile Satellite Corp., and vice president and CFO of United Cable Television Corp.’s Broadcast Division.

Medical Devices
Newport, R.I.-based Neograft Technologies Inc. has named Jon McGrath as president and chief operating officer. Between 2005 and 2008, McGrath was president and CEO at LumeRx, a venture-backed startup in Hingham, where he focused on phototherapy for ulcer causing H pylori bacteria. Previously, McGrath held various senior executive roles at Biosphere Medical in Rockland; Urologix in Minneapolis; and Schneider, based in Minnesota and Bulach, Switzerland, and now part of Boston Scientific Corp. McGrath co-founded Harbor Medical before that, and he began his career at Boston Scientific holding several positions including R&D director.

Internet
FreshAddress Inc. of Newton has named Elmer Bartek as strategic alliance manager and Sandy Pochapin as marketing manager. Bartek is responsible for developing strategic alliances across all industries as well as managing key partner relationships. He has worked for companies including Tealeaf Technologies, Salary.com, Computer Associates, and Harte-Hanks. Pochapin has worked with companies including Bose Corp. and Reed Exhibitions where she developed and managed programs for American Express, Toyota, Bass Pro Shops, Crutchfield and many other major retailers.

everrun, marathon, software, virtualization

High Availability has changed the way we now do business. But more than that it has changed the way users expect our business to run. This has made it more important than ever to keep our applications highly available.

In a recent paper I wrote titled “Making High Availability Pay for Itself” I wrote about how you can achieve these goals without emptying your pockets.

One of the products I looked at was from a company called Marathon Technologies. Marathon has been working in the areas of Disaster Recovery, Fault Tolerance and High Availability for a while now.

Their latest product everRun 2G, provides a flexible and cost effective way to implement high availability.
Some of the things I found that impressed me were a single solution for all your Windows platforms. There is no need to buy separate product versions for Windows 2003 or 2008, for 32 or 64bit platforms; everRun 2G will work across all of them.

This newest HA solution from Marathon not only provides a single platform solution for HA it also has a ton of great features like:
• The ability to use local storage, shared storage or a SAN
• Create single or multiple workloads

And most importantly everRun 2G offers automation…Automate the setup and configuration using setup wizards and a very functional browser interface. Automate fault detection and management of your HA solution with everRun’s embedded policy management. One of the best features I found was the ability to choose the level of protection for each application.

I have found that many HA solutions tend to be all or nothing and we are trying to fit our applications into our HA solution rather than our solution fitting our needs. This kind of customization was a real winner for me. I also liked the SplitSite feature which allows you to create a continuous availability in a different geographic location from your main data site.

everRun 2G is easy to setup, simple to manage and provides the kind of flexibility that really makes high availability pay for itself. Check out the webinar demo, schedule a live demo or download a trial at Marathon Technologies everRun 2G product site.

everrun, marathon, software, technologies, virtualization

LITTLETON, MA–(Marketwire – December 2, 2009) – Marathon Technologies, the award-winning provider of fault-tolerant, high availability software for physical and virtual servers, today announced that everRun VM was named a gold medal winner in the “2009 Editor’s Best Awards” in the Best High Availability/Disaster Recovery category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro magazine. Marathon’s everRun software has earned sixteen industry awards in the last two years for providing reliable high availability protection that eliminates the hidden costs associated with traditional high availability software.

“Marathon Technologies’ everRun VM is a snap to deploy, is easy to use, and is loaded with features. If you need to protect your virtual infrastructure from an unforeseen mistake or mishap, everRun VM is a great choice,” said Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro.

“The 2009 Editors’ Best Awards are an accumulation of our editors’, contributors’ and authors’ subject matter expertise, in service of identifying the year’s most significant products in the market,” said Michele Crockett, editorial strategy director. “We believe that our editorial experts’ annual tradition of selecting winners based on a product’s strategic importance to market, its competitive advantages and its value to the customer is particularly significant to the Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine communities this year, as we call out exceptional products in a highly competitive market.”

“Our Editors’ Best Awards allow us to take advantage of our contributing editors’ in-the-trenches expertise in the Windows and SQL Server markets to provide well-earned recognition to products that exceed industry standards. We’re proud to now share this invaluable insight with our Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine communities. Our winners should be extremely proud of this honor of recognition from our editorial experts.”

everRun Eliminates the Hidden Costs of High Availability Software

everRun software eliminates the complexities and maintenance costs of traditional high availability and data protection products to deliver more reliable, affordable application availability. everRun has been proven in the most demanding availability environments such as stock exchanges, television networks, and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants. Businesses of all sizes can run critical applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server or mission critical specialized applications without worries of outages or data loss.

Windows IT Pro is the leading and largest independent voice in Windows IT, with more than 2.5 million visits per month, and consists of a multitude of print and online channels. In addition to the flagship Windows IT Pro magazine, the Windows IT community includes SQL Server Magazine, Office SharePoint Pro, and Windows Dev Pro. Other online channels include blogs, forums, podcasts, RSS feeds, webinars, virtual events, white papers, newsletters, classes and more. IT professionals get objective, “direct from the trenches” information about Microsoft’s latest Windows-based solutions and gain essential insight for keeping business-critical Microsoft applications up and running. For more information, visit www.windowsitpro.com or www.sqlmag.com.

Penton Media, Inc. is the largest independent business-to-business media company in the United States, serving more than 6 million business professionals every month. The company’s market-leading brands are focused on 30 industries and include 113 trade magazines, 145 websites, 150 industry trade shows and conferences, and more than 500 information data products. Headquartered in New York City, the privately held company is owned by MidOcean Partners and U.S. Equity Partners II, an investment fund sponsored by Wasserstein & Co., LP, and its co-investors. For additional information about the company and its businesses, visit www.penton.com.

About Marathon Technologies

With more than 2500 global customers, Marathon is the world’s first provider of fault-tolerant, automated, high availability and disaster recovery software for physical and virtual servers. Marathon everRun® software prevents outages and data loss — without IT intervention or specialized IT skills. Organizations using everRun achieve continuous availability, 100% data protection, and rapid disaster recovery — all through automated “click-to-protect” operation. In the past 18 months, the company has been recognized with more than a dozen major industry awards including Best of VMworld 2007 – New Technology, SearchServerVirtualization 2008 Products of the Year, CIO.com “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2009.” The company was also recognized as a 2008 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate, a winner in eWEEK’s Eighth Annual Excellence Awards Program and finalist for 2009 Citrix Ready Solution of the Year. For more information visit www.marathontechnologies.com

No tags

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

Posted in Virtualization, 26th February 2010 08:02 GMT

Fault tolerant and high availability clustering software maker Marathon Technologies has received the second part of a $13.5m round of equity funding that the company lined up late last year.

According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Marathon has sold $13.5m in equity in total, but the company did not disclose who kicked in the money or how much came in during this round. The Boston Business Journal reports that $6.5m came in during this second traunche of funding from ten investors, with $7m coming in last August from unnamed investors.

Of its many investors, Atlas Venture, Sierra Ventures, and Longworth Venture Partners have kicked in dough to the company. Since it emerged from bankruptcy in 2003, Marathon has raised $27.8m and has completely revamped its product line.

Last September, after getting the first traunche of cash, Marathon tapped Jim Welch to be its chief executive officer. Welch was vice president of product operations at data integration software maker Ascential Software (which was spun out of database maker Informix) when IBM shelled out $1.1bn to acquire it in March 2005. (IBM had bought the database half of Informix back in 2001 for $1bn). Both bits of software have played key roles in the development of the InfoSphere data warehouse software business, which has grown to about $600m a year according to a statement put out by Marathon upon Welch’s appointment.

Marathon currently has more than 2,500 customers using its everRun clustering and fault tolerance software for physical and virtual servers. Marathon is based in Littleton, Massachusetts. It was formed in 1993 by a group of fault tolerant computing engineers from the former Digital Equipment Corp who worked on that company’s VAXft fault tolerant server line.

The company started out doing hardware-based fault tolerant clustering and then moved on to use more flexible software-based techniques, embodied in the everRun products, to accomplish the same levels of high availability that used to require hardware lockstepping.

What Marathon has not done, and perhaps should do, is expand beyond supporting the clustering of Windows with everRun 2G and fault tolerance with the everRun HA and FT products solely based on the XenServer hypervisor. Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX Server have larger market share on X64 servers. But there are two issues with going more broadly: Marathon has failover products that compete with those from Microsoft and VMware, and the hypervisors from Microsoft and VMware are closed source, which means Marathon needs their help to support them with its everRun suite.

In a separate announcement, Marathon has partnered with NEC Phillips Unified Solutions to integrate its everRun tools with the server-based communications systems created and sold by the NEC-Phillips partnership in Europe. NEC, you will remember, shuttered its PC business in Europe last February and said it would farm out production of its servers for EMEA. But it still sells servers and various turnkey products in Europe. ®

marathon, software, virtualization

Littleton, Mass.— February 16, 2010 – Marathon Technologies, the award-winning provider of fault-tolerant, high availability software for Windows applications, today announces that the City of Bonn, Germany has chosen Marathon’s everRun® VM. The software will protect their Microsoft® Exchange 2007 System and RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.0, to minimize downtime for around 5,000 employees and ensure all systems are synchronized in real time.

The City of Bonn has been virtualizing its Microsoft Exchange 2003 system on a VMware ESX 3.5-Cluster for some time, providing access to 4,500 email accounts and 2,500 public folders. In August 2009 the Exchange 2003 System was already overloaded due to the number of users and the limited availability of Exchange databases. Additionally, the City of Bonn was bound to use Outlook 2003 after a planned migration to Exchange 2007 because of regulations. Unfortunately, Outlook 2003 is unable to automatically recognize a new Exchange Server following a failover of the server, meaning that a manual intervention is required on each Outlook client. The auto discover option that comes with Outlook 2007 means that busy IT administrators no longer need to do this.
Virtualization of the Exchange Server with Marathon everRun VM, on Citrix XenServerTM, achieves the following for the City of Bonn:

·         No manual intervention for individual clients – the host name remains the same
·         No double-licensing of Exchange – only one virtual instance and not two parallel systems exist
·         All systems are synchronized – without any time delay
The Citrix XenServer is noticeably better equipped to handle the number of users (designed for 4,500 heavy users / 32GB Ram, 4CPUs, and 9DBs), than the previous Exchange 2003 VMware environment (3GB Ram, 4CPUs, 4DBs). This has greatly improved the user experience when it comes to activities such as searching and sorting within Outlook.
Frank Bücher, divisional head of central services / IT systems at the City of Bonn, said: “We chose Marathon Technologies everRun VM for its price-performance ratio and the ability to automate and protect our Exchange 2003 system in case of a failure. This new technology also enables us to make our Blackberry Enterprise Server available on the same system, making mobile communication possible for more than 300 users, and allows for monitoring of traffic to track traffic offences.”
Daniel Pogoda, senior consultant at centracon GmbH, said: “It’s especially important for the public sector to identify effective solutions to ensure high availability and performance. The choice of everRun VM for the City of Bonn is perfect, as it provides automated availability, the flexibility to assign the level of availability for each individual virtual machine and in case of a failure no manual intervention is necessary. Any mission critical application should be protected by an everRun system, so that companies are able to focus on their core competencies. Additionally the customer achieves a post-implementation-agility by virtualizing the workloads.”
About Marathon Technologies
With more than 2500 global customers, Marathon is the world’s first provider of fault-tolerant, automated, high availability and disaster recovery software for physical and virtual servers.  Marathon everRun® software prevents outages and data loss – without IT intervention or specialized IT skills. Organizations using everRun achieve continuous availability, 100% data protection, and rapid disaster recovery – all through automated “click-to-protect” operation. In the past two years, the company has been recognized with sixteen major industry awards including Best of VMworld 2007 – New Technology, SearchServerVirtualization 2008 Products of the Year, CIO.com “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2009.” The company was also recognized as a 2008 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate, a winner in eWEEK’s Eighth Annual Excellence Awards Program and finalist for 2009 Citrix Ready Solution of the Year. For more information visit www.marathontechnologies.com

About Bonn: http://www.bonn.de/
About centracon GmbH:
The core competence of centracon GmbH lies in designing flexible and cost efficient solutions for delivering and managing IT-workspaces and applications. The range of our consulting services ranges from optimising and standardising IT-workspace-infrastructures, implementing innovative technologies for application virtualisation or virtual desktops, process and infrastructure automation to innovative business solutions for user self service concepts.

Citrix® and Citrix XenServer™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

citrix, city, everrun, german, marathon