LITTLETON, MA — May 25, 2011 — Marathon Technologies, the leading provider and innovator of application availability solutions, today announced the general release of everRun MX 6.1, the latest generation of its flagship product line. everRun MX, the industry’s first software-based fault tolerant solution for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core servers and applications, is used worldwide by organizations that require absolutely no unplanned downtime. Since its introduction last year, everRun MX has been widely adopted in process automation, distribution, manufacturing, building security, media, gaming, transportation, and general IT.

“Marathon’s everRun MX changed the worldwide market for always-on computing by delivering unparalleled application uptime for any organization and all Windows-based applications. There’s just nothing better,” said Gerard Wubben, CEO at Raxco Software, a Marathon partner. “Now the new release of everRun MX 6.1 redefines the application availability equation yet again with improvements to performance, scalability, and manageability. As a leading IT provider in Europe, we view everRun MX as a critical and necessary part of any business that requires 24×7 operations.”

New capabilities of everRun MX 6.1 include:

• Increased scalability and support for additional protected virtual machines to fully capitalize on continual advances in server technology
• Expanded server coverage and compatibility to ensure broader freedom of hardware choice and deployment scenarios to worldwide partners and customers
• New platform-specific management applications including Dell OpenManage, Fujitsu ServerView, and HP Insight Manager to facilitate easy and seamless integration into nearly any operating environment
• Greater overall performance for networking, disk I/O, and shared storage to simultaneously deliver maximum application performance with total downtime prevention
• Additional operating system and server pack support to enable protection of all applications regardless of the underlying Windows platform

everRun MX combines the physical resources of two standard Windows servers into a single operating environment.  It functions with complete redundancy to ensure comprehensive and fully-automated fault tolerance and high availability for hardware, storage, applications, and networks. This provides continuous availability for applications that simply cannot have any downtime or lose operations or transactional data.

“everRun MX 6.1 reinforces Marathon’s continual track record of innovation in fault tolerance and demanding availability markets,” said Jerry Melnick, CTO of Marathon Technologies. “Our R&D efforts, as exemplified by this release, further expand the breadth and depth of world-class application availability while providing it in a future-proof architecture. We made significant upgrades across many dimensions of everRun MX, but also made it easier than ever to deploy in any Windows environment, whether on the factory floor, in the small business office, or in the enterprise data center.”

About Marathon Technologies
Marathon keeps applications running for over 3,000 companies in more than 30 countries. From email to electronic records, factory floors to trading floors, 911 call centers to emergency rooms, our everRun® application availability software proactively prevents application downtime. As experts in application availability, we’ve applied what we’ve learned from working with the world’s leading companies and application providers to deliver innovative software and services that prevent downtime, eliminate data loss, and reduce operational costs. For more information on ensuring non-stop business operations, please visit us at www.marathontechnologies.com.

disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, everrun, fault tolerance, high availability, marathon, virtualization

Providence Solutions is participating in these upcoming events. Be sure to join us and understand more about our products. We will also be conducting lucky draw for $100 robinsons vouchers at these events!

ICT Forum 2011 Singapore
24th February 2011,
Time : 9am to 5pm
Venue : Raffles Convention Centre
Padang/Collyer Room Level 4, Raffles City Convention Centre 80 Bras Basah Road Singapore 189560
Booth : Q

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Sharepoint Conference Australia
Date: 8th & 9th March 2011 Time: 8.30am to 6pm (Day1) 8.30am to 5pm (Day 2)
Venue : Hilton Sydney, Australia 488 George Street, Sydney, Australia 2000

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Global Security Asia 2011
Date: 15th to 17th March 2011,
Time : 10am to 5pm
Venue : Sands Expo & Convention Centre, Level 1 – Halls A & B, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore Booth : 505

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Data Protection, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, Disaster Recovery Software, everrun, fault tolerance, high availability, replicator, SharePoint Replication, software, virtualization, Virtualization backup, WAN Optimization

It has been a few days since we released our next generation product PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer and the response from our users has been awesome. Our engineering group as well the entire staff has worked very hard on this release and we believe the new architecture sets a strong foundation for our goal of providing virtual backup solutions across hypervisors. This is the just the first release and we are working hard on the next feature release to continue to grow the product and its offerings.

I wanted to share some of the quotes we are getting from our user community in just the first few days of the release.

Firstly, I just tried 5.1 – Wow! – that is a hell of an update. Really easy to get setup – the previous versions were getting better, but they were never something that just ‘made sense’ like this does. Feels like something I could pass onto my boss and he’d understand it! Very nice, very clean.

So far I am loving 5.1! As always, your team and you have done a phenomenal job. Although I loved the previous versions, this product is very polished and will be far easier for a novice to install, understand, and use. The backup process is almost instantaneous compared to the old VBA startup process. And, for firing off a quick backup or restore, that is very nice to have

I just wanted to thank the PHD team for 5.1. The new interface is cleaner, faster, and easier to navigate. I found the install and configuration process to be a breeze. Backups and restores are so simple I could probably walk my kids through it over the phone.

Ok, I have 5.1 installed already and ran a few backups. WOW, I have to say that this thing is fast! I

I personally think it’s great and a huge improvement

Manageability is a whole lot easier, I don’t want to have to manage backups. This seems a step closer to set and forget.

Keep the feedback coming.

Pete

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery Software, virtualization, Virtualization backup

Today is another landmark day for PHD Virtual as we release our Next Generation Product ( PHDVB 5.1 ) for both Vmware VSphere and Citrix XenServer. The new product leverages and builds the key architecture points that PHD Virtual has been a leader in, for example using Virtual Appliances for backups, doing source side deduplication and providing self healing backups. It takes that foundation and extends it to the next generation solution with a key focus on being on providing an end user experience that is easy to download, install, configure and maintain. Another key aspect of this release is the support for vSphere ESXi.PHD Virtual is the only provider that offers virtualized backup and recovery solutions purpose-built for Citrix and VMware environments. PHD Virtual Backup 5.1 delivers unique value including:A completely virtualized solution leveraging the PHD VBA™- Faster backup to meet your backup windows- Quick restore of full vm, virtual disk or individual files to meet your RPO and RTO- Optimizations for efficient backup over LAN and WAN environments- Dramatically lower backup storage requirements and overall solution costsPHD Virtual Press ReleaseEveryone at PHD Virtual is very excited about this release and we look forward to providing further enhancements and innovations to virtual backup solutions across hypervisors in the upcoming year.

Data Protection, Disaster Recovery Software, high availability, virtualization, Virtualization backup

Neverfail Wins ‘Infrastructure Innovation of the Year’ at the UK IT Industry AwardsREADING, UK – 15 November 2010 – Neverfail, a global software company specialising in affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, has been awarded the UK IT Industry Award for the Neverfail 6.2 Continuous Availability Suite in the category of ‘Infrastructure Innovation of the Year.’ Neverfail was lauded for its combination of class-leading replication technology which is integrated with application monitoring and automated failover to deliver continuous availability for business-critical applications, meaning that users are not disrupted when IT systems go down and the business is protected against lost productivity, revenue and data.Neverfail’s Continuous Availability Suite is architected to provide the maximum depth of protection from the widest set of downtime threats. By integrating local high availability and remote disaster recovery with Neverfail Tertiary™, Neverfail protects availability of mission-critical applications across any combination of physical, virtual and cloud-based servers, ensuring that neither localised failures such application issues nor site wide issues such as floods, hurricanes or power failures will bring the business down. Where organisations are looking to take advantage of private, public or hybrid Clouds, the unique combination of storage independent replication, advanced bandwidth reduction with Neverfail WANSmart™ technology and automated failover and seamless switch back means the economies of scale from cloud computing can be fully leveraged.Also key to Neverfail’s Continuous Availability Suite is the Continuous Availability Director, a centralised management console which enables a business-centric view of high availability and disaster recovery across systems, processes and business services that are dependent upon multiple applications. This means that IT applications can be grouped to reflect business function (e.g. E-commerce), technology functions (e.g. mobile email); geographical structure (e.g. New York, London) or any other desired view. Neverfail Continuous Availability Director sits on top of Neverfail’s Application Management Framework (AMF), which controls how continuous availability is optimised for different applications.Neverfail’s Continuous Availability Suite has achieved significant commercial success during the past year, and is being used by a wide range of companies, both large and small, in a variety of industries across the globe to ensure their businesses will remain up and running. For example, Fast Track, an internationally renowned sports marketing agency, has deployed Neverfail to ensure its business-critical processes and the applications which underpin them, including Microsoft® Exchange, RIM BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and Microsoft® SQL Server, are protected from failure, safeguarding the productivity of the business and saving significant monetary impact per hour of downtime should IT systems fail. According to Magnus Leask, IS Director, Fast Track, “With Neverfail we can rest assured that our most important applications will be protected whether they run in a physical or a virtual environment, taking the strain off IT and providing employees with the flexibility to work when and where they want.”“We are honoured that the Neverfail Continuous Availability Suite has been recognised for its innovative approach to protecting mission-critical applications from downtime,” said Andrew Barnes, SVP of Corporate Development at Neverfail. “Technology forms the backbone of businesses today, and any disruption to critical applications means an interruption to vital business processes, which is not acceptable in today’s 24/7 operating environment. Neverfail is committed to helping organisations of all sizes determine which core applications drive their business, as well as providing targeted solutions to ensure round-the-clock availability of those key applications, even in the event of an IT failure.”The BCS & Computing UK IT Industry Awards provide a platform for the entire profession to celebrate best practice, innovation and excellence. In total, the Awards feature 24 categories which cover: project,organisation, technology and individual excellence. The categories are open to organisations and individuals involved in IT across the public, not for profit and commercial sectors.“This has been another exceptional year for the Awards, with winners drawn from a wide range of industries, once again highlighting that IT is truly embedded in our society and brings tremendous benefits to all aspects of life from industry, healthcare through to entertainment and security,” said David Clarke, Chief Executive Officer of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “As the Chartered Institute for IT, we offer our congratulations to all those who took part and in particular, the medallists and winners. To qualify as a finalist is terrific; to win is an absolutely fantastic achievement in these highly contested Awards.”“On behalf of Computing, I would like to congratulate the winners and medalists on their achievements,” said Robin Booth, Publishing Director of Computing. “The UK IT Industry Awards are rigorously judged and as a result truly celebrate innovation and best practice in IT today.”About NeverfailNeverfail 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, a US Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is a consistent and active early adopter participant and contributor in all mission-critical Microsoft application. It is also a member of the Microsoft SQL Server Always On Alliance. More information can be found at www.neverfailgroup.com.

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery Software, high availability

One of the basic concepts of server virtualization [1] is the ability to abstract servers from the underlying hardware, preventing vendor lock-in  and giving consumers the ability to mix and match commodity hardware in their environments.  Marathon Technologies has taken that a step further by providing consumers with a software-based fault-tolerant solution that runs on commodity servers, not specialized equipment, thereby also preventing hardware vendor lock-in.

Marathon’s everRun MX is designed to help small to mid-size organizations affordably ensure uptime for applications running on industry-standard Windows servers.  With this latest version Marathon is able to take advantage of today’s modern server hardware, which has multi-core CPUs and is usually configured for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).

Customer demand for always-on environments has outpaced the ability of companies to protect themselves against a system fault, according to Marathon.  As a result, high availability (HA) is no longer “good enough.”  Customers want more than the ability to quickly recover from a system failure.  They want fault tolerance.

everRun MX provides fault tolerance to applications that require 100 percent uptime.  It does so by combining two standard Windows servers into a single operating environment with complete redundancy of all underlying hardware and data.  everRun MX then presents these redundant servers as a single operating environment to keep applications running in the event of component or system failures.  It operates in lockstep, ensuring redundancy of the hardware, data, and networks, to provide automated fault management.  Marathon says this ensures true continuous availability for applications that simply cannot have any downtime, or lose “in-flight” transactions.

Marathon claims everRun MX is the industry’s first software-based fault tolerant solution for symmetric multiprocessing and multi-core servers and applications.  The company also says everRun MX removes the price/performance barrier to continuous uptime, which not only eliminates technology tradeoffs but also makes fault tolerance more obtainable by any organization, regardless of its size.

Software fault tolerance itself is not new in the virtualization [5] community.  Virtualization giant VMware [6] also provides a software FT solution for its own platform.  But both VMware and Marathon have had to settle on protecting only those virtual machines that were configured with a single virtual CPU.  Until now, keeping two virtual CPUs in lockstep has proven to be quite the challenge.

Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst with the Taneja Group, believes Marathon is out ahead of VMware fault-tolerance with its everRun MX software.  “[Fault-tolerance] has always been a niche market, because you either needed very expensive fault-tolerant hardware or complex fault-tolerant software that wasn’t actually much cheaper.  Marathon is cheaper than hardware and legacy software fault-tolerance solutions, and they support SMP and multi-core servers and, critically, the apps that require them,” Bartoletti added.

By only supporting fault tolerance on a single virtual CPU VM, virtualization expansion in the production environment has halted or at least slowed down for many organizations.  One of the reasons many IT shops have hit the VM Stall [7] mark of around 30 percent is because they haven’t been able to provide that high degree of fault tolerance to mission-critical applications.  While virtualization platforms have supported multi-core and SMP virtual machines for some time, they have not been able to provide SMP fault tolerance and therefore could not guarantee uptime for these business-critical applications.

Based on many conversations with his own clients, Bartoletti agrees. “Now that the easy stuff is mostly virtualized, the hard stuff isn’t limited by consolidation requirements but by availability.  Those mission-critical analytics servers won’t get virtualized without a high degree of fault tolerance, and more and more they are leveraging multi-core servers,” he said.

Bartoletti also believes Marathon’s solution can help change what he calls the “FT 90/10 rule,” where 90 percent of a fault-tolerance budget is spent protecting only 10 percent of the workloads.  If fault tolerance is made more affordable and available for multi-core servers, he believes they can help push that number to 80/20 or perhaps even to 70/30.

According to Marathon, everRun MX only works with Intel systems today.  However, the company is working on a similar product that will work for AMD processors.  everRun MX can operate with any 32- or 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows and any application that runs on them, but the latest release is limited to the Citrix XenServer virtual appliance.  The company is working on Linux and VMware compatibility down the road.

A complete everRun MX configuration starts at under $10,000 with licenses for two systems that can be paired together with any configuration (core/sockets/memory) and includes one year of support and maintenance.  For more uptime guarantee, everRun MX can also provide N+1 protection when three or more active servers are used.

This article, “Marathon beats VMware to the SMP fault-tolerance [8] punch [8],” was originally published at InfoWorld.com [9]. Follow the latest developments in virtualization [10] and cloud computing [11] at InfoWorld.com.

everRun MX, fault tolerance, high availability, vmware

One of the pillars of virtualization is the ability to abstract servers from hardware to provide additional availability. Of course, infrastructure demands continue to increase and we seek to deliver high availability or even fault tolerance beyond the basic virtual machine. A number of solutions are available for virtual workloads.

The fault-tolerant space has three mainstream players: the VMware Fault Tolerance virtual machine feature with vSphere, Neverfail (which has an OEM relationship for VMware’s vCenter Server Heartbeat feature) and Marathon Technologies. Neverfail aligns with VMware, and Marathon aligns with Citrix.

Since the middle of the last decade, Marathon Technologies has offered solutions from HA to FT for Windows workloads before virtualized servers were mainstream in the datacenter. Back when I worked in the supply chain software industry, I used the everRun HA solution to replace fault-tolerant hardware solutions such as the NEC Express5800/ft or Stratus ftServer. Even back then, Marathon allowed customers to utilize commodity hardware for these HA and FT solutions.

Marathon recently released everRun MX, which provides a flexible offering to deliver FT workloads on commodity hardware. everRun MX can work for those who want to deploy a robust solution for a few workloads without a huge investment. everRun MX can use direct-attached storage or shared storage, making it price competitive if a traditional SAN is not involved. I’ve always thought it is very tough to provide a robust, highly available virtualized environment from small footprints such as a remote office.

With everRun MX, a base configuration starts at $10,000 and allows administrators to run a pair of servers of any configuration (core/sockets/memory) and includes one year of support and maintenance. The servers must have Intel processors. You can run everRun MX on dissimilar hardware, but they should be comparable. everRun MX uses the term Metal Pool, which would loosely equate to a cluster of virtual machines running with FT capabilities.

Figure 1. everRun MX allows a collection of virtual machines to function in a fault tolerant mode on commodity hardware. (Click image to view larger version.)

You might be asking: How well would this type of configuration be received within the greater software landscape? As virtualization customers, we go through this battle with new software titles to see if the software vendor supports their product being run on a virtual machine. For an architecture like this, it’s not as widely embraced as is a VMware virtual machine as a supported platform. But Marathon does offer 24×7 worldwide support in addition to an extensive partner ecosystem. I haven’t used Marathon products in a while, but everRun MX seems to bring more to the table for the customer seeking value and features.

citrix, everRun MX, ftserver, high availability, marathon, xenserver

Marathon Technologies has been working on creating a fault tolerant environment based upon standard, off-the-shelf systems for quite some time. everRun MX is the newest in a long line of products designed to bring the benefits of fault tolerant computing to more organizations by using industry standard servers. What’s new this time is that the product does its magic using symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)  as well as multi-core systems. Applications running in a well-implemented environment should continue to run even though some components have failed.

Here’s what Marathon has to say about this new release

Key attributes of everRun MX

• World class application availability through downtime prevention instead of recovery.
• Full SMP/multi-core fault tolerant and redundant operation across servers eliminates risks associated with system/VM restarts and data recovery.
• No hardware lock-in. Runs on commodity servers, not specialized equipment. It immediately leverages hardware innovations while providing server selection freedom.
• Natively scales and works with all applications, regardless of computing demands.
• Requires no application level customization or complex scripting routinely found in conventional availability offerings.
• Fully automated and self-healing. everRun MX’s prevention response requires no operator intervention, a trademark Marathon capability ideal for environments where staffing or access is constrained.

Snapshot analysis

As Professor Marcello Truzzi once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Another often used quote is “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” which is attributed to William Camden. Claiming the ability to create a never-fail environment based upon standard off-the-shelf hardware is something that most would say is an extraordinary claim.  After all, systems, memory, storage, networks and all other components of a computing solution fail at one time or another.

Hardware oriented fault tolerant systems suppliers, such as Stratus, would tell you that installing a machine that has built-in redundancy and hardware failover mechanisms would be less costly than building out an environment using multiple independent computing systems.  After all, they would say, a single copy of the operating system, data management tools, application frameworks and applications themselves would be needed. That alone would reduce the software and administrative costs of a solution.

Marathon, on the other hand, believes that a properly designed approach that is based upon common, everyday systems can approach the availability and reliability of those purpose-built systems. I suspect, however, that they can’t approach the failover speed seen when using those systems.

When asked for proof, Marathon would point out that their technology is in day-to-day use in 30 countries by thousands of organizations. Is that enough proof?

Well, it certainly seems convincing.  Has your organization used one of Marathon Technologies’ everRun products? Has it lived up to their promises?

If your organization has a need for this type of solution, it would be worth taking the time to see a demonstration of this technology.

everrun, everRun MX, virtualization

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