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
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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

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

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

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

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