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.

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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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Date: 15th to 17th March 2011,
Time : 10am to 5pm
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October 5, 2010 – Marathon Technologies released a software-only solution today that provides fault tolerance and high availability for symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core CPU servers. Dubbed everRun MX, the software enables users to eliminate server, application and I/O downtime in Windows environments without purchasing specialized fault-tolerant hardware.

Based on Marathon’s ComputeThru technology, everRun MX is designed to reduce the need for system/VM restarts and data recovery/restore (although the company does recommend implementing standard backup and recovery procedures.) The software can be implemented with direct-attached storage (DAS), eliminating the need to deploy a SAN for high availability purposes (although everRun MX can also be used in conjunction with a SAN).

“A lot of people approach high availability from a storage perspective, and deploy a SAN for fault tolerance,” says Rob Ciampa, vice president of marketing at Marathon, “but a SAN is expensive and doesn’t provide full fault tolerance. everRun MX can eliminate the need for a SAN.”

everRun MX protects against all types of failure, including server (physical and virtual), software, I/O and storage. The software includes three key modules:

–A Component Management element interfaces with network and storage I/O on protected servers

–Availability Manager maintains synchronization between server, network and storage resources

– Workload Manager supports multiple workloads and VMs, as well as application consolidation

Storage-specific features of the software include safeguards to protect storage and data against corruption during mirror copies, and the ability to add disks with pre-existing data to a protected virtual machine (VM).

Pricing for everRun MX starts at $10,000. The software does not require application-level customization or scripting.

Market researcher IDC estimates that revenue loss per hour for midsize companies ranges from $60,000 to $1 million, and that end-user productivity loss adds another $4,000 to $22,000 per hour.

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Marathon Technologies, a provider of network availability solutions, has announced the release of everRun MX, which it characterizes as the industry’s first software-based fault tolerant solution for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and multi-core servers and applications. Marathon says that with everRun MX, any organization can turn standard servers into hardened, fault tolerant platforms that prevent application downtime and eliminate data loss, critical requirements for systems that must operate without interruption.

“Marathon’s everRun MX solves one of the most technically challenging problems in computing: scalable fault-tolerance across multi-core server architectures,” said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix, a Marathon business partner. “The implications for application availability are profound: every Windows-based application can be emancipated from downtime.”

Jim Welch, Marathon’s president and chief executive officer, says that this new platform is cost effective enough for even smaller users. He explains, “everRun MX is a major technological achievement that shatters the price/performance barrier that prevents organizations from truly being always on. We call this application availability – and we’re taking it mainstream. For years, too many organizations have settled for a complex patchwork of recovery-oriented solutions. everRun MX, offering complete application availability, blows that all away with a unified, prevention-based approach. We’re removing the complexity, risk, and economic constraints so no organization – large, small, local or remote – will have to settle for less.”

Key attributes of everRun MX include:

• 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. It 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, ideal for environments where staffing or access is constrained.

“Marathon’s everRun software was the only solution that had exactly what I needed right out of the box, including fault tolerant support for multi-processors, easy snapshot capabilities, and the freedom to choose the hardware that best fit my applications and environment,” said Mike Rische, senior electrical project engineer, PPG Industries. “In addition, the automated failover and synching features are essential for my manufacturing environment, staffed mostly by non-IT employees, where manual failover solutions are not practical.”

www.marathontechnologies.com

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery Software, everrun, virtualization

Data Protection, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, everrun, everRun MX, high availability, virtualization

Marathon Technologies this week unveiled fault tolerant software for high availability of applications on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and multicore servers in Windows environments.

The latest version of Marathon’s everRun family, everRun MX, is targeted at small- to medium-sized IT operations as well healthcare, manufacturing and remote offices. everRun MX synchronizes between disk systems, and can work with storage area networks (SANs) or direct-attached storage (DAS). Marathon’s first generation everRun 2G was introduced about two years ago and it supported a single processor. This generation of everRun MX supports two, four or eight physical processors.

The everRun MX software is composed of three parts. The Component Manager allows the application to look at the hardware across all platforms as a single instance. It controls all the I/O operations to the disk, network and memory and helps maintain connections for data and transactional integrity. The Workload Manager supports multiple workloads so that applications can be stacked onto a single server pair, and the Availability Manager helps the traffic between the two servers stay in sync. “All of our key intellectual property is inside the Availability Manager,” Marathon CEO Jim Welch said. “It’s where all the hard work is done. This is where all the true fault tolerance occurs.”

Marathon vice president of marketing Rob Ciampa said everRun MX is more about preventing downtime than enablingapplication recovery.

“It’s much better never to go down than to deal with the implications of an outage,” he said.

Laura DiDio, principal analyst at ITIC, described this launch as a reboot of the company. Marathon secured $13.5 million in venture funding over the past year, and she said most of the vendor’s employees have joined in that period.

“This is getting back on track with new staff and new direction,” DiDio said. “They have expanded their focus. They are heading more into applications, virtualization and fault tolerance.”

She said the most interesting thing about everRun MX is that is that it enables software-based fault tolerant without requiring a specialized hardware solution. “In the past, if you wanted fault tolerance, you needed specialized fault tolerance hardware,” DiDio said. “Most people couldn’t afford it.”

Data Protection, Disaster Recovery - Data Reduction, everrun, everRun MX, WAN Optimization

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.

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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.

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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.

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