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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

everrun, marathon, software, virtualization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

everrun, marathon, software, technologies, virtualization

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