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

La Jolla, CA—May 19, 2011—Syntergy, Inc., today announced that it has been selected to participate in both the Coalition and the US Trident Warrior exercises this summer. The Coalition sponsored exercise will test Replicator for SharePoint 2010 to support various afloat and connectivity challenged collaboration scenarios. The US based Trident Warrior exercise will test out Syntergy’s Replication Gateway for Lotus Notes which enables the sharing of mission critical content between the CAS (Collaboration At Sea) platform and SharePoint. The Trident Warrior exercise is an annual sea trial experiment that focuses on at-sea experimentation of approximately 100 critical maritime technologies and is led by the Naval Network Warfare Command with technical and lab support from SPAWAR Pacific and Naval Post Graduate School. “Trident Warrior 2011 gives us the unique opportunity to demonstrate our software solutions alongside SharePoint 2010 and CAS to enable mission critical collaboration among and across multiple US/Coalition entities to support a global approach to collaboration,” said Mark Mueller, Federal Director, Syntergy. “Today’s militaries find themselves supporting a very broad array of missions, often times alongside many other military and civilian organizations. This has greatly enhanced their need for collaboration solutions which can cross organizational boundaries and support ad hoc collaboration at a moment’s notice.” For more information on Syntergy Replicator, visit www.sharepointreplicator.com. Syntergy Replicator Gateway for Lotus Notes is currently in limited release and will be available for purchase in the fall 2011. About Syntergy Founded in 1997, Syntergy is a leading provider of replication software for mission critical SharePoint deployments. Syntergy’s flagship product, Replicator, is a web-based platform used to synchronize and manage content, critical intelligence and structure in real-time across a geographically distributed SharePoint environment. With Replicator, customers can securely share selected documents between logically separate environments across firewalls and ensure continuous operations (COOP) in the event of a disaster or system failure. Replicator ensures uninterrupted access to critical SharePoint content, enabling FOB-ROB collaboration, and facilitating collaboration across coalition partners. Syntergy is a Microsoft Gold ISV. www.syntergy.com ######### Copyright © 2011 by Syntergy, Inc. All rights reserved. Syntergy and the Syntergy logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Syntergy, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Lotus Notes, MOSS, replication, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Replication, 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

Register Now

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

availability, data, software, virtualization