The company's new EverRun VM software looks to offer fault tolerance and high availability for companies on a tight budget.
Marathon Technologies is looking to lock down virtual environments.
The Littleton, Mass., company, which is best known for creating high-availability environments for Microsoft applications, is now turning its attention to creating secure, fault-tolerant virtual environments.
Marathon released the beta of its EverRun VM software March 24, with general availability slated for the end of April. The software works with Citrix XenServer and will eventually allow users to choose from different levels of failover protection, including basic fault tolerance and server component failover. Later this year, the company will release an updated version to address failures at the CPU level.
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While the software has a place within the enterprise, Gary Phillips, Marathon's President and CEO, said the company's management team believes that the EverRun software and its price range will make it a fit for midmarket companies that are interested in virtualization but want to ensure that any critical applications that are moved to virtual machines remain secure and functioning in the event of a hardware failure.
"We see the midmarket as the sweet spot for us as many of these companies are looking for simplicity and automation when it comes to virtual environments," said Phillips. "What we are looking to do is address a pain point. If you're consolidating servers and have all your eggs in one basket, there are a lot of consequences and fear to see those virtual machines go down."
With a fault-tolerant system and high availability, Phillips believes that Marathon has created software that will allow more companies to bring virtualization out of test and development and into production environments by providing a safe, redundant system for critical applications. The EverRun software also automates the setup of the fault-tolerant environments, which makes it easier for companies with limited IT resources to create a more secure environment.
The software, which sits just above the XenServer hypervisor, works by tying two x86 servers together. If one system fails, the other automatically kicks in and all the applications continue to work. The software also allows companies to connect two servers that are placed in different locations to create a backup environment in case of a disaster.
VMware, which is considered the leading provider of x86 virtualization software, has also developed a similar tool of its own called VMware HA (High Availability), which provides failover support. One advantage that Phillips said Marathon has compared to VMware HA is that EverRun does not require a SAN (storage area network).
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When the Marathon EverRun VM software becomes available in April, it will cost $2,000 per server and support an unlimited number of virtual machines. If bundled with the Citrix XenServer, the cost increases to $4,500.
Later in 2008, Marathon will release its EverRun VM Lockstep Option, which provides backup in case of system-level failures at the CPU level.
