Marathon Technologies Brings High Availability to XenSource

Marathon Technologies, best known for creating high-availability environments for Microsoft applications, is turning its attention to open-source virtualization provider XenSource.

The two companies are making a joint announcement April 17 to integrate Marathons technology with XenSources virtualization platform, although the first products of this venture will not hit the marketplace until the third quarter of this year.

The first of these products, v-Availability, will bring disaster recovery and high availability to XenSources open-source hypervisor. Later, the two companies plan to integrate Marathons EverRun software with XenSources XenEnterprise, which will bring high availability and fault-tolerant technology to virtualized environments and virtual machines.

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For years, Marathon, which is based in Littleton, Mass., has provided high availability for Microsoft applications through its EverRun HA software, which allows its customers to tie two x86 servers together. This then creates a virtualized Windows server environment at the point where the applications are deployed.

The software then creates a high-availability, multiserver scenario that is fault-tolerant with no single point of failure. This environment, however, is presented as a single server with one identity and IP address.

In addition to supporting Microsoft applications, the companys software supports Intel processors as well as Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices.

Click here to read more about Marathons support for AMD processors.

The products Marathon plans to integrate with XenSources virtualization tools will work much in the same way the companys technology works with Microsofts applications.

By integrating with XenSource, Marathon will have access to a virtualization platform that can support both Windows and Linux operating systems such as Red Hat Linux and Novells SUSE Linux.

The integrated products will blend high availability and virtualization technology and the first of these, v-Availability, will allow customers to employ fault tolerance, high availability and disaster recovery within virtual machines.

Click here to read more about virtualization.

"What we are doing is taking two virtual machines and treating them as one," said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon. "It creates a single environment from two virtual machines and we give VMs [virtual machines] high availability that allows applications to continue to operate. The protection is done at the VM level and each VM can now have its own high availability."

Phillips added that he believes the integrated Marathon and XenSource, once released into the market, will appeal not only to enterprise and midmarket businesses, but also to small and midsize businesses that can take advantage of the open-source hypervisor.

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