Marathon to Add Opteron Support

The company, which offers virtualization capabilities for Microsoft applications, will now support its EverRun software on AMD-based servers.

Marathon Technologies, which uses virtualization technology to create a high-availability environment for Microsoft applications, is expanding its support to include Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors.

Currently Marathons EverRun line supports Intel microprocessors. Marathon will announce its Opteron support July 25.

Steve Keilen, vice president of marketing for the Littleton, Mass., company, said branching out to include Opteron support made sense for a number of reasons, including AMDs strong presence in market sectors looking for scale-up x86 solutions.

Opteron has seen a lot of acceptance in the four-way space, and Marathons high-availability offering is scalable, Keilen said.

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"If you look at where AMDs had a lot of success, its where our product line is," he said.

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In addition, Marathon has a strong relationship with Hewlett-Packard, which also offers a full line of Opteron-based systems.

"A number of our customers have gotten to the point where they require [Marathon support of Opteron]," Keilen said.

AMD has seen its fortunes grow along with the popularity of Opteron, which is already a key part of server strategies from HP and Sun Microsystems. IBM also is looking to increase its use of the chip. In addition, Dell in May announced it would start selling an Opteron-based server by the end of the 2006.

Marathon is among a growing list of companies looking to take the concept of virtualization beyond servers. Its EverRun FT (fault-tolerant) and HA (high-availability) offerings both can synchronize two standard Windows servers and create a single operating environment for applications.

Applications can run in such a clustered environment without modification and on standard platforms and are not prone to the problems of cluster failovers, such as lost data.

Marathon is looking to expand its reach into Linux applications in 2007.

The AMD support will show up immediately in Marathons FT product, Keilen said. It will arrive in the HA product by the end of September.

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