Marathon Technologies Software Puts Virtualization in Lockstep

Marathon Technologies is introducing two new products, including EverRun VM Lockstep, designed to provide system-level, fault-tolerant software for virtual environments. VMware and other IT companies have also been exploring solutions for high availability within the virtual environment.

Marathon Technologies is releasing two new products, EverRun VM Lockstep for Citrix XenServer, system-level, fault-tolerant software for virtual environments, and EverRun 2G, a software platform designed to expand upon the capabilities of two other company products, EverRun HA and EverRun FT. 

The company's previous virtual environment solution was EverRun VM, software that worked with Citrix XenServer and allowed its users to choose from different levels of failover protection.

EverRun VM Lockstep provides full system-level, fault-tolerant protection for applications running on virtual machines, by ensuring that those applications will run on another server in the virtual pool should the original server fail. The software runs on Citrix XenServer and Citrix Essentials for XenServer.

EverRun 2G serves as the company's successor to its EverRun HA and EverRun FT solutions; the high-availability software is tailored for Windows Server environments, and supports both 32- and 64-bit Windows applications. It features three levels of availability: automated high availability, component-level fault tolerance and system-level fault tolerance.

Marathon has traditionally offered high-availability software for Microsoft applications, along with a portfolio of disaster-recovery and data protection software. The company's EverRun CDP (continuous data protection) software works with standard server, networking and storage environments, with specific options for Microsoft products including Exchange and Windows Server. 

Marathon's portfolio includes high-availability software for the XenSource enterprise platform. It also produces EverRun VM software for virtual environments that works with Citrix XenServer.

Moving high-availability capability into the virtual realm has been an increasing goal of IT companies supplying the enterprise as more and more large organizations embrace virtualization as an efficiency measure. In February 2009, VMware introduced the VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat tool, designed to protect the VMware vCenter Server against downtime issues by replicating server configuration and data onto a passive server.