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Blog

A common question we get from analysts and something that continues to come up in discussions (see Brian Madden’s blog) is why we developed everRun VM for XenSource and not VMware. One of the biggest obstacles in developing a version of our software for protecting virtual environments was making a strategic decision on which hypervisor platform to develop for initially. Some of the key factors that weighed in on our decision were:

• Virtualization platform market share
• Robustness of the virtualization platform
• Performance of the virtualization platform
• Openness of the architecture
• Virtualization vendor’s approach to partnerships
• Compatibility with future Microsoft virtualization platforms

Although VMware was the clear market leader, for most of the criteria, XenSource (now Citrix Virtualization and Management Division) was a much better fit. To acheive the superior availability that everRun VM uniquely provides, it had to be tightly integrated with the hypervisor, the openness of the architecture was very important. And since our solution would be directed at virtualizing applications that weren’t being virtualized yet, in part due to concerns about their performance in virtual machines, the near “bare-metal” performance of XenServer was also a major advantage. XenSource’s philosophy of growing through an ecosystem of technology partners gave us the confidence that they would get the technical, management and marketing support required to achieve our time-to-market objectives. Finally, because of the company’s relationship with Microsoft and the planned interoperability between the XenServer platform and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, we are confident that developing for XenServer now would provide the shortest path to supporting Microsoft Hyper-V when it becomes available.

If you have any additional questions feel free to leave us a comment.

Bill Murray’s character said it best in What About Bob, “Baby Steps” – In case you missed it, this week we announced our partnership with ADN, the largest Citrix distributor in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). ADN specializes in thin-client technologies. By incorporating the XenServer hypervisor and Marathon’s fault tolerant-class availability, ADN can now provide full-thin client packages for enterprises and medium sized companies.

How are we one step closer to VMWare? According to the folks at ADN, they are in the process of selling the XenServer Enterprise virtualization platform in the EMEA market – a market where VMWare has decided they are not looking to extend their current reseller base. This puts ADN in a prime position to work with the majority of EMEA companies that have not yet adopted virtualization, putting both Marathon and Citrix at their fingertips. :)

Read the full release here.

With the increasing adoption rate of virtualization, IT managers are left with many challenges when trying to protect their virtual infrastructures from unplanned downtime and unforeseen outages. Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource and our own Jerry Melnick, have teamed up to write a collaborative white paper which introduces “The Best of VMworld Approach for Protecting Virtual Machines.” George Hamilton, Director of Yankee Group’s Enabling Technologies Enterprise, stated in an August 2007 article in SearchServerVirtualization:

"As people move into virtual environments, they are more concerned about downtime events. When one physical machine goes down, it affects many virtual machines running on it, so you want to make sure that infrastructure does not fail. If you are going to put all of your eggs in one basket, you'd better make sure that it is one hell of a basket."

The white paper illustrates how you can make sure your organization is protected utilizing XenServer Enterprise Edition with everRun, in the event you are putting all your eggs in one basket. Tarry Singh highlights an excerpt from Jerry’s byline in Virtual Strategy Magazine here, which can also be found in the white paper. If you would like us to send you the white paper or have any questions regarding our “Best of VMworld” solution, feel free to leave us a comment and we will gladly share our insights 

Last week our own Jerry Melnick sat down alongside Chris Wolf, an analyst for the Burton Group, and Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, for a Webinar to discuss the new technology bringing fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments. Overall feedback was positive, with comments that the session was informative and thought provoking. For those of you that may have missed it (or those that just can’t get enough) we posted a recording of it here at the bottom of the page.

Listen, Share, Enjoy!

Presenters:
Chris Wolf, Analyst - Burton Group
Simon Crosby, CTO – XenSource
Jerry Melnick, CTO – Marathon Technologies

At VMworld 2007, Marathon won Best of VMworld – New Technology for bringing fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments for the first time. Attend this webinar to learn from Chris Wolf of Burton Group how to get the most out of your virtual environment. Simon Crosby of XenSource will explain how XenEnterprise v4 simplifies virtualized DR and availability. And Jerry Melnick of Marathon will demonstrate how you will be soon able to protect business critical applications with fault tolerant virtual machines.

November 1st, 2007 - 11:30AM-12:30PM Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)

Register for this Webinar

Over the last few days there has been a lot of attention directed at our counterparts at XenSource. This week at Citrix iForum, the largest application delivery conference in the world, Citrix announced an agreement with the two largest x86 server vendors on the market, HP and Dell. The number one and number two x86 server vendors respectively will be offering Citrix XenServer embedded in the HP Proliant and BladeSystem servers and Dell PowerEdge servers.

What does this mean for virtualization?

The embedded hypervisor approach from Citrix and VMWare (and eventually Microsoft) will help accelerate the mass adoption of virtualization because these vendors will be making it much easier for midsized and smaller companies to get turnkey virtual servers. By providing their customers with turnkey, virtualization solutions, HP and Dell will help their customers reduce their overall costs of deploying virtual servers. And by offering a choice of hypervisors, they will be giving their customers options, something that was limited before.

We have seen the predictions for the future of virtualization, and we have heard analysts predict that by 2009 at least 50% of x86 servers will be shipped with an embedded virtualization platform. Although these are only predictions, what’s to say that these figures aren’t a bit conservative? Either way we are eagerly awaiting widespread adoption.

For those of you who might have missed it the first-time around at VMworld , here’s your chance . We will be demonstrating fault tolerant virtual machines for a second-time with our counterpart XenSource at iForum 2007. Our technology showcase received the Best of VMworld Award for New Technology back in September, so we are eager to enlighten those who were unable to attend. If you’re going to be in the Las Vegas area from October 22 – October 25, we encourage you to stop on by our booth at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino for a demo.

On another note, XenSource’s own Simon Crosby will be at the Westin Times Square, in New York on Wednesday October 24, as a keynote speaker at the 2007 Ziff Davis Enterprise Virtualization Summit. If you’re in the area and want to learn more about the evolving virtualization industry swing by and tell Simon Marathon sent you :)

VMworld 2007 has come and gone leaving us with many positive insights for the future of the industry. Michael Bilancieri, our Director of Products, attended the event and was rather impressed with the turnout as well as the growth in the “virtual eco system.”

As like last year, the business continuity, disaster recovery and high-availability protection-related sessions were well over sold and left many people unable to attend, indicating that this is one of the most prolific topics on the minds of customers.

The folks at VMware demo'd their R&D continuous availability project which was met with oohs and aahs from the audience clearly validating the need for solutions like this in the market. Continuous availability, or more specifically fault-tolerant availability in a virtual environment in Marathons’ case, is no small feat.

Interestingly enough Michael did have a conversation with an end-user industry veteran that stopped by our booth (seen below). He had been perusing the show and said that the everRun technology showcase was the most innovative thing that he’s seen in quite some time. He went on to say that in the availability/data protection space, innovation is typically incremental and is relegated to status quo paradigm views of the world.

Other insights come from our friends at XenSource who have done an incredible job enabling the ecosystem as evidenced by the number of software vendors supporting or soon to support XenSource. All in all we want to say kudos to VMware for building this market and opening up this event to all the virtualization players.

Next up: VMworld Europe in Cannes, France :)

The results are finally in and we are pleased to announce that Marathon has been chosen as the winner of the “Best of VMworld Award” in the New Technology Category. Tech Target’s SearchServerVirtualization.com selected from more than 100 exhibitors offering new products and innovations.

Below is the complete list of winners:

Category: New Technology
Winner: Onaro Inc. – VM Insight
Winner: Marathon Technologies Corp. – everRun FT for XenEnterprise
Winner: InovaWave Inc. – InovaWave VirtualOctane for ESX Server

Category: Capacity planning, consolidation software
Gold: CiRBA Inc. – CiRBA Data Center Intelligence 4.4
Finalist: 3Leaf Systems – V-8000 Virtual I/O Server

Category: Performance Monitoring and Optimization
Gold: Akorri – Akorri BalancePoint 1.7
Finalist: B-hive – B-hive Conductor
Finalist: Netuitive Inc. – Netuitive SI for VMware

Category: Migration Tools
Gold: PlateSpin Ltd. – PlateSpin PowerConvert 6.6
Finalist: Leostream Corp. – Leostream P>V 4.0

Category: Data Protection and Security
Gold: Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) – NetBackup 6.5
Finalist: Blue Lane Technologies Inc. – VirtualShield
Finalist: LeftHand Networks – Virtual SAN Appliance

Category: Utilities
Gold: Veeam Software – Veeam Reporter 2.0 VMware
Finalist: ThinPrint GmbH – .print Virtual Desktop Engine

Category: Desktop virtualization software
Gold: ClearCube Technology Inc. – Sentral 5.6
Finalist: VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) – VMware Workstation
Finalist: VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) – VMware ACE 2

Category: Green Computing
Winner: 3PAR Inc. – 3PAR Utility Storage
Winner: Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) – AMD’s quad-core processor technology

Category: Best of Show
Winner: IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) – IBM System x 3950 M2 with VMware ESX Server 3i

Over the course of the last few weeks the virtualization industry has really emerged in the market. With VMware’s IPO and Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource, the industry is turning heads, forcing CIOs to rethink their current strategies. Bloggers like Om Malik, who posted this article today and Bob Evans of InformationWeek who wrote an interesting piece yesterday discussing the growing need for virtualization, are among the few caught up in the buzz. Evans highlighted an article where his colleague Charlie Babcock describes what sits over the horizon for the market:

“Server virtualization will be followed by desktop virtualization; storage is already virtualized or is well on its way toward being virtualized; network access, network resource management, is or will be virtualized along with these other developments. As most of the data center resources become virtualized, it will be possible to move to new ways of doing things. Virtualization will cease of be a feature of some elements of the data center. Rather, data centers enjoying a high degree of virtualization will be the standard way of doing business.”

The rise of virtualization demands that CIOs consider the availability implications for their systems. If they introduce virtual environments, are they prepared to ensure their systems are available 24/7?

Gary Philps, CEO of Marathon, is actually going to be discussing the need for high availability in virtual environments September 13 at AppCon 2007 in San Jose for those interested. If you are in town we would like to see you there. If you can’t make it drop us a note here with any questions/thoughts you have.

Yesterday Network World released their “10 Virtualization companies to watch” list and we are pleased to say that yours truly has made the list. We were awarded the distinction for v-Available, the first-of-its-kind initiative, bringing fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments.

This story validates much of the hard work that goes on here at Marathon and reflects the advancements we have made over the last few months; announcing several strategic partnerships including one with the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions, XenSource. We encourage you to follow our lead moving forward and observe as we continue to develop solutions that provide companies of all sizes simple, reliable protection for critical virtual workloads.

Many of you probably know that we recently announced a long-term partnership with XenSource to ensure a genuine fault tolerant solution for hypervisors. Yesterday’s announcement highlighting Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource (which you can read more about here, here and here) is a great one, for both the virtualization and application management marketplaces. From a market perspective, this announcement further validates the quality of the XenSource product and presents a solid alternative for companies that don’t want to be tied into virtualization offerings from just a single vendor. And from a customer perspective, it’s always more beneficial to have options, so it’s good to see there is more than one company making noise and providing solutions. This whole arena has taken another developmental leap forward and we welcome what’s to come.

We had the opportunity to speak with Brian Ducharme from Virtual Strategy Magazine back on April 17 when we announced our v-Available initiative and partnership with XenSource. If you are curious as to why we partnered with XenSource, give a listen as we go into greater detail about our reasoning. In addition, we share how we eliminate some of the barriers for adoption of virtualization. Listen to the podcast and our thoughts on providing true availability solutions for server virtualization.

Last week, we announced our v-Available initiative and XenSource Partnership and the public response has been overwhelmingly positive. Throughout the week, we updated our last post with some of the coverage of the recent news. Below are some snippets from last week’s coverage that will provide you with a look at the future of Marathon Technologies:

• “Right now, the v-Available extensions to everRun are only available for Xen, but Phillips says that Marathon will support the Viridian hypervisor that Microsoft has put into Longhorn Server. Because XenSource and Microsoft are working on Xen-Viridian interoperability, this support should come relatively easily.” – Timothy Prickett Morgan at IT Jungle
• “This means applications hosted in an everRun environment do not see failures. Processing "fails through" to remaining resources when something fails. Marathon is supporting Windows-based applications today and will support Linux-based applications in the future.” – Dan Kusnetzky at ZDNet
• “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 Novell's SUSE Linux.” – Scott Ferguson at eWeek

We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to speak with us regarding the recent news and encourage you to read their full coverage. However, we’d also like to hear from those interested in utilizing virtualization within thier organization?

• Does the integration of everRun and XenEnterprise alleviate some of your concerns with adopting virtualization?
• What roadblocks are you currently facing within your organization regarding high availability and virtualization technology?

Feel free to leave a comment as we’d enjoy talking with you about the future of your organization.

Today is a big day for us as we announced our v-Available initiative, certification program and XenSource Partnership. The announcements are the first of our virtualization roll out and we are excited about the benefits we are bringing to businesses large and small. In a nutshell:

• v-Available bridges the current gap between virtualization and availability – It is an initiative that is the first of its kind, bringing Fault Tolerant (FT) class availability to virtual environments
• Marathon’s everRun software integrated with XenEnterprise is the best combination of price/performance, ease of use, & FT-class availability protecting virtual workloads
• v-Available eliminates the complexity of availability for virtualized environments

As we stated in the release, we believe our v-Available initiative will remove one of the most significant barriers preventing greater proliferation of server virtualization, especially as it relates to the mid-market. IT Administrators looking to consolidate servers and reduce costs now have the added assurance that applications will remain up and running in virtual environments. However, these announcements are just the beginning of our virtualization push. Throughout the rest of the year you will see the collaboration between two companies, Marathon & XenSource, as we deliver a series of products which will encourage and provide a safety net for businesses (large and small) adopting virtualization.

If you would like to learn more about this program leave a comment here and we will be happy to answer your questions. In addition, we had the privilege to speak with a few folks over the past couple weeks about our plans and will post their thoughts here when they are made available.

Related Links

Marathon Technologies Brings High Availability to XenSource - eWeek
Conversation with Marathon Technology - Dan Kusnetzky, ZDNet
Marathon Makes Virtualization Fault Tolerant with v-Available - ITJungle

There’s a lot of chatter within the Virtualization community about whether speed and performance is more important than stability and reliability. Why? Because with the growth of virtualization and the pace with which the market is evolving, organizations need to carefully evaluate their needs and recognize that the solution that’s most appropriate for them may be one of the new innovations right around the corner.

A recent article from John Humphreys, an analyst at IDC, states that, “As users consolidate multiple applications onto a platform; their concerns around the stability of the underlying platform will carry the day.” Essentially, as users increase a servers work load, downtime risks rise disproportionately and reliability becomes more valuable to the organization than speed and performance.

In a recent post on VMware’s executive blog, The Console, their marketing team does a good job at conveying VMware’s commitment to reliability. Just ask one of their “50 commercial or academic users.” Being the early entrant into the virtualization space, it’s hard to ignore the numbers and the statistics, but important to remember that there isn’t any one particular virtualization approach that carries the day.

We’re only at the beginning folks. Organizations like XenSource, VMware and Marathon will continue to evolve and grow to provide cutting edge innovations for all needs, from Fortune 500 organizations to small businesses. It’s important to remember that first to market doesn’t always translate into “market leader.”