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Blog

OK. We’re not being coy, even though we have a big “Major Product Announcement” box on the front page of our web site. Really. Am I going to share? Yes, but not now. Instead, I’m going to provide a bit of a drum roll and some recent feedback from many worldwide discussions with some great analysts and thought leaders.

To start off, we’re not just making a product announcement. Rather, we’re proposing an entirely new way to think about availability: one that will actually work – and work for the masses. We’re not pulling any punches. It builds upon years of experience, 14,000+ implementations, and thousands of customers. Combine that with some stunning, technological, price-performance breakthroughs and the game begins to change. It’s a direct assault on what I’ll call the “norms of availability.”

These norms have forced many organizations either into accepting a false sense of security or tolerating downtime that could have been prevented. We’ll be attacking both this week. So what are some of these norms of availability?

• Recovery is OK because it’s getting faster. Really? Go ask American Eagle Outfitters about their 8-day outage debacle. Given that over 30% of recoveries don’t go as planned, this is dangerous, especially now because the stakes are so high. “Recovery” is still application downtime and still presents a high-risk of data loss. Remember: prevention is better than recovery.
• Virtualization is availability. Actually, virtualization is consolidation. Virtual machines (VMs) fail and have to be restarted. Virtualization, though very important, is a subset of availability. Want to gauge availability risk with pure-play virtualization? Look at the other pieces such as storage. No big deal? Most organizations will disagree on many fronts, including price and complexity. Virtualization matters (and we’re fans), but availability should be thought of first.
• DR keeps us going. DR is the nuclear option. It’s a last resort when major catastrophes occur. It should NOT be used when a disk drive fails. (More on this in a subsequent post.) DR is a necessity, but needs to be combined with local protection to make a very powerful availability combination.
• We have high availability support for our applications. That used to be a good, though it's really an inherently flawed approach. Remember, it’s still a restart; it’s still complex; and - do the math - it’s still expensive.
• Cloud computing will solve all our issues. Actually, it may ultimately be a great part of the DR component of broader availability, but it’s just not going to work for localized failures. Time to think holistically.
• Backups protect us. They sure do, but it may be a day or two late. Can your business afford that? Keep your backups going, but consider other things to amplify availability.
• I’m not worried because I never had a problem. Wow. Now I’m really scared. You may want to give us a call before you get fired. During recent services work, we’ve helped many of our customers not just identify, but find their critical assets. Do you really know where your important assets are? Do you want to be looking for them when something goes awry?

I’d like to say these are tales of fiction, but they’re not. They’re part of that dangerous norm and we hear this regularly. Fortunately, many organizations are getting better. Shortly, we’ll provide them with availability capabilities that they’ve never had access to, either because of economics, complexity, or scalability.

For the past few months, we’ve been briefing analysts and other experts on what we're delivering this week (and after). What has their response been?

• Wow. This is BIG.
• You’re changing the dynamics of availability.
• You’ve eliminated the triage IT decision make while tackling availability.
• You’ve emancipated applications from downtime.
• This is the “American Dream” of computing.

I like the last one, though I think the rest of the world will appreciate it as well. Stay tuned. We’ll share the word in the next couple of days. And it won’t end there because fault tolerance is about to go mainstream and the implications are substantial. And that’s just the start…

Rob Ciampa

Thomas Goebels recently joined Marathon as sales manager for the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region. Thomas will be responsible for growing Marathon’s business across the region with a particular focus on the channel and end users. Thomas brings impressive sales experience and a remarkable track record to his new role, having previously held positions with NetScout Systems, PC-WARE Information Technologies AG, Bechtle and Novell. Thomas will be working closely with Marathon’s distributor in Germany, ADN. ADN has been Marathon’s key distributor for the DACH region since 2007.

“The need for data and application availability has never been greater as companies of all sizes now have to operate on a 24x7 global basis. Marathon is uniquely qualified to provide solutions to meet the customer pain points associated with this,” said Thomas. “I am eager to build on Marathon’s vision of providing automated high availability and disaster recovery solutions for businesses of all sizes.”

Thomas can be reached at tgoebels (at) marathontechnologies.com
 

We’re very excited to announce our partnership with NEC Philips Unified Solutions today. Through this partnership, Marathon’s everRun software will provide high availability and fault tolerant capabilities for several of NEC Philips’ business communication systems, including the SIP@Net server and Business ConneCT and MA4000 applications. These new combined offerings will be available to channel partners and customers throughout EMEA.

From left to right:
Gerard Wubben, General Manager, Raxco Software; Nick Turnbull, VP International Sales, Marathon Technologies; Rafael Costa, VP Worldwide Sales Marathon Technologies; Yoshihiko Katsura, Senior VP Portfolio, Applications & Operations NEC Philips Unified Solutions; Paul Kievit, President NEC Philips Unified Solutions; Jim Welch, President & CEO Marathon Technologies; Benne van der Lugt, Director Enterprise solutions portfolio NEC Philips Unified Solutions; and Marco Koenen, Enterprise Business Manager NEC Philips Unified Solutions
 

Signing the agreement: Paul Kievit, President NEC Philips Unified Solutions and Jim Welch, President & CEO Marathon Technologies

Congratulations to Richard Potter of Boeing, the winner of a $50 American Express gift card for participating in our September survey on Windows application high availability. To participate in future Marathon surveys, sign up for Marathon's monthly newsletter: http://www.marathontechnologies.com/news.html (see the right-hand column for sign-up.)

In case you missed it, we announced this week that Jim Welch, former IBM VP and GM, has joined Marathon as our new Presdient and CEO. To learn more about Jim and the future direction of the company under Jim’s leadership, be sure to check out some of the recent press coverage:

Xconomy, "Marathon Hopes to Go the Distance with New CEO"

Mass High Tech, "IBM vet Jim Welch named CEO at Marathon Technologies"

ZDnet, "Conversation with Marathon Technologies"

Worcester Business Journal, "Marathon Hires Former IBM Exec As CEO"

Congratulations to Eric Layman of PNC Financial Services Group, the winner of a $50 American Express gift card for participating in our August survey on Windows Server 2008. To participate in future Marathon surveys, sign up for Marathon's monthly newsletter: http://www.marathontechnologies.com/news.html (see the right-hand column for sign-up.)

We're tallying the results of the survey now and will share our findings on Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V adoption in early September.

Spring has brought a number of welcomed events here in New England – more than one or two days above 40 degrees, Josh Beckett looking good in the Red Sox home opener, and a snow-free driveway and yard (fingers crossed they stay that way).

At Marathon, we’re also looking forward to some other exciting Spring events including Citrix Synergy and Microsoft Tech Ed where we’ll be speaking in a session with Microsoft. And within the coming weeks, we are ramping up to launch the next generation of our flagship everRun technology. We’re not ready to spill the beans, but we can assure you, it includes some industry-first features that can simplify high availability for midsize and smaller companies.

We look forward to releasing this news and other exciting developments in the next few weeks - stay tuned.

Following last week’s XenServer HA announcement, we’ve been approached with questions like “How exactly does XenServer HA work?” and “How does XenServer HA and everRun VM work together.” Rather than respond ourselves we thought it would be best to point to a few fellow bloggers who have already answered these questions.

First, here’s a good post written by Anil Madhavapeddy at Citrix discussing how the overall architecture of XenServer HA works. Second, Scott Lowe has put together a great summary of why Citrix and Marathon worked together to develop XenServer HA.

If you want more details, please leave us a comment.

What a week it’s been for us here at Marathon. In case you haven’t seen our announcements, we want to fill you in on our strategic positioning. Yesterday, we announced our collaboration with the global leader in facility management and control, Johnson Controls, Inc. This partnership has introduced our everRun solution to a wide range of customers, including the Gerald R. Ford International Airport. The airport uses a combined Johnson Controls and Marathon everRun solution to keep a critical access control system available 24/7/360.

Today’s news: Marathon has been targeted by Transpara Corporation in a partnership which utilizes everRun in combination with Visual Key Performance Indicator (KPI) software for mobile devices. Transpara currently provides the only software available for mobile devices which delivers on-demand operations data to handhelds and browsers such as: SmartPhones, PDAs and Blackberry’s. As we see more and more decision makers utilizing mobile devices to aggregate data from multiple sources, 24/7 access is a necessity and Marathon is happy to be at the forefront of an emerging market.

Stay tuned for a third partnership announcement that will put everRun in the hands of one of the leading global transaction processing solutions.