Marathon Technologies everRun 2G and everRun VM Lockstep

I've been meeting to post something on the announcement of Marathon Technologies' everRun 2G and everRun VM Lockstep. I've spoken the the good folks of Marathon on many ocassions in the past (see Marathon Technologies launches everRun VM, Conversation with Marathon Technology and Marathon Technologies launches everRun CDP to catch up on old times) and have always come away impressed with their vision.

Here's how Marathon describes their products

everRun VM Lockstep - Industry’s First VM System Fault-Tolerant Software - everRun VM Lockstep for Citrix XenServer is the industry’s first software-only product that provides full system-level fault-tolerant protection to applications running in virtual machines delivering zero downtime. If an entire server fails, everRun VM Lockstep ensures the application continues to run on another server in the virtual pool without disruption. This system-level protection eliminates downtime and data loss, and prevents transaction loss making it the first virtual server solution to satisfy zero-transaction-loss regulatory requirements. With the addition of system-level fault tolerance to everRun VM, Marathon now fulfills the promise of ‘dialable’ availability that can be tailored by VM workload from auto-restart high availability to full system fault tolerance. The new everRun VM software works with the free enterprise-ready, cloud-proven version of Citrix XenServer and Citrix Essentials™ for XenServer™, delivering industry-leading value to the market.

The combination of the new everRun VM and Citrix XenServer software is designed to benefit customers in the following ways:

• Organizations can run their most essential business critical - and now mission critical applications - on virtual servers
• With everRun VM and XenServer, virtualization and availability can be deployed for a lot less money and managed with considerably less IT resources
• With everRun VM and Citrix Essentials for XenServer, midmarket companies have a robust, reliable virtualization platform alternative

everRun 2G – Most Comprehensive, Automated Windows Availability Platform everRun 2G, the successor to Marathon’s widely deployed everRun HA and everRun FT, is the most comprehensive high availability software for Windows Server environments. Responding to customer requirements, everRun 2G supports:

• Any Windows application – 32 or 64-bit - without modification or scripting
• Single or multiple workloads
• Full storage, networks, systems and data protection
• Three levels of selectable availability: Automated high availability, component-level fault tolerance and system-level fault tolerance
• Local or geographically separated continuous availability
• Local disk, shared-disk, SAN

The new software carries over all of everRun’s automated availability features that ensure more reliable availability that costs less to operate and maintain:

• Automated setup – installs in 30 minutes or less
• Automated configuration monitoring – no need to reconfigure when updating applications
• Automated fault detection and management – built-in self testing increases reliability and decreases TCO

The combination of everRun 2G’s comprehensive and automated protection is designed to benefit customers in the following ways:

• Eliminates costs, complexity, risks of multiple point solutions
• Gives organizations the flexibility to tailor individual application’s availability with resources and budget
• Enables organizations to extend high availability & continuous availability to more applications, locations and users

Snapshot analysis

Of the crew mentioned above, by the way,  Stratus is the only one that offers both hardware based solutions for those needing "five nines" and software based solutions that offer "three to four nines" of availability.

The key questions that customers need to get answered are:

• What level of availability is required for each of my workloads?
• Which technologies will support my selection of platforms (both hardware and software)
• Which will do what I need in the way that best fits my needs, the levels of expertise held by my staff and my budget.

Marathon, like the others, must clearly articulate why they should be selected. Marathon's messages are clear, to the point and the demonstrations I've seen show how easy it can be to rack up those nines.

With all of those heavy hitters lined up to win your business, Marathon clearly has its work cut out for it.  The technology appears sound. Getting the word out is the next challenge.