We’re constantly getting questions regarding the what, when, where, why, and how Marathon can help CIOs expand the use of virtualization and availability in their IT infrastructures. Jack Germain of LinuxInsider chatted with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick recently and asked him some of these same questions, which we have excerpted:

LinuxInsider: Numerous industry reports show that the rush to adopt server virtualization is run mostly by very large corporations with a large bank of servers. What part of the market is your company targeting? Are you following the big money trail?

Jerry Melnick: Our product is designed to work like a standard application taken off the shelf and installed right out of the box. Existing availability systems can cause more problems than they solve. Our system is different. That is precisely what midsized companies need.

LI: What barriers does everRun VM take down that you expect to drive a company’s need for what you offer?

Melnick: For one, there is a cost advantage over high-end proprietary products. On the other end, data replication solutions don’t provide all the functions needed. Replication is managing data only. The comprehensiveness of our solution is what makes it unique. The application is unchanged in our environment. In addition, our solution does not need lots of setup.

LI: What are you thinking about beyond the accomplishments of everRun VM as the next virtualization enhancement?

Melnick: Now we have taken the process to the next leap. What I mean is we can now take two servers with hardware virtualized and build a Xen server pool and manage it as a single entity. We can build a virtual machine in Windows by installing out software and give it an interface of all running servers. Our next vision is to have one mechanism to do availability with multiple uses. It will take six months to one year. This will add new levels of choices to select plug-ins for desired results. All of this will be possible through one product.

LI: How do you see this vision changing the industry?

Melnick: We’re breaking through limitations. We are in a position to expand use. Availability is something that everybody is talking about. We are providing ways of doing it.

For Germain’s complete article visit here.