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Disaster tolerance (DT) is a proactive way to prevent system failure from impacting application and data availability. A disaster tolerant solution isn’t going to recover the data if there’s a disaster. Instead it will tolerate the fault if a disaster occurs – keeping an organization’s critical applications up and running at all times. It is not recovery, but rather prevention.
Yesterday our partner, Fort Lauderdale based Citrix, announced that they would be expanding its team to the Boston area where they would set up shop for their virtualization business with new offices in Bedford, MA. The virtualization business continues to grow steadily as companies seek ways to minimize power costs and mitigate risk; so being centralized in a tech-savvy labor market is beneficial to Citrix’ success. This expansion is expected to bring 250 workers into the space in the next 12 – 18 months.
We are looking forward to Citrix’ expansion and are eager to continue to work with our partner, who’s now right around the corner. Congrats!
David Maldonado was the lucky winner of the 8GB iPod Touch for his input into: What hurdles does/did your organization need to overcome in order to deploy a virtual environment.
We appreciate the input from all those who participated and remember the conversation doesn’t have to end….any additional feedback is always
welcome!
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.
Last week Marathon was recognized in IT Administrator, one of the leading IT publications in Germany. If you haven’t brushed up on your German lately, here are a few highlights from the article which discuss the need for virtualization and high availability in Germany:
• More and more companies are realizing that it’s high availability and virtualization they need
• Application and data availability is also becoming more important for mid-market companies
• From a plethora of solutions that are on the market companies must choose the one that is right for them
• The right level of high availability might not necessarily be part of a solution, so it is essential that companies research their options
• The ability of virtualization solutions to bring down costs and cut down maintenance is immense
The full article (in German) can be found here.
A research report by IDC’s virtualization guru, John Humphreys, The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to Move Beyond Consolidation highlights the fact that the automatic restart used by most high availability solutions for virtualization fails to deliver what most customers really want and need. Here is what John has to say:
“To address unplanned downtime today virtualization companies are providing an automatic restart capability if the hypervisor or host go down for whatever reason. While this is a good start to trying to combat the lost revenue associated with unplanned outages, ultimately knowing what is happening at the hypervisor and hardware layers fails to deliver customers what they most want — application-level awareness and action. In this way, current HA solutions in the virtualization market are “blind from the waist up.” That is, they do not know what is happening inside the virtual machine. They do not know if the operating system or application has stopped working, and that is ultimately what IT professionals charged with delivering application services most care to know.”
If you would like to learn more about high availability for virtualization, how to get application-level awareness and what that can buy you, we encourage you to join the webinar Thursday, June 26 at 11:30 EST. with John Humphreys (IDC), Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Jerry Melnick (Marathon).
For more information or to register visit here.
The folks at eWEEK have been giving Marathon a lot of love lately. On Monday they announced the winners of the eWEEK Excellence Awards and named us the winner in the infrastructure software category for everRun VM and had this to say:
“If infrastructure is the heart of the network, then infrastructure software is the brains. Marathon software helps to make these brains that much smarter with everRun VM, a product with the potential to solve many of the problems found in today’s complex networks. everRun VM combines server virtualization with high availability, leveraging Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. With everRun VM, enterprises now have a fault-tolerant virtual-server solution that can provide continuous access to network services and reduce operating costs, yet is designed to be easy to implement and manage.”
In addition, the voting for eWEEK’s Best in Show wrapped up yesterday, and we weren’t the top winner, however we were in the running for second place as of late last night. Winner or not, it’s an honor to be recognized among so many top level companies that all produce products that can be considered as having the greatest impact on business moving forward.
Congrats to all nominees and winners!
