Marathon Makes a Run for Virtualization

Marathon Technologies has unveiled EverRun VM software, a technology that the company says will help VARs speed the acceptance of virtualization and disaster recovery solutions for midmarket companies running Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures.

Sold 100 percent through the channel, the company's technology comes from disaster recovery roots, according to Steve Keilen, vice president of marketing.

"EverRun VM is bringing our legacy of disaster recovery and VM products into the virtualization space," Keilen said.

The EverRun VM software protects against data loss and outages by running redundant virtual machines and synchronized infrastructure mirroring, allowing companies to migrate high-value, production applications to virtual servers without fear of losing applications or business-critical data.

Click here to read Channel Insider Labs review of Marathon's EverRun technology. 

Virtualization-based high availability solutions haven't become mainstream because of their perceived complexity and cost.  Marathon said its EverRun VM can be deployed in under 30 minutes with its included automated setup and configuration, and also maintains itself using automated fault and policy management.

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Removing the cost and complexity eases the implementation and management burden for midmarket companies, bringing disaster recovery-based virtualization solutions within their reach, Marathon said.

The company said its channel partner program has added more than 100 VARs in the first two months of 2008, bringing the total worldwide number to about 300 VARs.  Many of the company's new VARs are also Citrix solution providers, Marathon said.

"We've been intensely recruiting and bringing on partners," Keilen said.

Marathon's EverRun VM supports all Windows applications out of the box, and is designed to tightly integrate with Citrix's XenServer. Currently, EverRun VM is in beta with general availability scheduled for April.

 Senior Editor Jessica Davis also contributed to this article.