Citrix Xen

Marathon Technologies made a splash at the fall 2007 VMworld show with a preview of its everRun VM product for high availability and disaster recovery and will formally announce the product today; it’s available in beta and is expected to ship in April, according to the company.

Based on the same everRun automated availability software employed by over 1,800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

1. Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

With virtualization moving beyond test and dev environments and into the realm of key business applications, more CIOs are looking for high availability (HA) solutions now. If those apps are running in a VM, the last thing IT would want is a slowdown or outage for business users. The higher profile the app, the greater the need for a high availability solution for VMs.

Marathon is betting that its product will appeal in particular to midmarket CIOs, some of whom have had a hard time justifying the cost of traditional high availability/disaster recovery solutions, many of which require the added expense of a storage area network (SAN) and staffers with specialized SAN skills. Marathon’s product can use direct connect attached storage, which is a plus for CIOs who don’t have a SAN and don’t want to pay to install and maintain one.

Marathon’s product works only with the Citrix/Xen virtualized server architecture, not marketshare-leader VMware‘s. Microsoft Hyper-V support is planned at a later date, but no VMware support is on the drawing board, according to Marathon (which cites its ability to get its product to market faster and ensure proper performance with the Citrix/Xen architecture, among the reasons for this decision.).

By the fourth quarter of this year, Marathon is expected to ship everRun VM Lockstep Option, providing system-level fault tolerance, designed for scenarios where you lose a whole server for any reason, for example, if you lose a building in a fire. This will essentially be an add-on solution to everRun VM, the company says. Customers will be able to set the desired level of protection VM by VM, to keep costs down for VMs that don’t need the highest level of protection.

Also check out the interview our occasional guest blogger Tarry Singh did with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick, where he reveals more information about the pricing strategy.

“everRun VM is available in two flavors. For companies that already have XenServer Enterprise, they can buy everRun VM for $2,000 per physical server. If they don’t have a hypervisor installed, they can buy an integrated bundle from us that includes XenServer Enterprise Edition and everRun VM for $4,500 per physical server. That’s for a perpetual license by the way. We’ve briefed a lot of channel partners and potential customers on the product and the pricing and more than once we’ve had them respond, “what’s the catch.” There is no catch. We’re just trying to make this so easy and inexpensive that companies don’t have to think to hard about adding it to XenServer.“

[Source: The Register UK]