Bringing fault tolerance to virtualization

Marathon Technologies hopes to open up new opportunities in the server virtualization space with the release of a new fault tolerance, high availability software tool, everRun VM, and it’s looking for more Canadian partners to help make it happen.

Virtualization is a new market for Marathon, which has traditionally developed fault tolerance and high availability applications for the Windows server space. It has had success in verticals that demand high-uptime and have little tolerance for outages, such as manufacturing and the oil and gas sector. Steve Keilen, vice-president of marketing with Marathon, says with everRun VM the vendor is staking-out new ground.

Keilen says to date companies have generally only virtualized low-level IT infrastructure applications, not wanting to risk running their critical line of business applications in a virtualized environment. With everRun VM’s fault tolerance

capabilities; he says companies will have the confidence to go deeper into virtualization.

“This is the first and only software product designed to deliver fault tolerance for server virtualized environments,” said Keilen. “Now more business-critical applications can be virtualized or consolidated with confidence.”

Targeted at the mid-market and designed to be low-maintenance with broad appeal, everRun VM is deigned to work in conjunction with the Citrix ZenServer virtualization platform.

This puts Marathon in competition with VMware (NYSE: VMW) and its HA product, but Keilen says there are some fundamental differences between the two, particularly in the way they unite physical servers and communicate between then, that sees Marathon eliminate the downtime that would occur when failing-over from a primary to a secondary server with VMware.

There’s also room for both in the market. Keilen says they’ll regularly go into clients that are predominantly VMware shops and find they haven’t virtualized a whole set of applications yet because of downtime and availability concerns. When they learn more about the Marathon offerings, he says many companies often decide to use VMware for some applications, such as print and file servers, and Marathon and Citrix for others, such as SQL and Sharepoint.

“Any partner currently carrying VMware that wants to round-out the offerings they can take to their customer, it’s a good product-line to add,” said Keilen. “They can present the scenarios where VMware has a good solution and also where the Citrix XenServer/ Marathon everRun is a very good fit. We’re seeing customers really deploying both.”

Marathon has over 300 partners globally, including 25 to 30 in Canada, focused in the vendor’s traditional market of process automation and large manufacturers where uptime is crucial. With the launch of everRun VM the vendor is looking to recruit more general IT infrastructure VARs, particularly those already carrying Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS). In Canada, Marathon is working with Alternative Technology to bring more partners onboard, and Compugen has already joined as an Elite partner.

“To round out our channel strategy this is the right time to add some channel partners with the IT infrastructure specialty and ride the virtualization benefits,” said Keilen. “It’s a new market opportunity. As far as we can tell it’s probably one to three per cent penetrated, and outside of Compugen we just don’t have this type of partner with a local presence, that value-added IT infrastructure VAR that steps-in as a trusted advisor.”

Marathon’s Infinity Partner Program has two tiers, Preferred and Elite. Preferred partners receive margins of between 20-25 per cent, with margins of around 30 per cent for Elite partners. Getting to the Elite level takes time, says Keilen, and in addition to strong sales volume also requires investment in training, certifications and reference customers.

“We represent to our partners an opportunity to take a relatively lightweight software solution into a brand new market, because these applications aren’t being consolidated today,” said Keilen. “But what our partners like further is there is a pretty high service content around (the migration) representing a nice service component for the partner. We’ve also seen maintenance attach rates extremely high.”

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Jeff Jedras
Jeff Jedras
A veteran technology and business journalist, Jeff Jedras began his career in technology journalism in the late 1990s, covering the booming (and later busting) Ottawa technology sector for Silicon Valley North and the Ottawa Business Journal, as well as everything from municipal politics to real estate. He later covered the technology scene in Vancouver before joining IT World Canada in Toronto in 2005, covering enterprise IT for ComputerWorld Canada. He would go on to cover the channel as an assistant editor with CDN. His writing has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen and a wide range of industry trade publications.

Related Tech News

Featured Tech Jobs

 

CDN in your inbox

CDN delivers a critical analysis of the competitive landscape detailing both the challenges and opportunities facing solution providers. CDN's email newsletter details the most important news and commentary from the channel.