Partners

Microsoft & Marathon Technologies Alliance

Partnership Expands Fault Tolerance for Windows Server Applications

In January 2009, Microsoft^® and Marathon announced an expanded development and marketing agreement that underscores the growing need to eliminate downtime for your most important Windows applications. The goal of the expanded partnership is to make it easier for a lot more companies to get cost-effective, easy-to-deploy fault tolerance for their critical Windows applications. Working together, Marathon and Microsoft will bring automated fault tolerant availability technology to Windows Server and Hyper-V.

Factors Driving Need for Fault-Tolerant Windows Servers

There are two key factors that are driving the increased need for Windows-based fault tolerant computing:

More customers are relying on Windows Server to run their mission critical applications, and the number of these critical Windows applications is increasing
The growing popularity of server virtualization (where applications are being consolidated onto fewer servers) the impact of downtime is often magnified

Impact of Expanded Microsoft and Marathon Partnership

The potential benefits to IT professional from this expanded partnership include the ability to:

Extend the high availability features of Windows Server 2003 and 2008 to fault tolerant protection in minutes. With automated setup and configuration, more Microsoft customers will have the simplicity that is the hallmark of everRun high availability software. And with automated fault and policy management it will literally run by itself.
Add or adjust availability levels dynamically to meet fluctuating demands. Customers will be able to select application availability based on requirements, budget and system resources.
Deploy a future version of Hyper-V with Marathon everRun as the common fault-tolerant virtual infrastructure for both Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. In mixed hypervisor environments customers can have one software tool to create and manage a fault-tolerant infrastructure.

Microsoft Executives on Marathon Partnership

"Microsoft is seeing more and more customers relying on Windows Server to host business-critical applications which obviously increases the need for reliability. Also, the growing impact of virtualization is putting the spotlight on reliability."

“The need for fault tolerance in Windows environments is growing. Our work with Marathon sets a course for more customers to deploy Windows-based applications, both virtual and physical, on cost-effective fault tolerant systems.”