Marathon Technologies announced a strategic and technology-based partnership with XenSource. The partnership, which will bring Marathon’s fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments, represents a paradigm shift in the way companies will be able to protect virtualized workloads. Leap-frogging today’s availability and disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments, integrated products resulting from the partnership will provide companies with unprecedented protection for their business-critical, virtualized workloads.

The partnership comes at a critical time for the mainstream adoption of server virtualization, which has achieved less than ten percent deployment rate on x86 servers to date, according to leading analyst firm IDC. Driven by the lack of fault tolerant-class availability solutions available for virtual environments, many companies have expressed hesitancy in transitioning their critical workloads from a physical to a virtual environment.

Marathon selected XenSource for the OEM relationship because of its expertise in virtualization. XenSource, the inventors of Xen and the leaders of the Xen open source project, delivers virtualization products designed to help enterprises increase server utilization, support server consolidation, and reduce total cost of ownership. XenSource’s flagship product, XenEnterprise™ delivers to Marathon a stable and high performance virtualization platform that excels on both Windows and Linux, and interoperates with leading operating systems from Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat. Marathon is OEMing XenSource’s XenEnterprise to integrate with their everRun high availability software to bring, for the first time, simple, proven and cost effective high availability to virtualized workloads and servers.

The partnership with XenSource supports v-Available, Marathon’s initiative designed to drive the convergence of high availability and virtualization technologies. Marathon applied its 12 availability patents and over 14 year experience in engineering availability software solutions to the development of v-Available. With this new initiative, Marathon is aiming to fill significant gaps in current high availability offerings for virtual environments. With v-Available, Marathon is enabling companies of any size to take advantage of fault tolerant, high availability and disaster recovery solutions for virtual machines simply, at low cost and with complete confidence. For more information on the v-Available initiative which was announced today, visit www.marathontechnologies.com/v-available.html.

“We are pleased to partner with Marathon, a company that has a proven track record in delivering availability software solutions,” said Peter Levine, president and CEO of XenSource. “Our virtualization products are truly complementary with Marathon’s and with Marathon delivering an integrated solution in the coming months, we are enabling customers of any size to get simple, enterprise-grade virtualization solutions with FT-class application availability.”

“Partnering with XenSource reflects Marathon’s leadership position and commitment to establishing the true convergence of availability and virtualization technologies,” said Gary Phillips, president and CEO at Marathon. “With today’s announcements, Marathon is addressing one of the most significant barriers preventing greater proliferation of server virtualization, especially as it relates to the mid-market. IT Administrators looking to consolidate servers and reduce costs now have the added assurance that applications will remain up and running, even in virtual environments.”

Marathon, has grown its customer base to include more than 1,200 companies. The company has also signed on more than 100 reseller and other strategic partners that are key to expanding the company’s reach in growing markets throughout the world.

Marathon’s everRun line of fault tolerant software products protects Microsoft Windows applications from leading sources of downtime while eliminating the need for costly and complex failover processes, specialized applications, or proprietary server hardware. Turnkey, automated, and simplicity are the cornerstones of the everRun line, which uses embedded intelligent policy management to prevent application downtime. The primary benefit to the end user is that applications continue to ComputeThru® platform faults and failures, without needing to modify or script the application.