Marathon Technologies Corporation, the leading provider of automated, fault tolerant-class availability solutions for virtual and physical environments, today introduced its v-Available™ Certification Program. The new, innovative program is designed to help drive 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. Members certified under the program will be qualified experts in integrating high availability technology into virtual environments. For more information on how to join the v-Available Certification Program visit www.marathontechnologies.com/v-available.html.

Marathon partners such as Key Information Systems, a systems integrator and IBM Premier Business Partner, have already seen the value in joining the v-Available Certification Program as charter members.

“The majority of our client base, which ranges from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, has either purchased or started to evaluate virtualization solutions for server consolidation and improved data center efficiency,” said Lief Morin, president at Key Information Systems. “Joining the v-Available Certification Program provides our staff with the best practices on how to integrate and implement high availability and virtualization technologies. In addition, our clients now have the added assurance that we are experts in combining these technologies and that their applications will be continuously up and running in their virtual environment.”

As part of the program, Marathon will be offering v-Available Assessment Services which are designed to define the consequences of downtime within a customer’s business, quantify the likelihood of downtime in their virtual environments and categorize the level of needed availability. Marathon will also sponsor v-Available Certification Seminars, which will include a comprehensive set of training sessions that will enable partners to fully understand the integration of high availability and virtualization technologies and be able to get up and running immediately.

The launch of the new certification program is a key component of Marathon’s broader v-Available initiative, which is aimed at filling significant gaps in current availability offerings for virtual environments. Through the convergence of Marathon’s everRun™ fault tolerant technology and leading server virtualization solutions, v-Available will enable enterprises of all sizes to take advantage of fault tolerant-class availability and disaster recovery solutions for virtual machines.

Also, as part of the v-Available initiative, Marathon today announced that it has established a technology-based partnership with XenSource, the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor. For more information on v-Available and the XenSource partnership visit: www.marathontechnologies.com/v-available.html.

“The launch of our v-Available Certification Program demonstrates our commitment to making the convergence of availability and virtualization technologies a reality for our customers,” said Steve Keilen, vice president of marketing at Marathon. “We encourage our current partners and other resellers, distributors and systems integrators to join the program. As a certified member of the v-Available Program, partners can provide their clients with the assurance that they have the necessary expertise required to integrate true availability solutions into virtual environments.”

Marathon has grown its customer base to include more than 1,200 companies. The company has also signed more than 125 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 they are protecting their business by ensuring continuity of operations – simply, at low cost and with complete confidence.