Marathon Technologies Corporation, the leading provider of automated, fault tolerant-class availability solutions for virtual and physical environments, announced today that it has been selected as one of the Top Ten Virtualization Companies to Watch by Network World, a leading IT publication. Marathon was awarded the distinction, which was featured in the August 20, 2007 issue of Network World, for v-Available(TM), the first-of-its-kind initiative bringing fault tolerant-class availability to virtual environments. Exploiting a lack of effective availability technology for virtual servers, Marathon is developing solutions that provide companies of all sizes simple, reliable protection for critical virtual workloads.

The current availability solutions don't provide the rock-solid availability and simplicity of management needed to broaden virtualization beyond non-critical applications in large companies. "There is huge market appeal for technology providers that can deliver solutions that can address both planned and unplanned downtime in virtual environments -- especially for mid-market and smaller companies," said John Humphreys, Program Director of IDC's Enterprise Virtualization program.

In April, Marathon announced a strategic technology partnership with XenSource, the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen(TM) hypervisor. The combination of XenSource's high-performance, easy-to-use virtualization hypervisor with the proven fault tolerant-class availability of Marathon's everRun(TM) software will enable more enterprises to deploy virtualization across a much broader array of applications. See more news on the XenSource partnership at www.marathontechnologies.com/v-available.html.

"We are honored to have been selected to Network World's Top Ten Virtualization Companies to Watch list," said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon Technologies. "Marathon's v-Available defines the next generation of availability software for virtual environments. Customers want fault tolerant-class availability for their business critical applications running on virtual environments. And they expect a cost effective solution that is simple to deploy and manage. The combination of XenEnterprise and everRun in a tightly integrated solution provides an ideal combination of price/performance, ease of use, and fault-tolerant class availability -- to enable companies of all sizes to realize the benefits of virtualization."

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.