Building on a goal to make virtualization and availability ubiquitous, Marathon Technologies Corporation today announced an expanded strategic partnership with Citrix® Systems. The broader agreement involves tighter integration of Citrix XenServerTM and Marathon everRun® VM, and establishes Marathon as a preferred high availability partner.  The newly expanded partnership includes closer sales and marketing collaboration, as well as validation of Marathon everRun as one of the first Citrix Ready™ high availability solutions. The results of these efforts will be turnkey, automated availability and disaster recovery solutions that deploy in minutes and work with little or no IT intervention.  These solutions are ideally suited for both mid-market customers with very limited IT resources and larger customers who need to do more with less in a slowing economy, both of whom can reliably and confidently consolidate more of their applications.  

The two companies are uniquely positioned to increase the adoption of virtualization and availability solutions above their current adoption levels. Citrix’s open, ecosystem approach with Citrix XenServer allows customers to select best of breed ISV partner solutions to add enhanced functionality to their XenServer virtualization software platform. Marathon is providing turnkey, automated availability software to more than 1800 companies, approximately two thirds of which are in the mid-market and the rest mostly Fortune Global 500 companies.  

“Customer perception is that availability and DR solutions require a lot of IT resources to setup and maintain, as a result IDC finds most organizations have under invested when it comes to business continuity,” said John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software for IDC. “The combination of easy-to-use, tightly integrated virtualization and availability software could make HA and DR a practical reality for mid-market companies as well as broaden protection in larger companies.” 

Over a year ago, Marathon elected to OEM XenServer as their initial virtualization platform because of its open architecture, performance and ease of use best met Marathon’s time-to-market goal and mid-market customer focus.  Citrix and Marathon continue to expand their partnership, and the companies have also tested Marathon’s fault-tolerant everRun software with Citrix XenApp™. everRun VM is Citrix Ready for XenServer Enterprise Edition. everRun HA and everRun FT are Citrix Ready for XenApp. 

High Availability Provider

As part of the enhanced alliance, Marathon is a preferred high availability partner and its everRun family of software is one of the first Citrix Ready high availability solutions for Citrix XenServer and Citrix XenApp. Citrix and Marathon will market their integrated solutions globally through both channel and customer marketing programs.  

Tighter Integration = Simplified High Availability

The companies will work to deliver seamless integration of Citrix XenServer and everRun VM. The benefits of this tight integration for IT professionals include:

• Single setup and installation. Currently administrators have to install Citrix XenServer and then install everRun VM. Although both can be installed in 30 minutes or less, the goal is to provide a single setup for the integrated solution that can be performed in 15 minutes or less.
• Seamless integration between different levels of availability. Administrators will be able to transparently select availability levels from XenServer or everRun VM.
• Integration of management consoles. The everRun Availability Center (eAC) will be available from the XenServer Management console to provide IT administrators with simplified availability management.

“Our ecosystem approach gives us the flexibility to validate a range of complementary solutions as Citrix Ready, enabling our customers to easily choose the best solutions to complement Citrix solutions,” said Frank Artale, vice president of business development at Citrix Systems.  “With Marathon’s track record of providing mid-market and larger customers with reliable, automated availability, we are excited to work more closely with Marathon to provide an integrated, fully automated Citrix Ready HA solution for XenServer.” 

“Citrix and Marathon are both focused on removing complexity for today’s IT professionals by offering simplified software that can be rapidly deployed, is completely automated and delivers the best price/performance,” said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon Technologies. “Working together we believe we can make availability a standard component of the IT infrastructure for midmarket and larger companies.”