The Computerworld Honors Program
Honoring those who use Information Technology to benefit society
LOCATION:
Littleton, MA, United States

YEAR:
2008

STATUS:
Laureate

CATEGORY:
Business and Related Services

NOMINATING COMPANY:
Morgan Stanley

ORGANIZATION:
Marathon Technologies

PROJECT NAME:
everRun VM



Introductory Overview
Marathon Technologies has developed software that addresses one of the key factors that has held back broader adoption of server virtualization - a lack of effective high availability technology for virtual environments.

Server virtualization brings many IT benefits: better hardware utilization, lower capital and operating expenses, lower energy usage, and greater flexibility to meet business needs among them. But virtualization also brings with it some unintended consequences. One of the unintended consequences is that server virtualization dramatically increases the need for rock-solid availability. Because server consolidation can result in the server becoming the single point of failure for multiple applications, the implications of downtime are much greater.

Before the development of everRun VM from Marathon Technologies, the availability solutions on the market didn’t provide the rock-solid availability and simplicity of management needed to broaden virtualization beyond non-critical applications in large companies.

The significance of Marathon Technology’s everRun® VM software for the IT industry is threefold:
1. Organizations can now reliably run productivity and business-critical applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

In recognition of the importance of the problem Marathon is solving with everRun VM, the company has received the following industry accolades:

• Winner Best of VMworld 2007 – New Technology

• Top 10 Virtualization Companies to Watch, Network World

• 10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008, CIO.com

The Importance of Technology
How did the technology you used contribute to this project and why was it important?
Marathon Technologies integrated two key technologies to achieve their goal of providing simple, effective, high availability to virtual server environments. The first technology is Citrix® XenServer, the dynamic virtualization software platform based on the open source Xen hypervisor. Marathon selected Citrix XenServer because of the Citrix Virtualization and Management Division's (previously XenSource) expertise in virtualization. XenSource was the inventors of Xen and the leaders of the Xen open source project.
The second key technology that made this breakthrough possible was Marathon Technologies existing everRun software, which is already being used by over 1800 global organizations for fault-tolerant, high availability protection of single Windows Server applications. The company applied its 12 availability patents and over 14 year experience in developing availability software solutions to the development of everRun VM, porting their existing everRun software code to Citrix’s Xen-based hypervisor.
To date, most of the applications that have been migrated to virtual servers remain in test and development or other non-production environments. This is due to a variety of reasons, primarily performance concerns and a lack of true high availability. everRun VM delivers reliable protection for virtual workloads by providing redundant virtual machines and synchronized mirroring of the whole system. The integration of XenServer’s superior “bare-metal” performance and everRun VM’s unique architecture gives IT professionals the confidence to virtualize business critical and other production applications.

Benefits
Has your project helped those it was designed to help?   Yes

Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed?   Yes

What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people?
everRun VM provides organizations deploying virtualization with the following key benefits:

• VM Fault Tolerance in Software – Fault tolerance, or the ability to remain operational in the event of a fault, was once the domain of high-end, mainframe-class servers running specialized operating systems. everRun VM makes fault-tolerant computing available to everyone with software that provides the highest levels of availability for virtual machine environments. everRun transparently creates and manages redundant virtual machines running on different servers in a XenServer resource pool. Disk data is mirrored synchronously to redundant storage and network. If a fault or failure occurs in a disk, network device or even a XenServer host, everRun’s ComputeThru capability automatically reconfigures resources to permit the application to continue operating without interruption or loss of client connectivity. everRun VM’s unique software fault-tolerant architecture gives IT professionals the confidence to run business critical and other essential applications in virtual machines – so they can deploy server virtualization across a much broader range of applications.

• Completely Automated VM Availability – everRun VM automates VM availability setup and configuration – usually deployed in thirty minutes or less. It also automates fault and policy management – it literally maintains itself. everRun VM completely automates VM availability setup, configuration, fault detection and policy management. Automated setup and configuration eliminates the manual configuration other availability solutions require. IT administrators just point to the VM they want to protect, and everRun’s setup wizard does the rest. They can fully deploy everRun VM from bare metal in 30 minutes or less. everRun VM’s embedded policy management automatically handles all system, network and disk I/O failures. Failures are automatically and immediately addressed - without IT intervention. By automating VM availability everRun VM removes the availability burden that traditional “bolt-on” clustering and data replication software require. And for the first time, midsize businesses can get practical, automated HA and DR.

• Flexibility to Dial-in Availability by Virtual Machine – everRun VM lets IT administrators select the availability protection for each virtual machine (VM) so they can match the right availability level for each application running in a VM. The end result – optimal availability price/performance because companies only pay for the protection they need.

• Geographic Fault Tolerance – Because everRun VM utilizes completely independent physical servers, geographic fault tolerance is achievable simply by placing at least one of the servers at a different location. With everRun VM organizations can ensure applications are available and data is protected even if their primary data center is hit with a disaster.


If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work.
“We have used Marathon’s everRun software for years Over time we came to appreciate the “self-maintenance” aspects of the solution; in other word, you install it and it just works as advertised with little to no IT intervention. The combination of Marathon’s everRun software and server virtualization is the best of both worlds.”

- Director of IT, Windows Applications, Leading Sports
News Network and Media Company


Originality
Is it the first, the only, the best or the most effective application of its kind?   All of the above

What are the exceptional aspects of your project?
First and only solution: everRun VM is the world’s first and only fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. In 2007 IDC projected that fault tolerant virtual machine software solutions would not be available until the 2009-2010 timeframe. Marathon is scheduled to ship the industry’s first fault tolerant virtual machine software solution in April 2008.



Why everRun VM is so much more effective than alternative availability solutions for server virtualization

"From what I've seen so far, this is far superior to VMware HA or anything else out there." - Barry Cohen, CTO, Editor-in-Chief The Edison Group

Server virtualization technologies are particularly useful for protecting applications from planned downtime—outages necessary for administrative purposes. Using live migration technologies, companies can move virtual machines and their running applications between physical machines without disruption. Examples of planned migration technologies include Citrix® XenMotionTM and VMware® VMotionTM.
But protecting virtual environments from unplanned downtime is a different matter. In many cases, virtual environments employ traditional clustering and failover techniques that were never designed for virtualized environments. These traditional approaches use rudimentary heartbeat pings to check the status of a virtual machine. They suffer from several drawbacks:
• Clustering and failover add cost and complexity to the environment, requiring manual configuration, setup, scripting and testing to define the appropriate actions to take in case of failures. This additional administrative complexity can introduce errors, contributing to availability issues.
• Heartbeat pings are unable to reliably determine the health of a virtual machine and may not distinguish between I/O path failures, server failures, or lack of system resources. In some cases, these limitations may result in unnecessary or false failovers. In other cases, discrete storage or network device outages are not identified as failures and the system does not fail over.
• The failover process is far from certain; it assumes that the administrator has configured the standby system appropriately for the application and has maintained that configuration. If the target system is not configured appropriately, then when a failover does occur, the application or virtual machine is inoperable on the standby system, causing a “failed failover”. Given the sense of uncertainty, some refer to this approach as “ping and pray.”


Difficulty
What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
One of the biggest obstacles for Marathon in developing a version of their software for protecting virtual environments was making a strategic decision on which hypervisor platform to develop for initially. Some of the key factors the company had to weigh were:
• Virtualization platform market share
• Robustness of the virtualization platform
• Performance of the virtualization platform
• Openess of the architecture
• Virtualization vendor’s approach to partnerships
• Compatibility with future Microsoft virtualization platforms

Although VMware was the clear market leader, for most of the criteria, XenSource (now Citrix Virtualization and Management Division) was a much better fit. Because everRun VM had to be tightly integrated with the hypervisor, the openness of the architecture was very important. And since Marathon’s solution would be directed at virtualizing applications that weren’t being virtualized yet, in part due to concerns about their performance in virtual machines, the near “bare-metal” performance of XenServer was also a major advantage. XenSource’s philosophy of growing through an ecosystem of technology partners gave Marathon the confidence that they would get the technical, management and marketing support required to achieve Marathon’s time-to-market objectives. Finally, because of the company’s relationship with Microsoft and the planned interoperability between the XenServer platform and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Marathon could be confident that developing for XenServer now would provide the shortest path to supporting Microsoft Hyper-V when it became available.

Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
See above.

Success
Has your project achieved or exceeded its goals?   Achieved

Is it fully operational?   No

How do you see your project's innovation benefiting other applications, organizations, or global communities?
The combination of a high-performance virtualization hypervisor from Citrix XenServer with the automated fault tolerant architecture of everRun VM enables far more enterprises to deploy virtualization across a much broader array of applications. Fortune 500 companies that have already begun to deploy virtualization for non-critical applications will now be able to run productivity applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint in virtual machines. And for midsized businesses it will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of their IT infrastructure.

How quickly has your targeted audience of users embraced your innovation? Or, how rapidly do you predict they will?
The response from the IT channel has been tremendous. Since we began in the fall of 2007 to recruit virtualization IT resellers for everRun VM, we have increased our partner network by over 50% adding 100 new IT channel partners around the globe.

The interest in becoming a beta customer has exceeded our expectations.

“Based on our research, high availability solutions, including clustering software and proprietary hardware, have never exceeded 20 percent deployment rates,” said John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software for IDC. “The reason: they are too complex to setup and too complex to manage. The combination of easy to use virtualization and availability software could bring availability to the masses.”

Digital/Visual Materials
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