Littleton, Mass. — March 24, 2008 — Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

1. Companies can now reliably run high value production 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

Enabling Virtualization of Production Applications 

To date, companies that have deployed virtualization have not migrated many of their highest value, business critical applications to virtual servers. 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. “Marathon has a superb software product that is seamlessly integrated with XenServer. The combination allows companies to virtualize a range of applications that they wouldn’t even consider previously,” said Peter Levine, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Citrix Virtualization and Management Division. 

Making Availability Mainstream 

Availability solutions have remained a niche application because they are complex and expensive. Through tight integration with Citrix XenServer, everRun VM breaks through the availability bottleneck by providing:

• 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.
• 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.
• Application Independence – everRun VM supports all Windows applications without any modifications.

everRun VM removes the burden of availability for IT professionals and makes automated HA and DR practical for midsized companies. 

“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.” 

Accelerating Adoption of Server Virtualization 

According to industry analysts, server virtualization has achieved a less than 10 percent deployment rate on x86 servers to date. everRun VM can help accelerate the adoption of server virtualization by allowing:

• Enterprises to deploy virtualization across a much broader range of applications
• Midsize companies to use virtualization as a tool for automated availability and DR

“everRun VM presents a dramatically more reliable approach to virtual server availability through selectable, automated, FT-class availability,” said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon Technologies.  everRun VM is the first in a line of virtualization availability and DR products from Marathon that are so simple, transparent and cost-effective that every application can be protected.” 

everRun VM is currently in beta. General availability is scheduled for April. 

About Marathon Technologies
With over 1800 global customers, Marathon is the world’s first and only provider of fault-tolerant, automated, high availability and disaster recovery software for physical and virtual servers. Marathon’s everRun® software prevents outages and data loss – without IT intervention. Organizations using everRun achieve uninterrupted availability, 100% data protection, and rapid recovery – all through “one-click” operation. The company won a “Best of VMworld 2007 – New Technology” award for bringing fault tolerant availability to virtual servers. CIO.com recently named Marathon Technologies one of “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008.” For more information visit www.marathontechnologies.com

NetworkWorld published a list of the 20 most useful Microsoft sites for IT professionals.

WindowsNetworking.com is rated as number one!!! MSExchange.org and ISAServer.org are also included in the list reaching number 2 and 6 respectively.

It is great to receive this rating from such respected resource as NetworkWorld. The TechGenix team is happy to appear on this list of useful sites and will continue to provide fantastic content for our visitors.

HANOVER, Germany-March 4, 2008-Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) announced it will begin shipping its new Cheetah® 15K.6 hard drive this month. Designed for the world’s most demanding enterprise storage environments, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive is Seagate’s highest-performance hard drive ever in a 3.5-inch form factor, with a 28% increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to previous generations. With this new performance on tap, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive remarkably consumes significantly less power, using up to 61% less watts/GB at idle.

Major OEM system builders, including HP, are working to design in the new Cheetah series hard drive, equipped with its leading Fibre Channel interface for HP’s SAN storage systems. “HP’s Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), incorporating Seagate’s latest Cheetah 15K.6 drive will fulfill the needs of our most demanding customers running mission-critical business applications,” said Kyle Fitze, director of Storage Works SAN Marketing, at HP. “The improvements in performance, reliability, power savings, and capacity will collectively help enable our own EVA systems to deliver greater overall value to our customers.”

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive also ships in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which has become the mainstream enterprise interface of choice for companies including Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI). “Many of our customers require top-of-the-line performance and system efficiency,” said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. “Integrating Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.6 drive into our 85%+ high-efficiency, earth-friendly SuperServers™ and Server Building Block Solutions® delivers not only superior performance, but also power savings, scalability and significantly reduced TCO.”

About the Cheetah 15K.6 drives
Using second-generation perpendicular recording technology and available in capacities of 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB, the new Cheetah 15K.6 drive provides an unprecedented blend of storage capacity and performance. Add to this the highest 3.5-inch hard drive reliability in the industry at 1.6 million hours MTBF (0.55% AFR), a choice of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces, and a 5-year warranty, and the Cheetah 15K.6 drive becomes the clear drive of choice for 3.5-inch SAN, NAS, and other transactional processing and internet applications.

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive includes Seagate PowerTrim™ technology which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim™ technology, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive delivers the highest performance in its class without increasing power consumption. The Cheetah 15K.6 drive lowers idle and operational power requirements from its prior generation - as much as 61% in watts/GB at idle - while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% at 164MB/sec.

For more information about Seagate’s Cheetah family of products, visit www.seagate.com.

Microsoft announced availability of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. This version is primarily for web developers to test new technologies available in IE8. Also it is great to check your existing sites against IE8 new rendering engine. However, nothing stops anybody from testing new IE.

There are versions available for Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server
2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2).

You can select your version on this page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamil...ll.htm

More on new features here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamil...es.htm