Jerry Melnick, Marathon Technologies 1

Chief Technology Officer
Littleton - MA United States

The big idea: In 25 words or less, please tell us how this Fast 50 Nominee is helping to address the planet's problems.

Marathon offers the world’s first fault tolerant, high-availability software which consolidates physical and virtual servers to improve business continuity, lower operator expenses and energy consumption.

Please describe how this nominee is using business as a force of positive change. What technology, idea, or strategy is the nominee using -- and what problem, such as global warming, poverty, or pollution, does it address? (suggested length: 100 words)

$11.5 billion is the expected energy bill for datacenters in 2010 (up from $8.6 billion in 2007). $1,870 is the annual operating expense for powering and cooling a single midtier server in a tier III datacenter. On average, 25 percent of an IT budget goes toward datacenter costs. In today’s age, with the rising costs of fuel and energy, more datacenters will be looking to adopt green IT strategies. Through virtualization, data centers and physical servers can reduce 65 percent of power consumption. Marathon Technologies, a virtualization software solutions provider for Window’s environments, offers just that.

Due to the significant cost savings and productivity gains it brings to enterprise organizations of all sizes, virtualization has emerged as the hottest sector in the technology industry in the past decade. Marathon’s unique software solution enables organizations to consolidate their servers, improve business continuity, lower operating expenses but more importantly, reduce energy consumption.

everRun was built so companies could conserve energy and run a datacenter without the need for a large IT staff. Marathon’s products have resonated across the board as the only fault tolerant and high availability solution that’s affordable and environmentally friendly for all business needs.

What are the results, both financial and social? How has the nominee's business performed, and what impact has it had on the problem it addresses? (suggested length: 100 words)

First and only solution: everRun VM is the world’s first and only fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization.

As it pertains to the broader enterprise community, Marathon’s technology helps drive the adoption of virtualization technologies. Virtualization is the hottest topic in the technology industry, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Yet, even with significant benefits, many enterprises, especially mid-market, have been reluctant to transition their critical workloads from a physical to a virtual environment due in large part to the lack of automated protection available for virtual environments.





everRun VM and the everRun family line of product have been implemented in a variety of organizations in the media and eneterrainment, financial, health, manufacturing, and gaming industries. The results have been tenfold:
• Eliminated outages at world’s largest commodity exchange preventing downtime at a cost of $250,000 per hour
• Maintained data integrity and zero data loss for leading bio-pharmaceutical manufacturer; preventing loss of $5M per batch
• Reduced start-up costs by 36% and ongoing administration and maintenance costs up to 55% versus clustering and failover technologies
• Protected a county government municipality, using SplitSite®, when a fire broke out in their primary data center - applications protected by everRun continued to operate without pause, failover, or data loss co-located in a secondary site

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