Disaster Recovery without Breaking the Budget
Steve Williams, Managing Director, Sierra Ventures

The recent earthquake in China was just the latest wake-up call for businesses: When disaster strikes, are you prepared? Can you keep your business running – and your revenue flowing – if your business is struck by a flood, earthquake, or tornado? While many businesses have thought about their failover and disaster recovery plans, some simply cannot afford to spend the millions of dollars required to implement the expensive, mirrored server approach that has been the industry standard for several years.

But in today’s fast-changing economy, businesses truly cannot afford NOT to implement a disaster recovery plan. For example, financial services companies cannot abide any lags or lapses in access to critical customer information. Hospitals cannot tolerate interruptions in patient care. Airports cannot accept gaps in access control. And manufacturers cannot survive with disruptions in operations or customer service.

So how can companies and other organizations ensure continuous operations after a catastrophic event or sudden system failure—without breaking their budget to do so?

Affordable Fault Tolerance and Disaster Recovery

With Marathon Technologies’ everRun^® fault-tolerant, high availability, and disaster recovery software, companies now have a cost-effective and automated solution. By preventing failures rather than responding to them, everRun delivers a fundamentally different approach to availability and disaster recovery. Plus, because it requires no IT intervention, everRun enables even the smallest organization to have the peace of mind that their systems are safe from outages and their data is protected from loss.

Whereas traditional, proprietary hardware-based approaches are expensive, complicated, and difficult to implement and manage, Marathon’s everRun software installs on standard, off-the-shelf x86 Intel and AMD servers running Windows Server 2003. Operating as a virtual machine on your existing Windows hardware, you can protect any Windows application – without modification or customization. Just install the everRun software on your server and you get uninterrupted availability, 100% data protection, and rapid disaster recovers – all with a single click. And all for a few thousand rather than a few million dollars.  With the recent addition of Marathon’s everRun VM, these same benefits can now be realized in Citrix XenServer virtualized environments protecting multiple applications.  This makes the ROI even more compelling.

Proven High Availability and Automated Failover

What’s more, Marathon’s innovative approach is already road-tested: more than 1,800 businesses – from television networks to casinos to investment firms and stock exchanges to pharmaceutical manufacturers to power plants – are already running critical business process applications on and protecting their businesses with everRun software.

One of the world’s largest commodities futures exchange counts on Marathon to ensure that traders and clearing members always have accurate, up-to-the-minute pricing information and order pricing confirmations. To protect the integrity of the system and ensure the continued confidence of the traders and clearing members, downtime is not an option. With Marathon everRun running on two standard x86 servers, yet appearing as a single instance for all applications, traders now get 100% continuous uptime for the exchange’s pricing board and order confirmation messaging applications. And large clearing members are confident that their pricing position gets through – every time.

With a reputation for 24-hour coverage, one of the world’s largest sports news networks relies on Marathon everRun software to protect its email and other communications applications from downtime due to component failures or physical disasters. For disaster protection, the media company’s infrastructure is located in two fully redundant, geographically dispersed data centers requiring continuous availability without operator intervention. Using Marathon, the company has been able to deliver seamless email, file/print, Active Directory, and other key services to end users with no loss of application data, no need for transaction rollback, and no loss of performance.

And a multi-institutional shared telecommunications system that processes over 3.6 million calls annually uses Marathon to ensure that all critical calls, doctors’ pages (from multiple page vendors), alert codes, and other functions served by its call center would no go down due to server component failure or dropped network connections. In healthcare call management, there is no margin for error: a single call that does not reach its destination can result in a life-endangering situation or even a fatality. To ensure continuous availability of communications between providers, patients, and healthcare facilities, the call management company installed Marathon’s everRun software on two standard x86 servers. If one physical server or server component fails, the virtual Windows environment continues to operate with no interruption in service—protecting quality of care and patient health.

Protect your Organization with everRun

These days, no matter if you’re a large company or small, there is no system outage or disaster from which you should not be protected. Customers not only expect it—they demand it. And today’s leading-edge disaster recovery approaches—led by Marathon Technologies’ everRun software—are much more affordable than you think. You really can’t afford not to give it a test drive.

Sierra is looking for...
Passionate entrepreneurs with a compelling value proposition in large and growing markets

We are interested in:
+ consumer applications & 
   infrastructure
+ enterprise software infrastructure
+ power systems
+ SaaS
+ semiconductor
+ systems & network management
+ wireless
+ emerging markets

For more information please contact Vimal Patel vpatel@sierraven.com

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. For more information visit www.marathontechnologies.com.

Founded:  1993

Management Team:
Gary Phillips, President and CEO
George C. Tranos, Executive VP, Strategic Alliances
Brian Doheny, Sr. VP, Worldwide Sales
Jerald Melnick, CTO
Dan Sullivan, CFO
Bill Tao, VP, Engineering
Steve Keilen, VP, Marketing
Dave Mazursky, VP, Services

Investors:
Sierra Ventures
Atlas Ventures
Longworth Venture Partners

Expresso Fitness is changing the $2B commercial cardio fitness equipment market by delivering an exciting interactive product to spice up a previously boring experience: working out.  Expresso is the only company that integrates game software technology in a robust cardio station for health clubs and YMCAs.  The market response has been phenomenal; Expresso grew year-over-year revenue six-fold in 2006 and almost five-fold in 2007.  In the last eighteen months, Expresso has begun penetrating the largest chains, associations and franchises, promising continued fast growth in 2008 and beyond.

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Expresso’s near-term goal is to leverage our R&D investments by introducing new models, increasing share of current markets and establishing new market positions overseas.  We have developed an exciting product and wish to make it more broadly available.

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Expresso Fitness is headquartered in Sunnyvale with sales offices around North America.  See us on the web at http://www.expresso.com/.