Stratus acquires competing HA software provider Marathon

"The acquisition of Marathon is totally synergistic. With the combination of Marathon's offerings with our offerings, we are the one stop shop for availability," said David Laurello, Stratus chairman and CEO. "In addition, it expands our channel base, or partner ecosystem and gives us a much more diverse customer base."

Marathon Technologies focused on selling software to ensure fault tolerant system operations. Its flagship product, the Marathon EverRun MX, offers a software based approach to ensuring MicrosoftMicrosoft applications could run without interruption on multicore and multiprocessor computers. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

With this purchase, Stratus is further expanding its portfolio of HA and fault-tolerant systems. HA systems are critical for ensuring operations run even if an individual server stops operating. Such HA services are good for mission-critical operations, business continuity and disaster recovery. Stratus originated as a provider of HA servers, which are now sold under the name ftServer. Subsequently, Stratus released HA software called Avance for small and medium-sized businesses that run commodity hardware.

The purchase of Marathon will allow Stratus to offer a more sophisticated fault-tolerant software package with EverRun MX. Unlike Avance, EverRun can offer true fault tolerance, namely the ability to switch to a backup copy of a program without losing any in-transit data. The software also has additional business continuity, disaster recovery and reporting features not found in Avance.

EverRun "is a little bit above our Avance HA offering but a little bit below our ftServer offering," Laurello said.