Marathon Technologies Corp president and CEO Robert Glorioso says that NEC Corp is not the only OEM interested in his company’s fault tolerant technology for Windows NT, the only product of its kind on the market, he claims. Other OEMs, some horizontal like NEC and others in vertical market areas, are expected to be announced over the next few weeks. Marathon has mostly been selling its technology direct to the telecommunications, manufacturing and financial services market since it launched its first products last year. It uses standard commodity parts including software, PCI cards and cabling. NEC began selling its version of Marathon’s Endurance 4000, a hardware and software fault tolerant kit, integrated with its Express server range last month, adapting its systems management tools to fit. NEC sales have mostly been in the Pacific Rim. Marathon’s technology fits well with clustering products and technologies such as Microsoft Corp’s Wolfpack and the VI Architecture initiative, says Glorioso, but not so well with Intel Corp’s 120 initiative. Marathon will offer VI support once it reaches the market, and is watching how the FCAL fibre channel arbitrated loop and storage area networking developments pan out before deciding where to spend its resources in that area. Version 2.2, released in July, adds dual or quad processor node support, Gigabit Ethernet and non-identical disk support. The next generation of Endurance will see higher performance and more systems management intelligence in the I/O subsystem. Glorioso says that five-year-old Marathon has now reached the revenue stage, but is maintaining a start-up mentality.
