If your organization relies on VMware to create virtual server environments and internal clouds, then VMware’s vSphere 5 is one of those critical components. Stratus, in a recent announcement, commented on its work with VMware to host vSphere 5 on the company’s Stratus® ftServer® family. Stratus claims that these systems offer uptime of 99.999% or better (5.26 minutes of downtime annually).
Stratus’ ftServer offers a single-system continuous computing environment that can expand up to 24 processor cores with hyperthreading to virtualize mission-critical applications, run virtualization management software, host VDI, and ensure the extremely high levels of uptime.
What Stratus has to say about its ftServer
The ftServer system is the only product — software or hardware — that proactively guards against downtime, data loss, and failover resulting from a failure of the server or vSphere hypervisor running on it; Stratus backs its claim with a $50K uptime guarantee. Stratus’ resilient hardware and software technologies, combined with proactive availability monitoring and management services, set the standard for uptime assurance. With a broad range of server configurations and price points to select from, data-center operations running vSphere on single ftServer system can benefit from:
- Uptime of 99.999% or better (5.26 minutes of downtime annually) in continuous operation
- Full symmetric multi-processing (SMP) on industry-standard hardware for uncompromising fault tolerance
- Proactive availability monitoring and system management that prevents outages from occurring, unlike failure-recovery solutions
- Root cause analysis and repair of server and OS issues without interrupting processing
- Plug-and-play simplicity using off-the-shelf standard editions of vSphere software
- Minimal system overhead of < 5% and no need to over-provision hardware for uptime
- A bullet-proof infrastructure that prepares the IT organization to move to the cloud
Snapshot analysis
Some components of a virtualized system require higher levels of uptime than other components. They are critical to keeping everything running, optimizing the ongoing operations and the like. Knowing which components are critical and placing them in the best environment is an important element of a smoothly running environment.
Stratus saw that it had an opportunity to help VMware create a virtualization and cloud computing environment that meets the uptime requirements of any but the most demanding workloads by hosting critical functions on its fault tolerant systems.
What’s interesting is that Stratus is so confident that its systems can assure uptime that the company is offering a $50K uptime guarantee.
Note: Kusnetzky Group has established relationships with some of the suppliers mentioned in this article.
