Keeping cloud applications up

As organizations move ever more critical workloads into cloud computing environments, the importance of application high availability and reliability  (HA) comes to the forefront. Several suppliers of hardware and software forms of "non stop" or "continuous processing" solutions have announced their entry into cloud computing.

Stratus and Neverfail are two examples.  Stratus is offering both a hardware and a software-based solution. Neverfail offers a software-based solution.

In each case, these HA solution suppliers have created partner programs and are working with managed services, hosting and collocation suppliers to make it possible for them to create HA platform as a service offerings.

The hardware-based solutions offered by Stratus would allow a single machine to offer 99.9999% up time or greater. The software-based solutions by both Stratus and Neverfail would be useful for critical applications needed slightly less measured levels of up time.

It is clear that moves made by both of these companies and a few other competitors clear away some end-user organization's fears about using cloud computing.