Maximizing Uptime for Virtualized Environments

Providing Five Nines (99.999%) Uptime for Virtualized Applications

As virtualization goes main-stream, the workloads of virtual machines are taking on business-critical proportions. Business enterprises are now seeking to virtualize Tier-1 applications and include cloud infrastructure designs in their IT strategies.

As you look to virtualization, the need for bullet-proof uptime increases dramatically.

Whether you’re a fully staffed data center in a large enterprise or a small-to-mid-sized business lacking in IT expertise, Stratus offers a range of virtualization platforms engineered to address your specific requirements. As the proven provider of round-the-clock uptime for more than three decades, our team integrates perpetual monitoring services with reliable hardware, high-availability software and virtualization technologies to deliver assured uptime for your virtualized environment.

Virtualization Case Study

“We were quick to recognize that ftServer systems offered the reliability … necessary to underpin a private cloud model.”
- Cathy Crowley, Chief Information Officer, Columbia Memorial Hospital

Read how Columbia Memorial Hospital created a reliable private cloud platform for its new Electronic Health Records system.

Stratus support technology, built into our fault-tolerant server hardware and high-availability software, automatically detects and resolves faults, and enables advanced online remote service. Rely on Stratus for the infrastructure and expertise you need to support virtualized environments in:

Stratus^® Uptime Appliance for VMware^® vCenter™ Server – The new Stratus Uptime Appliance for VMware vCenter Server protects vCenter Server from downtime, eliminating single points of failure and preserving the business-critical functionality of virtual and cloud applications.
Business-Critical Application Virtualization– Stratus servers offer complete uptime assurance and maximum performance for your critical Tier-1 applications. Stratus is the only fault-tolerant solution that overcomes VMware FT’s single-core limitation.
Small and Medium Business Virtualization: Avance HA software offers low-cost, high availability with built-in virtualization capabilities that can be easily implemented without specialized staffing or expertise.

Read our Virtualization Buying Guide (PDF)

Allegheny County Emergency Services 9-1-1 Division

Allegheny County’s Emergency Services 9-1-1 Division handles 4,500 to 5,000 calls for police, fire and EMS dispatch services each day. Preventing unplanned downtime was a non-negotiable criterion in the county’s RFP process, and a primary reason for installing Stratus ftServer systems. At the County’s primary site, two CAD applications run in virtual machines (VMs) on one ftServer system while a second ftServer system supports the Microsoft SQL CAD database. The overflow/disaster recovery site mirrors primary-site operations in near real-time and can take over complete operations in a very short period of time.

Read the case study (PDF)

Westpac Institutional Bank

Westpac Institutional Bank selected the ftServer platform and ftScalable storage for its first virtualized front-end processing infrastructure. The system supports more than a dozen critical applications including a file transfer service with transaction values that exceed AUD$1.25M per minute.

Read the case study (PDF)

Pinellas County Utilities

Virtualizing critical Wonderware automation solutions with confidence, to deliver clean water to St. Petersburg, Florida, residents, using VMware vSphere virtualization on a Stratus ftServer platform.

Read the case study (PDF)

Röchling Automotive

Automotive parts supplier, Röchling Automotive from Wolfsburg, Germany, relies crucially on the availability of its computer servers. The company has implemented a Stratus Avance solution, which provides a high-availability virtualization system with two synchronous servers and minimal administrative requirements.

Read the case study (PDF)

Read more case studies

Independent testing by Principled Laboratories finds virtualization software on fault-tolerant servers delivers unmatched performance, uptime Tier 1 applications run smoothly and without interruption
Stratus Technologies ftServer keeps demanding, virtualized Tier 1 applications running at top performance even during a “catastrophic” component failure, according to a series of tests by independent laboratory Principled Technologies.
Read the press release (PDF)

Aging infrastructure is IT’s spending target for 2010, survey reveals
Disaster recovery and more server virtualization underscore need for highly available server platforms.
Read the press release (PDF)

Stratus ftServers with VMware answer need for resiliency in critical banking services
Westpac Institutional Bank consolidates 20 production servers onto three fault-tolerant servers in new virtual infrastructure.
Read the press release (PDF)

Virtualizing on VMware vSphere Software

This product sheet addresses the myths and realities of using fault-tolerant ftServer systems with VMware software.

Read the Product Sheet

Myth Busted: Affordable, Easy to manage Virtualization with High-Availability is a Reality

Small and medium sized businesses would like to take advantage of the many benefits of virtualization, but have been finding it costly to purchase and manage if they do not have the required skills in-house. Noted virtualization and cloud expert, Dan Kusnetzky takes a deep look at all of the benefits as well as the a number of issues these small and medium businesses are facing, including the requirement to use automated systems to address operational issues, reducing virtualization complexity and maintaining availability.

Read the analyst report (PDF)

Best Practices for Protecting Virtualized Applications

Aberdeen Group research finds that Best-in-Class companies prefer fault-tolerant servers over other high availability solutions to protect their virtualized applications against downtime.

Read the analyst report (PDF)

Server Virtualization and Cloud Computing: Four Hidden Impacts on Uptime and Availability

Cloud computing allows companies to use IT resources as a service, taking advantage of shared applications, processing and storage managed within the cloud — either inside a private cloud at an internal data center, or in an external cloud at a service provider. Greater robustness of the virtualized servers supporting this new IT model will ensure a resilient cloud infrastructure capable of delivering “on-demand” access to users.

Read the white paper (PDF)

See all related resources