IT is an organization behind the scenes working hard to be invisible.  When systems are running smoothly IT professionals get little notice, but when things go wrong the consequences  to customers, revenue, and/or personal careers can be severe.

An IT professional’s fundamental concern is to keep infrastructure, applications, and data available and secure.  Routine maintenance, most of which is not very sexy, is essential to a healthy IT environment and ensures minimal disruption to business functions and the user community.

IT professionals today stay in front of a wide range of issues; monitoring thresholds, backup success rates, governance policies and procedures, business continuity and disaster recovery planning and testing, power and cooling consumption, understanding impacts of regulatory and legal requirements, etc.    These activities require constant assessment, evaluation, and adjustment.  Typically we juggle these backroom operational issues while responding to our customer’s requests.   Balancing the importance of background activities while not being an obstacle to meeting individual and business objectives is critical to our success.

IT professionals can leverage limitless tools to keep their home in good repair.  Because repairs are never ending, developing a roadmap and prioritizing tasks are critical to keeping an IT organization focused on fundamental objectives.  Initiatives such as consolidating storage through SAN or NAS devices or consolidating servers through virtualization have increased efficiencies in resource utilization.  Staying current with these latest IT technologies have allowed for less complicated disaster recovery and business continuance planning for instance.   These are positive steps for an IT organization’s roadmap toward increasing availability; they also decrease an IT organizations visibility.  For instance, leveraging virtualization allows for the provisioning of servers in minutes as opposed to weeks while maximizing server resource utilization.

Virtualization technology is ubiquitous today. It has evolved rapidly into a solution that can deliver greater levels of efficiency, improved systems and business management, and increased application availability. Stratus and VMware are working together to provide virtualized solutions that deliver all of these benefits and more.

When it was first introduced, virtualization was all about consolidating the number of servers in an organization. In this “Smart IT” phase, IT managers embraced the technology to reduce server count and associated management demands and to make better use of

Now we are fully engaged in the “Smart Management” phase. The technology is maturing and the benefits are multiplying. Today virtualization is on the front lines of the green IT initiative. Server consolidation not only frees up space, it also drastically reduces energy consumption throughout the data center without throttling business growth. New applications deploy more quickly because it is so easy to do with virtualization.

We are now entering the next phase, the “Smart Business” phase, in which the most forward-thinking enterprises are planning to use the technology to implement advanced IT strategies like SaaS and cloud computing, and as a way to provide improved business-process availability, business continuity and disaster recovery.

Stratus and VMware have been working together to ensure that enterprise customers understand how they can use virtualization to achieve higher levels of availability. VMware Infrastructure 3 has features designed to reduce both planned and unplanned down time. Deploying VMware solutions on the Stratus ftServer platform enhances these features by providing assured levels of availability in excess of 99.999% for mission-critical applications.

Stratus’ fault-tolerant servers are designed from the ground up to maximize application uptime; they are the ideal platform for virtualization solutions. Enterprise customers today are exploiting the power of virtualization technology, assured that they will have the highest levels of availability and fault-tolerance for critical applications.

And business continuity? As organizations recognize the business critical nature of their IT infrastructure, they’re increasingly developing formal business continuity plans, with virtualization at their core.. In a recent Aberdeen Group report, “Are You Protected? Virtualization and Business Continuity” (2007), they conclude that approximately 50% of the 320 companies surveyed have virtualization deployments supporting business continuity strategies. A Computer Associates study surveyed 300 CIOs and top IT executives around the world; they found that 34% of respondents are currently using virtualization to support business continuity, while 45% plan to do so within 18 months.

In the words of IDC: “[we] believe the next wave of [virtualization] adoption will be centered on mitigating the problems and costs associated with system downtime. IDC estimates that server downtime cost organizations roughly $140 billion worldwide in lost worker productivity and revenue in 2007.”

With revenue like this at stake, virtualization will continue to grow as a vital weapon in the armory of availability and business continuity.

• If you built it from ‘the ground up’ with no single point of failure – “You might be fault tolerant”

• If the ten’s of thousands of machines in production at customer sites are monitored daily, and you post an uptime of 99.9999% on your company home page – “You might be fault tolerant”

• If you understand that being fault tolerant is more then a piece of hardware or software, but an entire infrastructure including services – “You might be fault tolerant”

• If customers around the world have been trusting you with their most mission critical applications for almost 30 years – “You might be fault tolerant”

First I want to go on record and apologize to Jeff Foxworthy for butchering his tag line, but I thought it was an interesting way to get a couple of points across.

Having been in this industry for going on 30 years now, I have seen many things “recycle”, sometimes the terminology changes, sometimes it stays the same. What I find interesting is how when something ‘comes back around again’ in many ways it’s thought of as “new and innovative”. The first thing that comes to mind for me is virtualization. Over the last 18 to 24 months, this has been the hottest topic in the IT industry, and for good reason. But in reality it’s not new. Virtualization was new in the late 1960′s when IBM put it on the System 360.

Most recently another 35-year-old technology is making a comeback. OK, let me rephrase that, because it never really went away, it sort of went to the outer rings of the radar screen. I’m talking about fault tolerance. Fault tolerant machines began to make their mark on the IT industry in the late 1970′s. These machines where large, proprietary and very expensive, but then again, so was every other computer of the late 70′s! Check out this commentary on the how & why fault tolerance is back, by Director of Product Management Denny Lane – Rediscovering FT

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”
Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corporation
September 26, 2008

I must admit that it is not often I agree with Mr. Ellison, but his characterization of cloud computing is much closer to reality than VMware CEO Paul Maritz’ homily to the assembled multitudes at VMworld 2008.

For decades, the “cloud” was a convenient metaphor used by the telecommunications industry to hide a mosh pit of acronyms. Today, it’s used to describe methodology for the delivery of computer services and applications; you don’t need to know what’s in there, only that it gives you something you want. That is neither new nor profound. In the 1970s it was timesharing. More recently it has been called on-demand or utility computing.

In all this, one thing is certain. Data centers are incredibly complex places with infrastructures made up of products and topologies spanning time, vendors, technologies, management oversight, and an end to the Red Sox World Series curse. And calling something by a different name in an attempt to make it sound new is marketing.

Virtualization is tremendous technology. But like every technology before it, it is not a cure-all for data-center ills. So, let’s stop clouding the issue.

Virtualization and fault-tolerance are decades-old technologies reinvented for the demands of modern enterprise computing … industry-standard platforms, business continuity, application availability, server consolidation, end-to-end business process reliability, flexibility and rapid response. While not by design, they are also made for each other. Virtualization vendors are pushing up the availability stack and fault-tolerant solution providers are wrapping themselves around virtualization. Well, kumbaya.

Having been in the availability business for nearly three decades, Stratus knows a thing or two about supporting mission-critical computing environments. Our ftServer systems lead the x86 world for field-tested uptime reliability. Believe us when we say, it’s not easy to do.

New declarations of fault-tolerant systems today are coming from companies with solutions in software, not hardware like Stratus does it. By the narrowest of definitions, these software solutions are fault-tolerant, and Hurricane Ike could have been described as inclement weather; both statements are correct but neither captures the true nature of the situation.

Software-based FT comes up short in several ways. It has not conquered how to prevent transient errors from crashing a system or propagating the error to other servers or across the network; how to root-cause an outage to prevent it from happening again; and how to quash latency when applications or VMs move from one side of the cable to the other.

Most important, software-based solutions don’t support symmetric multi-processing (SMP); i.e. they cannot scale beyond a single processor core per socket. That means that if the application cannot execute on a single core, it won’t be supported in a software fault-tolerant environment.

Delivering continuous availability – mission-critical application availability – requires more than saying you have fault-tolerance. Continuous availability demands a combination of hardware, software and, as important, service without quibbling over whose problem it is.