This week Stratus announced the release of Avance 3.1, the newest version of our industry-leading high-availability software solution. The latest update includes virtual-machine load balancing and rolling reboot. What does this mean for users? Here’s a look inside the newest version of Avance:

Load Balancing: This lets customers automatically (or manually) assign virtual machines (VM) to both physical x86 servers that make up the high-availability platform. This speeds up VM migration times, distributes disk reads across both nodes (improving read performance), doubles network bandwidth for writing to disk, and accelerates synchronous write replications.

Rolling Reboot: Built into the user interface, this feature automatically stages and reboots the underlying system resources during upgrades. This means VMs experience no downtime during upgrades.

This latest update underscores why Avance software is part of the industry’s most complete portfolio of products and services designed specifically to prevent downtime and data loss. Check out what the reaction has been by browsing through some coverage of the announcement found below. You can also learn more about Avance by clicking here.

VMblog: Stratus Avance 3.1 Software’s New Features Focus on Business Continuity and Downtime Prevention
David Marshall outlines the major new Avance 3.1 features, including new virtual-machine load balancing and rolling reboot.

ZDNet: Stratus Technologies Avance 3.1 Simplifies Business Continuity
Dan Kusnetzky dives into the benefits of Avance 3.1 for small to medium organizations that all face the need to reduce their costs while also offering their customers competitive products and services.
Similar article: Kusnetzky Group Blog

Stratus Technologies’ high-availability (HA) Stratus Avance Software 3.0 now includes support for Intel Xeon E5 “Sandy Bridge” processor-powered servers.  This is an exciting development for companies that use Intel Xeon E5 servers manufactured by HP, IBM, Dell and Intel, as Avance software proactively detects and prevents downtime and ensures that their applications run without interruption.

Avance software is the only HA solution that automatically detects, isolates and handles faults, keeping applications running despite system interruptions. Avance software constantly monitors system heartbeat and the health of drives, fans, power supplies and other system components to predict faults and performance degradation. This system management dashboard gives the IT administrator detailed configurations and alert information as well as guidance on resolving issues.

This next generation of Avance can support up to 24 virtual machines (VM) on a single licensed HA server platform, a 50 percent increase over its predecessor. The improvement in VM density can lower operational, maintenance and management costs by enabling more consolidation of servers and applications.

This is also an important development for our channel partners. Frank Vincentelli, chief technology officer at Integrated IT Systems, a computing services firm and Stratus4Uptime channel partner, feels the development is critical to maintaining healthy relationships with customers. “Adding IT talent is expensive and application downtime is disruptive, and our clients very much want to minimize both,” he said.

Avance 3.0 software is an organization’s best protection against unplanned downtime and data loss for their most important applications. Avance proves that HA can be simple to achieve and manage, and affordable to implement in organizations of any size.  No other HA solution offers more.

Some additional features of the newest release include:

• Support for Intel Modular Server (IMS) systems, built on Intel Multi-Flex technology, to create a HA blade platform between two IMS chassis
• Faster snapshotting to reduce VM back-up time and downtime exposure
• System manageability enhancements that improve the user experience

Complete product details are available here.

IndustryWeek readership poll indicates little current or future interest

Manufacturing plant operations may be virtualization technology’s final frontier. Fewer than one in five manufacturing companies currently run production applications such as SCADA, MES, Historian, Batch or OPC  in virtual environments, and only seven percent say they plan to do so in the next twelve months, according to a recent readership survey conducted by IndustryWeek magazine for Stratus Technologies.

Virtualization use in manufacturing IT systems is far behind the technology’s penetration in IT infrastructures generally, where one in five companies runs 80 percent of all applications on virtual machines, and one in two companies has virtualized 40 percent of all applications. ⁽¹⁾

More than 500 IndustryWeek readers responded to the “Manufacturer IT Applications Survey,” representing a broad range of company sizes and products produced. The magazine tabulated results by annual revenue categories – less than $100 million, $100-$999 million and above $1 billion – and by the average of all respondents. Results were as follows:

[1] International Data Corporation, “Worldwide Enterprise Server, 2012 Top Predictions,” January 2012        (IDC #232823)

Source: “Manufacturer IT Applications Study,” March 2012, IndustryWeek magazine

Pinellas County (FL) Utilities, which manages water and waste water systems for five million residents and annual visitors, made the jump to virtualization two years ago. “I can foresee a time when the SCADA operation runs entirely on virtual machines and three fault-tolerant servers,” said Ken Osborne, SCADA supervisor, about his current eight-server infrastructure. “That option didn’t exist a decade ago. Our decisions then proved to be the right ones in every regard and today we’re smarter about our virtualization strategy because of it.”

The full survey results were presented during a webinar hosted by IndustryWeek on May 31, 2012. Featured speakers included NetSuite’s GM of Manufacturing/Wholesale & Distribution, Roman Bukary, and Stratus’ Director of Global Alliances, Peter Cook, who offered insights into what manufacturers are currently experiencing with regard to downtime, as well as some best practices to prevent it.

Read the Full Press Release: Here

Microsoft Windows SBS simplifies small business IT, protects business data, reduces IT costs, and increases productivity and growth. This small business solution promotes collaboration within your company, is simple to manage, and is very affordable. SBS also provides file and print sharing, automated backup capabilities, identity protection and active directory integration, and even a simplified management console.

SBS consolidates all of your critical systems, making a single point of failure for SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint - the center of the small business.  Prior to SBS, outages in previously disparate systems only effect a portion of the business, now when SBS fails, downtime affects your entire business.

SBS does not support clustering, and while backup and replication can be used to protect the SBS system, recovery is time consuming for you, the IT support team, and the business – which may be down during the hours-long process.

Depending on your total cost of downtime, it might make sense to research high availability solutions to protect your SBS environment. With a high availability solution, you can prevent downtime on Exchange, eliminate costly SQL server outages and keep SharePoint up and running. Some solutions may even allow you to predict failures and migrate applications without data loss.   One industry-proven HA product for SBS is Stratus Avance, an affordable HA software solution for small and medium sized businesses.

Be sure to check out our Avance high availability software solution, and share how you protect your small business systems below.