Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is bringing efficiency, cost savings and flexibility to the networking world in the same way that virtualization and cloud technologies transformed the enterprise server world

But for telcos, reliability and availability are non-negotiable. In the telecoms industry, five nines (99.999%) network availability is the benchmark: The reputation of a telco rests on its ability to reliably connect calls and transfer data. If the network goes down, even just for a few seconds, millions of people can be affected. System failure not only results in loss of revenue for the operator, it can seriously damage its reputation and, in some cases, lives could be at stake. Stratus’ high availability solutions for telecommunications is the best option.

A private and hybrid OpenStack-based solution, the Stratus Cloud Solution for telcos and communications infrastructures provides software defined, fully automated, selectable levels of resilience to cloud workloads, including fully stateful fault-tolerance, with geo-redundancy and transparent service continuity. Unlike traditional approaches for fault-tolerance, which require duplicate or triplicate resources, limiting utilization to 50% or 33% respectively, with resultant high costs, our Software Defined Availability (SDA) uses virtualized resilience based on our unique StatePoint™ Technology enabling dramatic increases in resource utilization levels of 80% to 90%, while providing uncompromised reliability at a fraction of the resource cost

The Stratus Cloud Solution for Telcos and Communications infrastructure is desired for the new converged IP network that includes NFV, SDN, IMS, LTE and WiFi. Beyond network functions, it provides a platform for telcos to offer competitive cloud propositions and big data analytics, potentially opening up valuable new revenue streams.

 Key benefits:

Minimizes CAPEX and OPEX with:

• Increased resource utilization from sub 50% in traditional fault-tolerant architectures to more than 80% with intelligent software-based fault tolerance, at a fraction of the resource cost
• Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and open source software (KVM and OpenStack)
• Automated deployment and management that reduces human errors and complexity
• Business self-service that reduces deployments from days to minutes

Transparent service continuity through fully stateful resiliency and availability for applications without code changes

Optimizes ROI with one cloud solution that supports:

• Deployment and management of all applications with selectable availability levels
• Open, standards-based and multi-vendor support of NFV, SDN, IMS and other applications

Stratus’ Cloud Solutions consist of two products; Availability Services and Workload Services. See Figure below

Availability Services enable you to achieve stateful continuous availability for mission critical workloads as well as other availability level options for less critical workloads. It leverages the KVM hypervisor with added extensions for transparent Availability Services

Workload Services enables fast, easy and efficient deployments and management for all workload types in OpenStack based clouds. It provides Intelligent Dynamic Workload Management that leverages Heat and other standard OpenStack services to provide faster deployment and management of all virtualized and cloud applications, with selectable levels of resiliency and availability for each application.