Stratus extends fault tolerant support to VMware

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Stratus Technologies will on Wednesday release support for VMware Infrastructure 3, bringing continuous availability to the market's leading hypervisor product for what it claims is the first time.

The server vendor said that previous work to extend support for virtual environments running on Red Hat and Microsoft operating systems could now be used for the those enterprises concerned about the suitability of existing hardware platforms for supporting mission-critical applications in the VMware environment.

Andy Bailey, Stratus availability consultant told IT PRO that virtualisation has been popular with businesses wanting to consolidate a large number of non-critical servers.

"But it can take a significant amount of downtime to restore virtual machines, even on the basis that no in-flight data has been damaged," he said. "Our ftServers can ride through any fault conditions in the compute mode without affecting operations."

The vendor is part of the VMware Community Source programme and has had its hardened drivers included into the ESX Server kernel so that any organisation that uses ESX Server 3.0.2 or higher on a Stratus server will automatically benefit from the continuous availability technology.

And they are plans to offset additional licensing implications for existing customers, as well as extend the support onto other Stratus server products in future.

Bailey added that the announcement positions Stratus as a first line of defence, by enabling enterprises to deploy a fault-tolerant physical layer underneath the VMware hypervisor that works in complement to its own high availability and disaster recovery functions available in the VMotion management suite.

In-flight data is normally defined as instructions that are going through the application's operation process. Stratus said its servers protect in-flight data through the entire cycle of the transaction being completed, including caching and memory operations, as opposed to normal high availability systems, where this data can be lost when a component fails.

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