Faced with a growing number of business-critical applications and services to support, SMBs and enterprises with remote environments are experiencing a real need for high availability. This paper discusses an easy-to-use, affordable high-availability and virtualization solution using standard x86 servers.
® by Stratus Technologies, The Availability Company June 2008
New Solutions
Closing the IT Availability Gap
New options for traditional and virtualized IT environmentsThe Evolution of Business-Critical Availability Over the last decade the electronic transaction has emerged as the basic element of commerce, with IT-driven applications and services supporting nearly every customer-facing and internal operation. As market reach expands across geographies, networks and time zones and "business hours" are reset to "on-demand" status, the availability of IT operations becomes even more fundamental to a business' ability to compete and survive. The trend toward server virtualization is also driving the need for higher levels of availability and has significantly altered the perception of what is considered business-critical. In fact, when you virtualize, every server becomes critical. Even when a company runs several non-critical applications on the same server a temporary outage can put a halt to business operations and incur substantial loss of data. As a result, availability is fast becoming a prerequisite to capitalizing on the many benefits of virtualization. Traditional or virtualized, most businesses will agree the pain of IT system downtime can quickly cripple operations and profitability. How much risk an organization is willing to accept varies tremendously ? throughout the functional units of a single company and from business to business ? resulting in a range of availability needs.
Availability Options ®At the top of the availability spectrum, Stratus Continuous Availability servers are operational more than 99.999% of the time, resulting in less than 5 minutes of downtime per year. In fact, for more than 28 years, businesses have relied on Stratus' fault-tolerant servers and 24/7 services to support mission-critical environments where even a short outage can result in catastrophic losses. Critical applications such as voice transmission, online stock trades, credit card validation and air ®traffic control typically require the always-on, real-time computing that Stratus ftServer systems ®deliver. Run VMware Infrastructure 3 on Stratus ftServer systems and you'll automatically get ® ®the same levels of continuous availability for virtualized mission-critical Windows and Linux application environments. At the other end of the spectrum, conventional systems, standby servers, data replication and high-availability clusters offer varying degrees of availability protection ? with widely varying cost and support structures. Historically, the next best availability option below the Stratus ftServer family was the high-availability cluster. But the time, complexities and costs incurred in building and managing these temperamental solutions make them impractical for businesses without large IT budgets or trained on-site IT specialists. Even environments with ample funding and staff often rate their return on investment (ROI) for clusters as less than satisfactory.
The Unmet Need Faced with a growing number of business-critical applications and services to support, small to medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprises with distributed/remote "edge" environments, are experiencing a real need for high-availability. Until now, no solution has provided even 99.9% reliability at a price/ease-of-use point that is acceptable to SMBs and edge environments. As a result, they've been forced to settle for inferior IT availability ? a gap that leaves their businesses exposed to tremendous risk.
Closing the IT Availability Gap: Page 2 New Options for Traditional and Virtualized Environments Closing the IT Availability Gap Backed by nearly three decades of IT availability innovations and expertise, no company is better equipped to close this "availability gap" than Stratus Technologies. Stratus began the effort as part of the Company's vision and overall strategy to address the total availability requirements of ®its customers and the industry as a whole. The result, Stratus AvanceT software, is a superior HA solution that's affordable for any business. Designed to run on a pair of standard x86 servers, Avance software delivers automatic uptime that exceeds 99.99% and comes fully equipped with a value-added bonus for users ? built-in virtualization. This unique combination enables SMBs and edge environments to experience the benefit... [download for more]
