Stratus Technologies introduces ‘first’ Software Defined Availability platform

Stratus Technologies, Inc. has announced the launch of everRun® Enterprise, its next-generation software solution. This comprehensive solution, which represents the latest addition to the Stratus portfolio, includes enhanced features such as disaster recovery and application monitoring to ensure business continuity.

“This launch signals a change in strategy for Stratus,” said Nigel Dessau, Chief Marketing Officer at Stratus Technologies. “We are broadening our focus on fault tolerance – which ensures the highest levels of availability – beyond hardware, to virtual workloads on commodity servers. In effect, we are bringing mainframe-like levels of availability to Intel-based servers.”

everRun Enterprise unifies the ease of use, monitoring, management and service capabilities of the Avance® high-availability software with the fault-tolerant engine of previous generations of everRun. Additionally, the entire solution now leverages the open source Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. The result of this new architecture is a higher performance software platform that supports a wider range of operating system guest workloads.

“This is significant since some customers have resisted migrating business-critical applications to virtualized architectures due to a lack of reliable, enterprise-grade availability in today’s hypervisors,” said Jason Andersen, Senior Director of Product Management. “We also see a very similar requirement in private clouds. This technology will be the basis of our cloud strategy as well.”

Andersen continued, “With everRun Enterprise, we are continuing to provide our partners and customers with more flexible solutions to solve their availability challenges. By moving the capabilities of downtime prevention and recovery from hardware to software, Stratus is the first company to deliver a solution for an emerging category called Software Defined Availability.”

This solution comes at a time when incidences of downtime continue to hit the headlines, and the cost of downtime continues to rise. According to the Aberdeen Group, the cost of downtime increased by 40 per cent in the three year period 2010 to 2013.

everRun Enterprise is designed to keep Windows® and Linux™ applications up and running continuously without changes to applications or in-flight data loss. It is compatible with a wide range of platforms, is easy to implement and includes centralized management tools for an all-encompassing view of the entire stack – from bare metal to the applications. The software runs on industry-standard Intel-based x86 servers without the need for specialized IT skills. Unlike other availability solutions, everRun Enterprise prevents downtime from occurring rather than merely recovering from it – a difference that can have a significant impact on revenues, costs and customer satisfaction.

everRun Enterprise is a complete solution that includes the following features:

Availability Engine – achieves always-on availability with applications mirrored in two virtual machines with no data loss or machine restarts
• Split-site Cross Campus* – provides application fault tolerance across geographically separated sites
• Disaster Recovery* – mitigates the impact disaster has on the bottom line by using a built-in asynchronous replication between sites over a wide area network connection
• Stratus One View console* – enables users to build, designate, deploy, monitor and manage everRun instances and virtual machines from one centralized location
• System Watchdog and Alerting Service – constantly monitors systems and automatically sends a system-level notification should a fault occur
• Application Monitoring – reduces downtime as well as simplifying, accelerating and optimizing performance by providing visibility across IT environments and delivering automatic diagnosis