Stratus Technologies, Inc., an SGH company and provider of simple, protected, and autonomous edge computing platforms, is debuting the Stratus ztC Endurance platform, a set of fault-tolerant computing models enabling organizations to confidently run complex software stacks with 99.99999% availability. The platform—which builds on Stratus’ combination of built-in software and hardware, proactive health monitoring, and serviceability—enables IT and OT to apply intelligent, predictive fault tolerance to mission-critical apps, ensuring that they are always running without downtime or data loss.
The needs of OT and IT converge in their requirement for operational efficiency, system security, and solutions that generate business growth. These identities need reliable, affordable, and secure solutions that are future-proofed against the rapidly changing digital-first world.
However, the traditional approach to fault tolerance has been riddled with complexities, often left inaccessible to those of a less technical skillset, according to Stratus.
Inspired by the success of ztC Edge, Stratus ztC Endurance is engineered to accommodate the intersecting needs of OT and IT at a larger scale, delivering built-in, transparent fault tolerance that eliminates system downtime and data loss (including for in-flight data) at a low TCO. By combining both predictive and fault tolerance capabilities, ztC Endurance limits complexity while delivering high availability and seamless failover.
“The idea is, ‘How do we make computing as easy as possible for people who work at the edge—who are typically not IT people—to get the power and capabilities of IT solutions, but in a format that they can consume, they can deploy, and they can manage?’” said Jason Anderson, VP, strategy and product management at Stratus.
Applicable to standard operating systems (OSs) and hosted apps without necessitating additional scripting or modification, OT and IT benefit from the platform’s proactive health monitoring and predictive fault strategies to run critical applications—without needing extensive expertise in servers.
Stratus ztC Endurance leverages the Stratus Automated Uptime Layer with Smart Exchange to identify and track a range of failure points, then automatically resolve issues before they impact operations. The platform further optimizes protection, ensuring data integrity and mitigating against the loss of in-flight app data combined with seven nines (99.99999%) availability.
“Smart Exchange allows us to move the actual workloads, while they're still running, onto the compute module and keep on running. So basically, you get zero downtime, and the system stays up if any piece of hardware fails,” explained Dara Ambrose, VP of products and solutions, intelligent platform solutions at SGH.
“We have a PCIe fabric that interconnects all these modules… [which is used] to move the workloads around between the active and the standby modules in real time, copying all of the state, and from the customer's application perspective, it just keeps on running when a failure occurs,” Ambrose continued.
The family of fault-tolerant computing platforms also innovates on manageability, serviceability, and performance, featuring a redundant and modular architecture with hot-swappable customer-replaceable units (CRUs) and an open, remotely monitorable, VMware-verified, interoperable system that integrates with existing IT tools and off-the-shelf OSs.
This release leverages 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” processors, high speed NVMe, and resilient, high-performance DDR5 memory to match performance with the platform’s enhanced fault tolerance. Additionally, ztC Endurance is backed by extensive testing in various beta sites around the world, as well as an extensive ecosystem of partner integrations.
Stratus ztC Endurance is available in three models, including ztC Endurance Model 7100 (for large data centers and larger plants), ztC Endurance Model 5100 (for remote offices and medium plants), and ztC Endurance Model 3100 (for shop floor environments and smaller plants).
To learn more about ztC Endurance, please visit https://www.stratus.com/.