Stratus Technologies, Inc., a provider of availability solutions, has launched an availability platform that serves as a disaster recovery and application monitoring to ensure business continuity. The solution, everRun Enterprise, is intended to provide “mainframe-like” availability to Windows and Linux applications, keeping them up and running continuously without changes to applications or in-flight data loss. The software runs on Intel-based x86 servers without the need for specialized IT skills, Stratus says.
“What makes mainframe technology unique is the way in which it can eliminate any single point of failure,” said Jason Andersen, senior director of product management and marketing at Stratus Technologies. “This is accomplished through hardware redundancy. However, these solutions are generally very costly to procure and manage. What everRun does is link together two commodity Intel servers and enable the virtual workloads to operate so that there are no single points of failure.”
Unifying Monitoring, Management and Service Capabilities
everRun Enterprise unifies the monitoring, management and service capabilities of Stratus' Avance high-availability software with the fault-tolerant engine of previous generations of everRun. The solution also leverages the open source Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
“everRun’s availability engine manages the two systems as one redundant server so in the event a system component fails, the other server instantaneously picks up the load,” said Stevensen. “Hardware redundant systems are really focused upon the system level. What we have done with this release of everRun is broaden the scope of what we can do by adding capabilities that enable reliability across geographically separate data centers.”
Support for High Availability in Mixed Platform Environments
everRun Enterprise is also open to mixed-platform environments that include mainframes, Andersen said. “We’d expect to see a scenario in which we’d be running alongside mainframes. Our goal is not necessarily to be a replacement for mainframe technology as a number of applications that run on mainframes are specifically designed for that platform. Our guest workloads are Linux and Windows based. What we are really trying to do is enable enterprises to get that mainframe level of availability for their Windows or Linux applications.”
The new solution includes an availability engine, intended to provide always-on availability with applications mirrored in two virtual machines with no data loss or machine restarts. The solution also includes a feature called Split-site Cross Campus, which is designed to provide application fault tolerance across geographically separated sites.
For more information, go to www.stratus.com.