Stratus Uptime Appliance for VMware vCenter Server prevents downtime of critical virtualisation infrastructure management

Superior uptime, operational simplicity, more affordable than alternative solutions

Stratus Technologies, the world leader of uptime assurance for critical business operations, today announced the Stratus® Uptime Appliance for vCenter Server, the universal management hub for the VMware vSphere virtualization infrastructure.

As VMware’s centralised framework for managing server, network and storage resources continues to expand in the scope and sophistication, the risks associated with vCenter Server downtime increase many fold. VMware vCenter Server is a single point of failure; without it, there is no control over hosts or virtual machines within the infrastructure.

“If the control tower at Chicago O’Hare airport suddenly went black, planes would continue to fly but, without someone directing traffic, order in the skies above the city would deteriorate quickly,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president and general manager, Enterprise Platforms at IDC.

“Similarly, the role of vCenter Server in maintaining order and control over the virtual infrastructure continues to expand, increasingly affecting the ability to configure, monitor and provision IT resources across the entire organization and out to the cloud. Downtime is not an option.”

Among the many critical operations now within the purview of vCenter Server are:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager for automating disaster recovery processes
• vCenter Operations Management Suite, integrating performance, capacity and configuration management into one vCenter module
• VMware IT Business Management, which manages costs, service levels, and vendors of cloud-based IT services
• VMware vCenter Chargeback, designed to improve cost transparency for IT services through chargeback and show-back.

The Stratus Uptime Appliance for vCenter Server is a single-system solution designed from the ground up to prevent downtime via resilient hardware and software technologies, combined with proactive remote monitoring and management. Based on Stratus’ Intel-based fault tolerant server architecture using a single-socket quad-core 2.0 GHz system, the Uptime Appliance bundle includes a minimum of four 146 GB 15K RPM disk drives, 16 GB of logical memory, Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition, Stratus Automated Uptime Layer, and vCenter Server 5 Standard Edition.

The complete Stratus appliance bundle is priced thousands of dollars less than clustered Windows or heartbeat products for availability. In addition to the price advantage, the Stratus Uptime Appliance is simple to install, configure and update, delivering better than 99.999% uptime to all the virtualisation resources running on it.

Recognising the criticality of vCenter Server uptime, VMware offers its VMware Heartbeat product, which is a failure-recovery solution, not failure prevention. Unlike this and other cluster-based products, the Stratus Uptime appliance features proactive monitoring that detects, isolates and resolves faults before they can cause downtime. The Stratus appliance needs no failover scripting, eliminates the management console as a single point of failure, requires only one software license, and has no hidden network channels to manage and troubleshoot.

The Stratus Uptime Appliance for vCenter Server is available for immediate order. Click here|http://www.stratus.com/Solutions/ByITNeed/Virtualization.asp...] for more information.

FACTFILE:
Stratus delivers the world’s only proactive “uptime assurance” guarantee for the platforms that run the most vital functions of business, healthcare, manufacturing and government. Combining its resilient software and hardware technologies with thirty years of unparalleled remote monitoring and management expertise for availability, Stratus helps save lives and protect the business and reputations of companies, institutions, and governments the world over. To learn more about worry-free computing, visit www.stratus.com.