First software defined availability platform!

SolutionsPT, in conjunction with partner Stratus Technologies Inc, has announced the launch of everRun® Enterprise, a next-generation software solution which represents a breakthrough in virtualisation technology.

Available from February 28th 2014, the comprehensive solution, which represents the latest addition to the Stratus portfolio, combines the best of Stratus’ high-availability software solutions with enhanced features such as disaster recovery and application monitoring to ensure business continuity.

Robert Dinsmore, High Availability Product Manager at SolutionsPT, said: “The new release combines Marathon’s EverRun and Stratus’s own Avance technology – meaning you get 99.999% availability from a software platform that can be used with commodity x86 servers. This brings true fault tolerance to a much greater user base since it allows businesses to stay in line with their current IT hardware policy, whilst delivering a higher level of availability than most cluster based alternatives. It does all of this in a simplified package that does not require additional shared storage.”

“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 virtualised architectures due to a lack of reliable, enterprise-grade availability in today’s hypervisors,” said Jason Andersen, Senior Director of Product Management at Stratus Technologies. “We also see a very similar requirement in private clouds. This technology will be the basis of our cloud strategy as well.”

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 centralised 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 specialised 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.