Stratus,NEC to Provide New Levels for VMWARE Infrastructure

This newest functionality is the result of efforts between Stratus ® and NEC® and is based on ongoing joint development efforts. In November 2005, Stratus and NEC signed two 10-year agreements for joint development, technology cross-licensing, and long-term hardware purchasing. The goal of the agreements was to yield fault tolerant servers to support business and mission critical operations.

"End user requirements for availability will vary with the scope of their virtualization program, the nature of their applications, the infrastructure architecture, budget elasticity, and so on," said David Laurello, president and CEO of Stratus. "But no one should think about virtualization without also thinking about availability. NEC and Stratus will ultimately provide customers with the appropriate level of availability and virtualization support necessary for their individual
situations and requirements."

Fault tolerant servers from Stratus and NEC enable IT organizations to achieve high levels of availability - in both physical and virtual environments. Fault tolerant servers allow a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components by providing multiple identical instances of the same components such as CPU and main memory, directing tasks or requests to all of them in parallel, and choosing the correct result.

"As companies look to virtualize their infrastructure to improve asset utilization, reduce energy consumption, cut costs, and shorten time-to- market for new applications, consideration must be given to the reliability and uptime availability of the underlying hardware platform," explains Yoshikazu Maruyama, senior vice president of IT Platform Business Unit at NEC Corporation.

"NEC and Stratus are offering an ideal solution to address those considerations with this development."

The jointly developed solution brings together, as a bundled offering, the full scalability, flexibility and performance of VMware Infrastructure with the field-proven 99.999 percent uptime reliability of the newest generation of fault tolerant server systems.

According to Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware, "A
fundamental benefit of VMware virtualization is the advanced business continuity protection it affords together with high availability for critical applications. This solution from NEC and Stratus goes a step further by ensuring the resiliency of the actual hardware platform to minimize unplanned downtime. For those environments where nothing less than continuous application availability is acceptable, fault tolerant servers running VMware Infrastructure is an excellent option."

"By reducing hardware and running many critical applications on fewer machines, the single points of failure that had been minimized in distributed systems may be reintroduced," according to a recent report from Yankee Group, Server Virtualization Creates New Opportunities for Fault- Tolerant Servers. "This brings to mind the famous adage, 'put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket!' This is precisely the value proposition of fault-tolerant servers. In essence, they are very resilient, highly available baskets for a consolidated infrastructure," the report states.

Demonstrations of VMware Infrastructure running on NEC and Stratus fault tolerant servers can be seen during VMworld at the NEC booth #511 or the Stratus booth #213.
Both Stratus and NEC plan to start shipping fault tolerant systems running VMware Infrastructure in 2008.-NEc news