Stratus Technologies has been busy supporting virtualization platforms for quite some time. The company joined the VMware Community Source Program in its early days, in March 2007, which eventually led to an OEM agreement.
More recently, the company has been bullish enough to launch a promotion called Zero Downtime Guarantee, where any unplanned downtime caused by the failure of the server or virtualization platform during the first six months after being placed into production will put $50,000 cash or product credit in the customer’s hand.
Stratus even leverages Citrix XenServer to offer a software-only version of its fault tolerant platform for SMBs: Avance, launched in June 2008.
Just last week, the company went a step further by announcing support for Hyper-V. This means that the Microsoft hypervisor gets out-of-the-box the famous Stratus’ 99.999% uptime.
Specifically, Stratus now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 on its entry level fault tolerant system ftServer 2600.
Like all Stratus systems, the 2600 is made of two servers, each powered by a single quad-core Intel Xeon E5504 @ 2GHz, up to 16GB RAM and up to 16 SAS 2.5″ drives (each with up to 500GB).
Hyper-V high availability can be achieved in different ways, through a Windows Failover Cluster configuration or third party products, but, assuming a well-positioned price, Stratus out-of-the-box solution may be especially appealing where companies don’t have resources to invest for software setup and administration (like in branch offices).