Release: Stratus ftServer Systems with vSphere 5.1

On January 9, Stratus Technologies announced the availability of the new Stratus ftServer systems with vSphere 5.1

The fault tolerant system company, founded 1980 and headquartered in Massachusetts, launched, in September 2012, the sixth generation ftServer that integrates into existing infrastructures and the vendor says that is able to provide uptime of 99.999% for the server and equivalent to 5.26 minutes of downtime annually, using the vSphere hypervisor apparently with very few staff oversight.

The Fault tolerant Server allows the server to ride through hardware faults unaffected, while vSphere HA software does nothing to protect the underlying server from downtime. In case of a failure with HA software alone, VMs would fail over to another host and applications restarted.
Stratus ftServer System with vSphere 5.1 features (from the press release):

  • Uptime of 99.999% or better in continuous operation, including the hypervisor
  • Single and dual Intel 8-core processors, including with hyper-threading and QuickPath architecture on high-end systems
  • Full symmetric multi-processing (SMP) for powerful fault-tolerant computing without compromise
  • Embedded 10Gb Ethernet for processing high-volume network traffic associated the higher number of VMs supported, as well as with, vMotion, NFS, iSCSI, etc.
  • Proactive availability monitoring and system management that prevents outages from occurring, unlike failure-recovery solutions
  • Root-cause analysis and repair of server and OS issues without interrupting processing
  • Plug-and-play simplicity using off-the-shelf editions of vSphere software
  • Minimal system overhead of  <5% and no need to over-provision hardware for uptime
  • A bullet-proof infrastructure that prepares the IT organization to move to the cloud