Stratus Technologies is a well-known company for its 99,999% fault-tolerant hardware, ftServer, which is made by a couple of identical machines that act as one, providing out-of-the-box HA capability.
Stratus ftServer isn’t exactly a cheap solution so the company today launches something completely different: a software-only HA solution for SMBs called Avance.
To achieve fault tolerance Stratus integrates Citrix XenServer and requires its customers to run their applications inside virtual machines.
The Avance platform has a web management console which allows to create new VMs with a very easy interface.
Once the VMs are in place Avance will take care of replicating them on all nodes, without the need to have any shared storage (FC or iSCSI SAN).
Any application supported by Citrix XenServer will be automatically supported by Stratus as well.
By design the product only supports two nodes, but Stratus doesn’t exclude the possibility to extend the number of nodes in future.
The product is currently certified to run on Dell servers only but the interesting thing is that the two nodes are not required to be identical machines.
The price for Stratus Avance is $2,500 per node (so the minimum price is $5,000 for each twin) and includes the Citrix XenServer license.