MAYNARD, MASSACHUSETTS: VMware vSphere Essentials virtualization software for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) will be bundled at no charge with the purchase of a Stratus ftServer system, Stratus Technologies has announced.
First announced in March with VMware Foundation software for free, the "We Feel Your Pain" program is intended to help customers make cost-effective technology investments with immediate positive impact today and lasting value as the current economic cycle runs its course.
vSphere Essentials enables server consolidation and centralized provisioning, monitoring and management to deliver immediate hardware and operational cost-saving. The software includes the hypervisor, patch management, management agent and management server. However, VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) is not supported in VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus or vSphere Standard editions. VMware Essentials must run on a fault-tolerant server in order to achieve continuous availability for consolidation of servers and applications, and for individual applications critical to business operations.
"The negative impact of an outage can be much greater on a medium-size company than a larger enterprise because a greater percentage of its revenue, customers and employees are likely to be affected," said Denny Lane, Stratus director of product management. "Availability concerns are no less important to mid-market companies than to the big guys. While virtualization certainly provides SMBs with numerous benefits, continuous availability of key computer-based operations is not one of those benefits, at least not without a fault-tolerant server host.
"Further, users of vSphere Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions should know that ftServer systems will provide them with symmetric multi-processing, fault detection and isolation, root cause analysis, and other capabilities, and will do it without the overhead, configuration complexity, and latency that's characteristic of alternative software-based FT solutions," said Lane.
For medium-size enterprises seeking to leverage existing infrastructure, or distributed sites at the edge of corporate networks, the server-consolidation benefits of virtualization are compelling. Stratus ftServer systems with free VMware vSphere Essentials software provide a continuously available computing platform with the plug-and-play simplicity of a standalone x86 server.
The Stratus SMP fault-tolerant architecture supports up to eight processor cores and is designed to prevent downtime and data loss, making it an ideal platform for multiple virtual machines with mixed operating environments. An Intel Xeon processor-based Stratus server supports both Windows and Linux applications.
With measured uptime better than 99.999 percent, an ftServer system running Essentials software represents an infrastructure investment with unmatched reliability, flexibility and availability that can be easily upgraded. As a VMware global partner and reseller, Stratus also offers all editions of VMware vSphere with features such as VMotion or VMware HA; only the Essentials edition is offered under this limited-time offer that ends November 25.
For companies that require less than six nines uptime, Stratus offers its Avance High Availability software, which delivers 99.99 percent uptime for both Windows and Linux applications, runs on industry-standard x86 servers, and has virtualization technology embedded in the solution. This cost-effective software solution is also available for immediate delivery.
