Stratus Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of availability solutions, today announced that is has become a Corporate Sponsor of the OpenStack(R) Foundation. Stratus also announced that it will release a suite of solutions that bring Software Defined Availability (SDA) to OpenStack-based cloud infrastructures. With Stratus, organizations can deploy any application – regardless of availability requirements — to the cloud with confidence.
“Stratus is applying its unparalleled availability expertise to cloud environments with a new suite of software solutions that will provide organizations with all the benefits that cloud computing offers with less of the risks,” said Nigel Dessau, Chief Marketing Officer at Stratus. “Building availability into the cloud infrastructure itself will significantly improve the quality of cloud SLAs while removing the availability worries and cost barriers that prevent legacy applications from moving to the cloud.”
The Stratus cloud suite will consist of three primary components — the Availability Engine, the Orchestrator and the Portal and Service Catalog:
— The Availability Engine safeguards OpenStack-based clouds withmainframe-class availability at the infrastructure level. Thisbuilt-in availability protection extends to both the control plane andapplications and brings a true fault-tolerant KVM hypervisor for use in the cloud.
— The Orchestrator augments OpenStack’s orchestration engine (code-named Heat) to create an intelligent provisioning process. Through a system of smart tags, the Orchestrator understands the full makeup of an application — including availability requirements, required resources, performance characteristics, compliance requirements and more. Based on these unique characteristics, the Orchestrator automatically deploys workloads to the appropriate location in the physical and software infrastructure.
— The Portal and Service Catalog is an OpenStack Dashboard alternative that streamlines application provisioning with template-driven workload profiles that ensure applications are deployed intelligently. The built-in dashboard provides administrators with an overview of application health throughout the system. It allows IT to tag resources by capability and create a service catalog so application owners and business users can spin-up new applications quickly using a library of pre-configured templates.
With the Stratus cloud suite, organizations can select configurable levels of availability on a per-application basis, allowing multiple applications with varying availability levels to exist in a single cloud infrastructure. With SDA, application availability levels can be modified “on the fly” to support applications that require different levels of availability at specific points in time. Examples include e-commerce applications during peak holiday seasons or financial systems at the end of fiscal quarters.
Typical cloud infrastructures do not provide built-in availability protection. As a result, availability protection must be written into the applications themselves. This prevents legacy applications from moving to the cloud without costly refactoring or coding. Stratus’ Availability Engine builds availability into the underlying cloud infrastructure, allowing organizations to migrate legacy Windows and Linux applications to the cloud without modification.
Stratus Cloud Solutions are deployed in conjunction with the OpenStack open-source cloud operating system. Stratus cloud solutions work in conjunction with standard APIs for OpenStack services including OpenStack Compute (Nova), Networking (Neutron), Storage (Swift and Cinder), Orchestration (Heat) and Identity (Keystone). The Availability Engine is Stratus’ fault-tolerant version of the open-source KVM hypervisor.
Stratus to Preview Cloud Solutions at OpenStack Summit (5/12) & Via Live Webinar (5/28)
Join Stratus at the following live events to learn more about its forthcoming suite of cloud solutions:
— Stratus @ OpenStack Summit: Stratus is an event sponsor at next week’s OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. OpenStack summit attendees are invited to visit the Stratus booth (#E41) for live demonstrations. To register for the OpenStack Summit, visit http://www.openstack.org/summit.
— Stratus Theater Demo @ OpenStack Summit: At OpenStack Summit, the Stratus Product Management Team will host a live theater presentation on Monday, May 12 at 2:40 PM in the Sponsor Demo Theater in the Expo Hall. The session will provide a high-level overview and demo of Stratus’ SDA solution for OpenStack. OpenStack Summit attendees can register for the session by visiting http://bit.ly/1hIyJY8.
