DNS - Stratus Technologies' ftServer Offers Smooth Execution of Tiered Applications: Principled Laboratories

Stratus Technologies (News - Alert) announced that tests performed by Principled Technologies, an independent laboratory, verified that the ftServer developed by Stratus helps enterprises run their virtualized Tier 1 applications even during catastrophic component failures.

The tests had been jointly sponsored by Stratus Technologies and NEC (News - Alert), and the reports claim that Stratus’ ftServer continued to operate without data loss and nearly unchanged database performance on guest virtual machines, in the face of a potential catastrophic event more extreme than is likely to ever occur in a real system.

Within one of the tests, the Stratus ftServer 6300/NEC Express 5800/R320a was deployed in a test environment that simulated a high-volume transaction processing system of an online DVD store. The report says that the device offered out of the box scalable database performance and fault tolerance to all guest Virtual Machines or ‘VMs,’ by supporting multiple virtual CPUs or ‘vCPUs’ per VM. Additionally, even when the test engineers pulled an entire CPU enclosure out of the rack, it continued processing transactions and was back to pre-failure processing speed in less than 30 seconds despite losing half of its physical CPUs.

The ftServer was leveraged to run VMware virtualization software, and Microsoft (News - Alert) SQL Server 2008 databases of between 10 megabytes and 100 gigabytes were also a part of the testing environment, while VMware high availability products were not included in the tests. Test crew of Principled Technologies also took benefit of the multi-core capabilities of the ftServer system, which helped it in pushing the processing speed to 60,000 orders per minute on four virtual CPUs. After the technicians pulled out the CPU, the performance began increasing just within duration of 12 seconds, which continued until it was back up to pre-failure processing capacity, while the server lost no data during or after the failure.

According to Roy Sanford, Chief Marketing Officer at Stratus Technologies, hardware-based fault tolerance delivers availability, performance along with the peace of mind to commit the Tier 1 applications to virtualization, which the software solutions alone are not able to offer. Sanford continued that beyond the scope of Principled Technologies' rigorous testing, there are many additional advantages to deploying virtualization on a fault-tolerant platform, such as root-cause analysis, proactive monitoring and diagnostics, and the simplicity of a single fault-tolerant server compared to the complexity of alternative methods.

In April 2010, Stratus Technologies announced that it has re-qualified as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for the sixth consecutive year and will continue its long association with the world's leading operating system provider. The Gold Certified Partners are the top level of Microsoft partners who have access to the tools and support; they need to assure their customers receive superior products and services.