News

Stratus Developing Fault-Tolerant Offering for OpenStack

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• July 1, 2013

High-availability computing software and hardware maker Stratus announced a new product designed to enable fault-tolerant operations in OpenStack clouds.

The company said it believes that the open source OpenStack effort has the strongest support behind it, said Dave LeClair, Stratus' senior directory of strategy. "OpenStack is gaining a lot of momentum in the public and private cloud space," LeClair explained. "The OpenStack community is expanding rapidly."

Stratus will offer a proof-of-concept software that will enable high-availability, fault-tolerant applications to run in OpenStack clouds -- initially private ones, according to LeClair. Later in the year, Stratus will release a beta of its software. It will be essentially be an OpenStack implementation of its everRun high-availability platform, he said.

Asked if he had considered CloudStack, the open source cloud compute offering backed by Citrix, LeClair noted that even though Citrix is a Stratus partner, he believes CloudStack lacks the support that OpenStack has gained over the past two years. "I'm not sure they have the staying power,"LeClair said. "They don't seem to have the community around them that OpenStack has."

Stratus said it believes the time is right to bring its fault-tolerant computing platform to the cloud. LeClair cited a survey by North Bridge Venture Partners that found while security is still the top inhibitor to cloud computing, a growing number are concerned about the uptime of their systems running in the cloud. "We are seeing things like availability, resilience and SLAs rise up to levels of concerns," LeClair said.