Tide of Applications Demanding High Availability Rises Steadily in Stratus-ITIC Survey

MAYNARD, MA--(Marketwire - Jul 26, 2011) - The number of corporate IT and business leaders demanding high availability for software applications has increased sharply over the past year, as virtualization and cloud computing take root in IT best-practices, according to a new survey sponsored by Stratus Technologies. More than 70 percent of the companies surveyed by research group ITIC said the number of their applications that require high-availability guarantees has risen over the last year. Within that number, the percentage of applications identified as mission-critical has increased almost 10 percent, from 27 percent in 2010 to 36 percent in 2011. As more applications are considered to be mission critical, companies are discovering that current availability standards and service level agreements (SLAs) aren't enough to protect their revenue streams from serious interruptions.

"The near-10 percent increase in applications considered critical to a business is reflective of the maturation of the virtualization market. IT realizes that virtualizing key applications can make the end users more productive and the business more competitive," said ITIC Principal Laura DiDio. "The mistake many make, however, is assuming virtualization software alone will provide adequate protection for critical application against downtime. IT departments must also ensure that their server hardware is robust and reliable enough to handle the increased workloads that virtualization demands," DiDio added.

Virtualization software only addresses availability from the hypervisor up; it does nothing to assure uptime of the underlying platform. Achieving high availability for virtual machines requires provisioning more servers and software, which introduces more complexity, cost, overhead and manual intervention, as well as additional single points of failure. VMs cannot be seamlessly migrated off a failed server, resulting in downtime, lost data and VM restarts on other servers.

"The industry is trying to 'dumb down' people's understanding of what constitutes acceptable downtime. Recent attempts by cloud service providers to pass off headline-making outages as business as usual are great examples," said Roy Sanford, Stratus chief marketing officer. "IT departments must be concerned about the business impacts of virtualizing Tier 1 applications. Uptime assurance was not a key design consideration for virtualization. Our customers tell us that using resilient software and hardware together with virtualization and proactive remote monitoring is the best way to deliver uptime assurance for Tier 1 applications."

About Stratus Technologies
Stratus delivers the world's only proactive "uptime assurance" guarantee for the platforms that run the most vital functions of business, healthcare, manufacturing and government. Combining its resilient software and hardware technologies with thirty years of unparalleled remote monitoring and management expertise for availability, Stratus helps save lives and protect the business and reputations of companies, institutions, and governments the world over. To learn more about worry-free computing, visit www.stratus.com.

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