Stratus puts emphasis on software-defined availability with everrun Enterprise launch

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1 Stratus puts emphasis on software-defined availability with everrun Enterprise launch Analyst: John Abbott Agatha Poon 3 Feb, 2014 Stratus Technologies, one of the few remaining purists of full-systems fault tolerance, is broadening its focus beyond hardware with the launch of everrun Enterprise, which it's calling a software-defined availability platform. The product comes out of Stratus' acquisition of Marathon Technologies back in September 2012, and aims to strengthen the company's protection of virtual workloads running on commodity servers bringing them availability levels comparable to mainframes, Stratus claims. And on that note, Stratus has won an OEM agreement for everrun Enterprise from IBM, which will bundle the product with System x servers. (IBM has since announced the sale of the System x line to Lenovo). Meanwhile, the company is working on a new product line, its Stratus cloud offering, which is built on top of OpenStack and currently in beta trials at customers and partners. It's due for launch later in The 451 Take There are still customers with mission-critical infrastructure requirements that go to Stratus for the most extreme fault-tolerant systems. But for the rest of us, software is clearly the direction in which things are headed. For Stratus, the threat is that software-defined infrastructure from the major virtualization and cloud vendors will include native availability features, and that while such features may not be the most robust on the market, they will be good enough for most. EverRun Enterprise updates Marathon's technology for on-premises, paired servers (that don't have to be from Stratus). But as cloud gathers pace, more customers will offload their redundant infrastructure requirements to third-party hosting companies. That's why we're going to be following the new OpenStack-based cloud product, Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 currently undergoing beta testing, with particular interest. Context Stratus isn't giving up on its flagship ftserver 'hardware defined' product, which it positions as high performance and turnkey. We've covered the venerable fault-tolerant credentials of Stratus in past reports. Over the years, it has migrated much of its proprietary systems technology over to more standard, x86-based alternatives running Windows, Linux, VMware and its own OpenVOS. Today, ftserver uses Stratus-branded hardware primarily designed by its partner NEC, but incorporating long-standing Stratus expertise in the form of ASICs to keep the software running on each side of a paired redundant system in synchronous lockstep. (NEC sells is own version of the product that incorporates Stratus technology). There's also a closely integrated services offering that's part of the sale. In the past, Stratus dismissed software-based approaches to availability as inadequate, but in 2008, it made a concession to market forces and introduced Avance, providing an availability layer for standard x86 servers that was in direct competition with Marathon. Products EverRun Enterprise uses standard dedicated servers and an embedded KVM hypervisor to underpin its virtual environment. It provides server failure protection, site failure prevention, replication for disaster recovery, and now also includes monitoring and management tools including basic system alerts, but also application performance, visibility and management. At its core is the Availability Engine, which mirrors a single application across two physical servers, linked via a private network connection (usually 10Gb or 100Gb Ethernet). If one server fails, the other carries on, and there's no interruption or loss of data. The engine mirrors the I/O to the redundant server with memory check pointing, so no restart is required. Granular fault-tolerance or HA levels can be set on a per-vm basis. SplitSite works across geographically separated campus sites (typically up to three miles apart) using synchronous replication, and there's also a disaster-recovery option for any other sites using asynchronous virtualization over the WAN. There's also a centralized console Stratus One View for creating and configuring VMs, setting availability levels, monitoring and managing disaster recovery, and for system health reporting. New to everrun, and packaged as an add-on option for an additional license fee, is a monitor package for applications, hardware, edge devices (for example, cameras in a security system) and switches. These are monitored 24/7 and automatically restarted if they do go down to minimize outage duration. It comes from an unnamed OEM partner. Finally, there is a suite of Stratus Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 services to surround the product, including a 'watchdog' and alerting service from Stratus' own support centers. In addition to everrun Enterprise, Stratus has been running a beta program with the goal of bringing HA cloud management platforms to OpenStack users. Although the company is still finalizing its plans for packaging, pricing and licensing, the Stratus cloud offering comprises three main components: protection of OpenStack workloads (the availability layer, similar in capabilities to everrun Enterprise); an orchestration stack (which is likely to include such components as self-service portals and a service catalog); and control-plane monitoring that plugs into the OpenStack distributions to enable a highly available control plane for a cloud. Strategy Stratus has now consolidated its two conflicting software offerings into one product. While the core of everrun Enterprise clearly comes from Marathon's everrun MX, Stratus says it's also taken the best of Avance, which, while it didn't provide the same level of software-based availability as MX, was much easier to install, use and manage. The new release also marks a shift away from the XenServer hypervisor (through Marathon's relationship with XensSource, subsequently Citrix) to the KVM hypervisor, more closely associated with OpenStack. Stratus is now urging both Avance and MX users to upgrade. The company's go-to-market strategy also includes an OEM element Marathon had an existing relationship with Fujitsu, and Stratus has now added IBM, which along with its new X6 System-x servers, announced a reference architecture jointly with Stratus. The software approach typically appeals to midrange and smaller customers, and the reseller channel. Stratus continues to develop its ftserver line, which it says has shown market growth even in the face of the general drop in server sales. The latest (seventh-generation) ftserver 2700/2710, 4700/4710 and 6400/6410 all use Intel's EV5 v2 processors and integrated networking technology. The improved hyper-threading improves virtualization performance, and the larger core count and memory can help reduce over-provisioning and lower the price per VM. Although the company does not disclose the number of customers in its alpha and beta testing program or the duration of the tests, it claims to have seen good traction for its OpenStack cloud manager among channel partners, ISVs (in particular) and enterprise customers. Thus far, enterprise interest remains US-centric, but it sees a growing appetite from companies in Japan and EMEA. By vertical, it is in-line with existing demand trends the typical early adopters are companies in the high-tech and financial segments. Other cloud platforms will be supported on a Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 case-by-case basis. One use case has been to take a workload managed in an OpenStack cloud environment to perform disaster-recovery snapshots and restore it in a third-party public cloud as requested by the beta customer. Competition Over the past decade, the focus of both HA and disaster-recovery products has shifted toward the virtualization layer first VMware with Site Recovery Manager, and then Citrix and Red Hat, all of which have been developing native capabilities for their hypervisors. More recently, there's been a further shift to cloud infrastructure software stacks examples include Amazon's Availability Zones and the Citrix/Apache CloudStack availability manager. Emerging software-defined datacenter platforms also incorporate availability capabilities. There are younger, independent replication providers such as InMage, PHD Virtual Technologies/VirtualSharp, Veeam and Zerto, which are arguably more closely integrated with the virtualization layer and well-positioned to collaborate with cloud-based partners. Interestingly, InMage Systems recently added hardware appliances to its backup and disaster-recovery product lines. With regard to OpenStack, Stratus will face growing competition from the OpenStack community itself as its HA capabilities mature. In general, new applications written specifically to run across multiple servers in a software-defined Internet or cloud datacenter are a big threat to the old fault-tolerant model of paired physical on-premises servers, which is why Stratus is paying attention to OpenStack. And it's clear that the virtualization vendors themselves see native availability capabilities as an important part of their value propositions. Even if the level of functionality lags that of the specialists, it still makes it harder for the independent suppliers to differentiate. One traditional Marathon competitor, Neverfail, has been working on a revised strategy for the past two years. It's currently beta testing a new product, IT Continuity Architect, a broader operations management platform that discovers servers, virtual machines, applications and networks (including their existing availability attributes and critical dependencies), monitors the traffic between them, sets availability objectives, and identifies gaps and risk areas. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Stratus with the possible exception of HP's high-end Tandem NonStop division is pretty much the only game in town nowadays for fully redundant hardware fault tolerance. It can bring that expertise and associated services over to the broader world of standard x86 servers. Opportunities Threats EverRun Enterprise comes from the acquisition of Marathon Technologies in September 2012, and Marathon's technology clashed with an existing in-house product called Avance. Stratus now has two product communities that must be persuaded to upgrade. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Cloud availability management is still in its infancy. OpenStack is known to have stability problems as it gradually matures. By moving to a KVM-based platform and by beta testing an OpenStack-based version of everrun, Stratus is setting itself up for future business. The next-generation virtualization and cloud operating system stacks are all adding native availability capabilities, including efforts from the OpenStack community. Stratus may find itself circumvented and facing competition from less-expensive open source components. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 6