Cloud Computing Explained

Cloud Computing refers to any data that is processed and accessed via the internet, rather than on a hard drive or local server.

Easily Supporting Mission-Critical Workloads in Clouds

Over the past decade, vast amounts of computing have been created for or migrated into Cloud computing architectures. While public cloud providers have gathered a great deal of the mindshare and workloads, cloud computing itself is an architectural movement that represents new ways to create, deploy and manage applications. Therefore, whether you are deploying in a public cloud, or managing your own hybrid cloud architecture, there also remains a need to support business-critical applications.

Achieving High Availability in Cloud Computing is Harder than it Might Seem

While many business critical applications are running in clouds, there are some inherent flaws in the overall approach. For instance, today’s clouds typically leverage out of the box clustering or VM migration solutions. These features do not adequately protect applications from transaction loss and can be more complex to manage. These availability approaches also tend to only focus on the discrete application VM versus the entire application service chain. This may require additional coding and configuration.

Additionally, Clouds are designed around commoditized hardware and software. Most of the monitoring activity is left to the cloud management software. This means that when there is an issue there is a significant time lag between an outage and the management software noticing the issue and starting the remediation process.

Since these flaws are not desirable for mission critical workloads, many people are rewriting or building their applications to overcome these challenges. This often requires specialized development effort and in some cases these applications must be written to a specific cloud deployment. In this scenario, the costs for deploying this way easily outstrip the cost savings.

There is a Better Way to Solve this Problem in a Cloud

Stratus’ approach is different. Our servers provide levels of high availability in cloud computing with no special software or configuration. That is because our ftServer systems are redundant at the hardware layer yet still support all of the major Hybrid Cloud hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. Additionally, an ftServer presents itself in hybrid cloud management tools as if it is any other commodity server platform.

Frankly, it’s a simple, plug and play method to add a level of business critical capability to your hybrid cloud with no additional effort.

Key Benefits

Cloud ready hypervisors

  • Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM
  • Support for VSphere and ESX

Application transparent

  • Enables applications to become fault tolerant without any changes
  • Fault tolerant upon deployment from Hybrid Cloud Manager

Simple to manage

  • Presents itself as if it was any other Intel based server
  • Can be managed by other Hybrid Cloud Management Tools

Click here for information on high availability in cloud computing features and functionality.