NEC officials say VMware's vSphere 4 virtualization platform is now supported on NEC fault-tolerant servers, which will give uptime assurance to virtualized environments running on the high-availability systems.
NEC Corp. of America
is offering native VMware vSphere support on its fault-tolerant servers.
NEC officials announced June 29 that the company's
sixth-generation FT Express5800/300 servers-which are powered by the latest Intel
Xeon processors-support VMware's virtualization platform, a move they say will
make it easier for enterprises to adopt virtualization for mission-critical
applications.
With the use of virtualization on the rise in data centers, the
continuous availability of these fault-tolerant systems becomes even more
important, according to Mike Mitsch, general manager for NEC's IT Platform
Group.
"IT industry trends indicate that virtual machine
densities per server are increasing as more applications and users are
consolidated onto virtualized servers," Mitsch said in a statement.
"It has become a business imperative that IT managers consider hardware
fault-tolerant servers as a component of their overall business continuity
strategy to protect these virtualized environments."
In a report in April, IDC
analysts found that
virtualization
is still a top priority for businesses as they buy x86 servers. The
worldwide recession has helped drive the trend, IDC
said.
IDC found that 18.2 percent
of all servers shipped in the fourth quarter of 2009 were virtualized, an
increase from 15.2 percent in the same period in 2008. In addition,
virtualization software licenses grew 13 percent during the last three months
of 2009.
NEC and Stratus Technologies, which also builds fault-tolerant
servers, have
run
virtualization technology on the high-availability systems for several
years.
Fault-tolerant servers offer twin components that work in
lockstep, leading to the high availability. If one set of components fails, the
other set continues working with no interruption to the user.
With this capability, a business' virtual environment will be
able to continue running even if one set of components in the server fails.
NEC's support for vSphere is offered without the need for external storage,
networking or additional server systems, the company said.
"NEC's support of VMware on the FT server series brings
fault tolerance to VMware environments at breakthrough price points and
simplicity," Mitsch said.
The support is available on the NEC Express5800 R320a-E4 and
R320a-M4, starting at $18,799.
NEC's announcement comes two weeks after Stratus put a $50,000
guarantee on one of its fault-tolerant servers running VMware virtualization
technology.
Through its Zero Downtime $50K Guarantee, Stratus is promising
customers 100 percent uptime for newly purchased ftServer 6300 servers running
VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise and
Enterprise Plus editions. If there is any unplanned downtime caused by problems
with the server or VMware technology, Stratus says it will pay the customers
$50,000 in cash or in product credit.
"Our customers have told us for decades that the only
truly effective way to ensure the highest uptime for mission-critical
applications is by delivering solutions where the hardware, software and
services work in concert," Stratus Chief Marketing Officer Roy Sanford
said in a statement announcing the program.
The Stratus program runs through the end of 2010.
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