Stratus Planning Fault-Tolerant Software for OpenStack Clouds

Stratus, a provider of hardware and software for mission-critical, high-availability computing, will deliver a solution designed to enable fault-tolerant operations in OpenStack clouds.

The company has watched the evolution of cloud computing and has come to the conclusion 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."

Having placed its bets on OpenStack, 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.

I asked if he had considered CloudStack, the open source cloud compute offering backed by Citrix. While LeClair noted 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," he said. "They don't seem to have the community around them that OpenStack has."

Stratus thinks 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," he said.

That's true, and we'll see if Stratus can up the ante in high-availability computing in the cloud.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/27/2013 at 12:49 PM