Stratus Technologies, the leading provider of availability solutions, today launched a beta program aimed at improving the reliability of cloud infrastructures. The program will test Stratus’ next-generation suite of software solutions that enable always-on clouds based on the OpenStack cloud operating system.

“Concern over availability is quickly becoming one of the primary obstacles keeping today’s applications out of the cloud. The fact is that today’s clouds – whether public, private or hybrid – can’t guarantee the amount of uptime required for core business applications. We see evidence of this every day with the high-profile cloud outages that litter news and social media sites,” says Nigel Dessau, chief marketing officer at Stratus.
“Stratus is applying its unique availability expertise to cloud environments with a new suite of software solutions that will provide organisations with all the benefits that cloud computing offers… with less of the risks.”

Moving applications to the cloud vastly improves agility and economics. However, organisations implementing clouds today are having difficulty moving their applications to the cloud because of concerns over availability. Why? Clouds are architected for scale and elasticity and typically leverage low-cost commodity components. In these environments, components fail.

To keep cloud applications up and running, they need to be designed to work around potential failures. For existing applications, that means rewriting code to make them “cloud-ready”.

With Stratus, organisations will be able to implement always-on cloud infrastructures that:

* Allow easy migration of applications without having to re-write code;
* Provide adjustable levels of availability on a per-application basis;
* Protect cloud control plane and application workloads from failure; and
* Leverage the OpenStack open source cloud operating system to avoid technology lock-in Join the Stratus Beta Program.

Stratus is actively seeking organisations to participate in its beta program.