With the introduction of its third-generation x10sure solution, Fujitsu Technology Solutions lowers the barriers holding small and medium-sized businesses back from exploiting the massive price-performance benefits of server virtualisation - without risking the domino effect of multiple virtual machine crashes due to the failure of a single physical host.
Designed to provide new levels of high availability at lowered price points, and without the need for replicating systems with unproductive “hot-spare” servers in standby, the powerful new edition of x10sure allows the consolidation of physical and virtual server environments into dynamic infrastructures, also delivering much-needed peace-of-mind through providing essential system failover protection.
Fujitsu's x10sure is designed to provide high availability to small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford clustered hot-spare servers on standby.
Already recognised for its ability to standardise and streamline IT operations and automatically ensure business continuity, version 3 of x10sure introduces hypervisor-level support for virtual machines and adds even higher levels of system protection against unplanned downtime. Entry-level pricing has been lowered, and the solution runs on updated hardware components.
Protecting multiple virtual machines on a single physical host was a key factor influencing the design of the third-generation x10sure system - and the solution integrates and complements market leading server virtualisation technologies including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. The new system can automatically recover from physical server layer failures and restart all impacted virtual machines on a newly-introduced spare with minimal service interruption, providing enhanced protection against unplanned downtime and data loss through server, fabric and storage failure.
Fujitsu has also worked hard to boost system resilience, introducing two key new features that deliver enhanced uptime and protection for mission-critical services. The first is the introduction of 1:1 failover configurations in addition to N:1 levels of protection where several servers in an x10sure configuration are protected by a single spare. The enhancements widen the appeal of x10sure to a broader section of the small and medium-sized business market, offering a failover solution in line with budgets.
The introduction of x10sure 1:1 also makes the solution more attractive to resellers as a standard high availability offering alongside PRIMERGY servers. Customers who invest in x10sure 1:1 are also able to upgrade later to an N:1 configuration.
This functionality goes hand-in-hand with x10sure's second big step towards high availability, the option of classifying and ranking servers so that the most-important systems are provided with enhanced levels of protection. Non-mission-critical servers, such as file-print or test systems, can be assigned a lower priority, so that they do not consume or block valuable failover resources.
IT administrators will enjoy a number of other new benefits of the x10sure 3.0, including a new graphical user interface, integration with SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and an open interface for interoperability with external systems. In addition, x10sure's new version offers variable disaster recovery concepts that include control node redundancy, site awareness and service importance and site/service failover along with storage replication solutions.
Richard Sutherland, Portfolio Manager Dynamic Infrastructures at Fujitsu, says: “System outages have a direct impact on companies' revenue, productivity, reputation and financial performance, and this grows by the minute. Having a strategy and the right technology in place to deal with unplanned downtime is critical. The next generation of x10sure helps businesses protect and make the most of their IT systems by increasing reliability and allowing for IT consolidation.”
PST Ostrava, a leading logistics provider based in the Czech Republic, turned to x10sure to consolidate, improve reliability and simplify the administration of their heterogeneous company applications. Managing Director Rudolf Maly says: “With x10sure we no longer have to worry about a sudden performance breakdown in our data centre. We now have a strong high availability solution that is also economical.”
The new-generation x10sure is available directly from Fujitsu and via qualified partners. Pricing starts at 1 400 euros for a basic software configuration.
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