x10sure delivers best availability-to-price ratio for SMEs

Peace-of-mind for small and medium-sized businesses through higher systems availability is a key focus of the new x10sure solution by Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the leading European IT provider.

Providing simplified, lower-cost high availability than virtualisation or clustering, x10sure delivers enhanced monitoring and protection for standard Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based server and disk-storage systems.

"x10sure is designed for the SMEs and offers an attractive, entry-level availability-to-price ratio for organisations who realise they need higher availability, but are put off by the price and complexity of a virtualised or clustered solution," says Rolf Strotmann, Vice-President Software and Solutions at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

"With x10sure, only one spare server is required for an array of productive servers, and in the event of a failure, production systems are back online again within minutes."

Offering small and medium-size businesses near-enterprise levels of system and application availability, x10sure provides centralised storage coupled with agent-less server monitoring and automatic troubleshooting - including automated server shutdown and reboot, and simple and automated data protection. Frozen applications are therefore back online automatically within minutes - without user intervention being required.

x10sure is designed for organisations running between five and 50 Windows-based servers - where according to research from IDC[1], the two main factors influencing their choice of primary IT supplier are quality of service coupled with technical skills, and quality and reliability. For many small-medium companies, price is also a major factor - so current IT back-end infrastructures are likely to be a complex, messy hybrid in danger of growing out of control.

Connectivity and systems availability are key business drivers today for more and more businesses, regardless of their size. In addition to the 24x7 Web-shop, Web-based services such as CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications, and even e-mail have become business-critical, and unplanned downtime can have a disastrous effect on daily business operations. Countering this, X10sure provides the peace-of-mind that even in the event of a failure, critical systems are up and running again in minutes.

Available exclusively via Fujitsu Siemens Computers' value-added reseller network, x10sure offers the small-medium business market segment higher availability through generic system protection, maximising the availability of key IT services, and providing a lower-cost alternative to complex clustering and resource-intensive virtualisation. In addition to using standard 32-bit and 64-bit PRIMERGY servers, x10sure uses the standard edition of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, while clustering and virtualised solutions require the more expensive Enterprise edition, and more licences.

In Germany, the Deutsche Alpen Verein (German association of mountain sport clubs) depends on x10sure for the highest availability of its IT systems, protecting the availability of its online shop and providing a centralised administrative and IT function for 354 individual chapters within its organisation, while the European logistics arm of Japanese cosmetics firm Kanebo uses x10sure to consolidate and protect its logistics and distribution systems across central Europe - ensuring that its products reach retailers.

"When we were confronted with replacing the aged hardware with new servers, it was quite clear that we would not go the conventional way which causes at the end too much administration and increasing costs. Also the constant availability of our systems became crucial for our business," explains Klaus Vogler, IT manager at DAV. "Fujitsu Siemens Computers' x10sure delivers us exactly what we need: an easy to install and easy to maintain high availability server solution. Any other option, be it cluster or virtualisation, would have been either too expensive or too complex."

DAV has reduced its expenditure on break-fix, having implemented x10sure to protect its SQL Server database holding 750 000 membership records, and a second database powering vital functions including its Web-shop, administration, service, press office, payroll and accounts, and near-real-time mountain hut booking availability information. x10sure continually monitors the performance and availability of DAV's IT systems and, if a server failure is detected, automatically deploys a spare, restoring availability within minutes.

At its most basic configuration, an x10sure software starts with a five server licence for EUR9 250. A typical configuration consists of PRIMERGY BX600 blade or rack servers - several production servers, a spare or failover server, and one system running the x10sure control software. These are coupled by a SAN switch using high-speed fibre channel links to a single FibreCAT SX80 fibre channel storage subsystem with a minimum of four or five hard drives. All disk-based storage is consolidated by FibreCAT - with x10sure's server access to disk managed via LUN mapping (logical unit numbers). Simplified configuration is browser-based, using wizards.

x10sure is available immediately in Germany, Belgium and Finland, and wider availability will be announced in April 2007.