Stratus Technologies, Inc. announced today its membership in the VMware Community Source program, which enables Stratus to collaborate on highly available and reliable
virtualization solutions. The program provides Stratus and other vendors with the opportunity to work with VMware on VMware ESX Server source code development and product direction under a royalty-free license. Program members may use the source code to contribute shared code to the community or to interface their own differentiated, intellectual property-protected products with VMware ESX Server.

As many companies look to infrastructure virtualization to improve asset utilization, reduce energy consumption, cut costs, and shorten time-to-market for new applications, consideration must be given to the reliability and uptime availability of the underlying hardware platform. As a leading provider of continuously available servers for business- and
mission-critical Windows and Linux applications, Stratus is devoting engineering and financial resources to integrating its extensive expertise in fault-tolerant solutions with virtualization technology.

"By opening the door to an extended base of engineering creativity and technical resources, the VMware Community Source program is an innovative approach to quickly building added value for customers," said Allan Jennings, Stratus senior vice president, product and solution development group. "We're very pleased to be taking an active role with VMware by
lending our expertise in technology for continuous availability to the effort."

"Deploying virtual infrastructure on industry-standard systems delivers significant increases in efficiencies, versatility and availability, which explains why more than 40 percent of our customers are standardizing on VMware Infrastructure," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. "As our customers virtualize their most
business-critical applications, they are looking at the integration of virtualization and continuous availability technologies to provide the highest level of downtime protection. The source access and collaborative development model between VMware and Stratus is designed to expedite the delivery of a continuously available virtual infrastructure strategy for our joint customers."

In a recent independent report from the Yankee Group (Server Virtualization Creates New Opportunities for Fault-Tolerant Servers, January 22, 2007), author George Hamilton writes, "As more customers consolidate their servers, they'll be running many critical applications and supporting critical business processes with few servers. Fault-tolerant servers give these customers a consolidated infrastructure without sacrificing availability and resiliency." 

The Stratus(R) ftServer(R) server family of Intel Xeon processor-based systems supports both the Windows and Red Hat Linux operating systems. Pricing begins as low as US$10,000. Systems are highly configurable to support a broad range of business requirements, application types and workloads. Field-proven uptime reliability for ftServer systems consistently exceeds 99.999 percent.