New virtual-machine load balancing and rolling reboot further strengthen the business continuity capabilities of Stratus Avance 3.1, Stratus Technologies' newest release of its affordable, simple to use high-availability software, the company announced today. Stratus is a global provider of products and services focused on protecting critical applications from system downtime.

Load balancing in Avance 3.1 software lets customers automatically or manually assign virtual machines (VMs) to both physical x86 servers that comprise the high-availability platform. During normal operations, the computing resources of both servers can be used while still benefiting from the Avance system's proactive VM migration during predicted and un-predicted system failure or instability. VMs running on the compromised node are migrated to the healthy node, and continue running without interruption.

Inside Avance 3.1 Load balancing speeds VM migration times. It also distributes disk reads across both nodes for improved read performance, doubles network bandwidth for writing to disk, and accelerates synchronous write replications.

In the event of a sudden catastrophic failure of one node, dividing workload between the servers reduces potential risk to business operations. VMs on the surviving node continue to run without interruption. Real-time data synchronization between the two nodes ensures that applications from the failed node can be restarted on the running server with the most up-to-date application data.

The new rolling reboot feature built into Avance software's intuitive user interface automatically stages and reboots the underlying system resources during upgrades. During the process, the virtual machines are unaffected and experience no downtime.

"Avance software is part of the industry's most complete portfolio of products and services designed specifically to prevent downtime and data loss," said Dave LeClair, Stratus director of product management & marketing. "Together with everRun(R) MX fault-tolerant software, ftServer(R) fault-tolerant hardware, and related availability services, Stratus delivers the widest range of affordable solutions to meet the uptime requirements of critical IT applications and business operations."

Avance high-availability software is sold worldwide through Stratus's channel network of ISVs, system integrators and distributors.