Stratoscale, the cloud infrastructure company, today announced the availability of Stratoscale Symphony V2, the second generation of Stratoscale’s comprehensive cloud data center software developed in direct response to customer demands and industry trends. The latest version of Stratoscale Symphony further differentiates itself from other approaches on the market—deploying, managing and scaling cloud infrastructure has never been so achievable. Stratoscale Symphony continues to add capabilities to support enterprise-grade private cloud deployments, with capabilities that are only available in web-scale environments. For businesses of all sizes looking to augment their aging VMware infrastructure, Stratoscale Symphony can be deployed on any x86 server, and provides an Amazon Web Services (AWS) experience in hours. Since introducing Symphony V1 in December 2015, Stratoscale has been committed to continuous, rapid innovation in cloud infrastructure with major enhancements released every few months. 

Upgrading Legacy Infrastructure
Companies face growing challenges with their aging VMware infrastructure, attempting to transition to an agile, flexible and scalable mode of operation. To overcome these difficulties, IT teams need a cloud infrastructure that scales quickly, simplifies operations and delivers the same kind of streamlined user experience they’ve come to expect from their smartphones and web apps. Stratoscale Symphony V2 provides an intuitive, powerful and beautiful experience that supports legacy applications. Time to value is an increasingly important competitive factor for all IT teams, and Stratoscale Symphony shrinks cloud infrastructure deployment to hours and VM, network and storage provisioning to seconds.

Simple Pricing
Stratoscale Symphony is available on a subscription basis through a rapidly growing network of partners. Minimal investment is achieved through a single-server subscription with a pay-as-you-grow model based on the number of servers that are installed.

Open Frameworks
Stratoscale Symphony is the simplest solution for deploying and managing Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) cloud infrastructure. Stratoscale is committed to open frameworks and is delivering native support for KVM with built-in OpenStack in Stratoscale Symphony. Today, IT teams struggling with long OpenStack deployments can provision OpenStack clouds in minutes using Stratoscale Symphony. Stratoscale is the only company committed to supporting the open technologies of KVM, Docker and OpenStack in a single product.

Multiple Use Cases
With the launch of V2, the company is expanding the use cases enabled by the Stratoscale Symphony platform, including:

Enterprise private cloud
Enterprise private clouds with a full software-defined data center (SDDC) supporting virtualization, storage virtualization and virtual networking are tightly integrated into a single, easy-to-use product. Stratoscale Symphony is self-balancing, self-healing, and supports multi-tenant and multi-project deployments, self-service portals, and easy provisioning and management of all activities. Breaking the silos between virtualization, networking and storage, a single administrator can manage all aspects of the infrastructure, freeing valuable time to support internal customers and the business. Provisioning time is reduced to minutes. Stratoscale Symphony supports VMware, Hyper-V and KVM workloads.

Service providers
Service Providers are powering their service platform using Stratoscale Symphony to achieve agile, easy-to-deploy and affordable services that are not available using aging VMWare infrastructure. Stratoscale is now supporting service providers in six continents to help them effectively compete with cloud giants and provide value to their enterprise customers.

OpenStack & KVM
OpenStack is becoming increasingly difficult and complex to deploy, maintain and operate. Stratoscale Symphony answers the challenge, providing OpenStack support and compatibility out of the box in minutes. It has never been easier to deploy a production-ready OpenStack framework with Stratoscale Symphony. There is no need to manage a cloud distribution or deal with Puppet or Ansible configuration scripts. Minimal clusters comprised of one server are supported, scaling to hundreds of servers in a single cluster.

Development teams
Development teams have been leading the enterprise transformation towards agility and flexibility in deployment capabilities. As development teams look to harness the flexibility of AWS in their own environments, Stratoscale Symphony is designed to work with Jenkins and CI/CD workflows supporting multiple large dev teams working on diverse projects, sharing the same dev cloud.

Hybrid cloud
As enterprises look to achieve hybrid cloud agility, Stratoscale Symphony is a true enabler for flexibility and scalability.

Big Data
The biggest challenge with deploying big data tools like Hadoop has been the inflexibility of the existing infrastructure. With multiple teams requiring big data in an organization, teams are increasingly relying on Stratoscale Symphony to provide a flexible environment where storage and compute assets can be dynamically assigned to different big data clusters, and reclaimed and reused when idle.

ROBO
With a minimal footprint of one server, scaling to hundreds in a single cluster, remote management capabilities, and easy upgrade, support and compatibility with all x86 applications, Stratoscale Symphony is ideal for multi-site ROBO deployments. Where real estate is scarce and local IT staff is minimal, Symphony’s small footprint and remote management capability make the best ROBO solution.

Hyperconvergence
Everything in Stratoscale Symphony is hyperconverged. Stratoscale is the only company that converged virtual networking, storage, virtualization and cloud management on a single scale-out stack. Our built-in native KVM hypervisor is designed to scale on any x86 hardware. Symphony uses direct attached hard drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) to provide scale-out storage as part of the solution.

Stratoscale Symphony V2 New Capabilities
Stratoscale Symphony V2 introduces significant new capabilities to the Symphony architecture, addressing customer requirements and continuing Stratoscale’s commitment to provide the best cloud infrastructure to service providers, enterprise IT and development teams.

Dynamic Cluster Scaling

• Symphony clusters can dynamically scale without reverting to professional services or developers. New servers are detected on the network using a beacon protocol, and are merged into the cloud infrastructure through a simple process managed using the user interface (UI) or command-line interface (CLI)
• Servers can be removed for maintenance or fully decommissioned supporting the full lifecycle of the hardware
• Stratoscale Symphony V2 is the only solution allowing both growth and reduction in cluster sized dynamically

Quota Management Tools

• Administrators can allocate resources to different teams and projects, monitor consumption and administer quotas and entitlements
• Symphony V2 enables IT teams to manage large-scale clouds, multi-tenant environments and complex projects more efficiently, and without resorting to additional expensive 3^rd party tools

Remote Management

• Remote management, monitoring and support for multiple Symphony clusters regardless of location is included in Stratoscale Symphony V2

Hyper-V Support

• Native conversion tools now support Hyper-V VM’s. This complements the existing drag & drop UI for importing VMware and KVM applications

Data Protection

• Multi-site data protection is built in, with configurable protection policies and backup and data recovery for virtual machines (VMs) and storage volumes
• Protection at the block level to any number of destinations and configurable protection policies to define a schedule and destination ensures the cloud infrastructure, applications and data are always available

Resilient, Worry-Free IT

• Self-healing cloud infrastructure with high availability for all management and network services, supporting multiple servers and network failures in a single cluster
• Storage resiliency with data striping across multiple disks and servers, with background rebuild of storage pools with no down time
• Workload resiliency with automatic VM recovery in case of hypervisor or server failure

Unified Storage

• Hyperconverged storage using direct attached SSD and HDD in all servers participating in the cloud infrastructure, keeping the costs low while ensuring enterprise-grade performance, availability and resiliency
• Unified, converged storage preserves existing investment in expensive storage services. All existing storage resources are combined into the cloud infrastructure providing a unified converged storage view, and single workflow for all applications whether using external storage arrays or built in scale-out storage
• Stratoscale Symphony V2 supports storage arrays from EMC, NetApp, IBM, Nimble, Pure Storage, Infinidat, Oracle, HDS and Dell

Multiple Storage Pools

• Symphony cloud infrastructure can be partitioned into multiple storage pools and independently managed, giving IT teams control over data locality, failure domains and tiers of service. Each pool can be independently built using SSD or HDD and can use flash storage for caching
• Storage pools can be dynamically created, grown, managed and retired

Policy Engine

• Resource management is built in with a sophisticated load balancer that is managing workload placement, dynamic load balancing with live migration, and tag-based management
• Rules and policies are set for resource consumption, affinity and placement using infrastructure and resource tags

Microservices

• Stratoscale Symphony V2 uses a modern micro-services architecture with over fifty system services hyperconverged in the cloud infrastructure
• Each service is load balanced and is self-healing. Stratoscale Symphony V2 is the most advanced cloud infrastructure platform in the world and uses scale-out architecture principles created for web-scale environments
• Stratoscale Symphony V2 is the first infrastructure platform in the world that uses Docker containers for its internal services

Beautiful User Interface (UI)

• Everything is beautiful, intuitive and easy to use. Stratoscale Symphony V2 includes the third generation UI for managing cloud infrastructure introduced by Stratoscale
• Advanced UI provides streamlined management, navigation and analytics capabilities with heat-mapping technology