Nec Corporation : Stratus and NEC Provide New Levels of Availability for VMware(R) Infrastructure

Stratus Technologies, Inc. and NEC Corporation announced today from VMworld 2007 new levels of availability for virtualized infrastructures through the introduction of fault tolerant support for VMware Infrastructure. Fault tolerant platform support for VMware Infrastructure will be especially beneficial in data center and infrastructure virtualization programs where mission critical business environments require the highest levels of availability.

This newest functionality is the result of efforts between Stratus® and NEC® and is based on ongoing joint development efforts. In November 2005, Stratus and NEC signed two 10-year agreements for joint development, technology cross-licensing, and long-term hardware purchasing. The goal of the agreements was to yield fault tolerant servers to support business and mission critical operations.

?End user requirements for availability will vary with the scope of their virtualization program, the nature of their applications, the infrastructure architecture, budget elasticity, and so on,? said David Laurello, president and CEO of Stratus. ?But no one should think about virtualization without also thinking about availability. NEC and Stratus will ultimately provide customers with the appropriate level of availability and virtualization support necessary for their individual situations and requirements.?

Fault tolerant servers from Stratus and NEC enable IT organizations to achieve high levels of availability ? in both physical and virtual environments. Fault tolerant servers allow a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components by providing multiple identical instances of the same components such as CPU and main memory, directing tasks or requests to all of them in parallel, and choosing the correct result.

?As companies look to virtualize their infrastructure 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,? explains Yoshikazu Maruyama, senior vice president of IT Platform Business Unit at NEC Corporation. ?NEC and Stratus are offering an ideal solution to address those considerations with this development.?

The jointly developed solution brings together, as a bundled offering, the full scalability, flexibility and performance of VMware Infrastructure with the field-proven 99.999 percent uptime reliability of the newest generation of fault tolerant server systems.

According to Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware, ?A fundamental benefit of VMware virtualization is the advanced business continuity protection it affords together with high availability for critical applications. This solution from NEC and Stratus goes a step further by ensuring the resiliency of the actual hardware platform to minimize unplanned downtime. For those environments where nothing less than continuous application availability is acceptable, fault tolerant servers running VMware Infrastructure is an excellent option.?

?By reducing hardware and running many critical applications on fewer machines, the single points of failure that had been minimized in distributed systems may be reintroduced,? according to a recent report from Yankee Group, Server Virtualization Creates New Opportunities for Fault-Tolerant Servers. ?This brings to mind the famous adage, ?put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket!' This is precisely the value proposition of fault-tolerant servers. In essence, they are very resilient, highly available baskets for a consolidated infrastructure,? the report states.

Demonstrations of VMware Infrastructure running on NEC and Stratus fault tolerant servers can be seen during VMworld at the NEC booth #511 or the Stratus booth #213.

Both Stratus and NEC plan to start shipping fault tolerant systems running VMware Infrastructure in 2008.

About Stratus Technologies

Stratus Technologies is a global solutions provider focused exclusively on helping its customers achieve and sustain the availability of information systems that support their critical business processes. Based upon its 27 years of expertise in server and services technology for continuous availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, life sciences, telecommunications, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries. For more information, visit www.stratus.com.

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) is one of the world's leading providers of internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. NEC delivers tailored solutions in the key fields of computer, networking and electron devices, by integrating its technical strengths in IT and Networks, and by providing advanced semiconductor solutions through NEC Electronics Corporation. The NEC Group employs more than 150,000 people worldwide. For additional information, please visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec.com. * Newsroom: http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/

NEC is a registered trademark of NEC Corporation. Other product or service marks mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. All Rights Reserved.

Stratus is a registered trademark of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. The Stratus Technologies logo is a trademark of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.

© 2007 Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. © 2007 NEC Corporation of America. All rights reserved.

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