NEC Adds Fault Tolerant Support For Microsoft Hyper-V

Express5800/ft server offers a highly available environment to run mission-critical applications for a small business or remote office on Microsoft's virtualization platform.

NEC Corporation of America announced Monday that it is adding to its NEC Express5800/ft series servers support for Microsoft's Hyper-V on its fault-tolerant hardware platform. This represents the latest additions to the company's Fault Tolerant (FT) server line.

According to the company, "The new NEC FT servers support Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and virtualization platform Hyper-V 2.0 to create virtualized environments on fault tolerant hardware."

Mike Mitsch, general manager of the IT platform group at NEC America, said, "Offering Hyper-V or other virtualization on high-availability environments has proven challenging and complex. The fault-tolerant hardware has to be aware of, and support, the hypervisor. Being able to run Hyper-V on fault-tolerant hardware addresses the needs of mission-critical applications."

NEC had announced support for VMware vSphere throughout the product line back in July to provide virtualization, and fault-tolerant hardware vendor Stratus also recently announced support for Microsoft Hyper-V.

NEC's Express5800/ft series provides redundancy for essential hardware components including CPU and memory to avoid system downtime due to hardware failures. "As you use virtualization, hardware failures become more significant," stated Mitsch. The components that typically fail on servers, according to Mitsch, are the moving parts -- fans, disk drives, and the high-heat areas like power supplies -- followed by memory, which can especially be a problem in virtualized environments, which are memory-intensive.

"Hardware fault tolerance is the most cost-effective solution for x86 platforms to ensure high availability when factoring in the time spent recovering from corruption due to failed non-fault tolerant server hardware such as those commonly used with Hyper-V and VMware's HA," said Eric K. Miller, CEO of Genesis Hosting Solutions, which has been offering VMware-based services on NEC fault-tolerant hardware and has been evaluating Microsoft's Hyper-V on NEC's platform.