Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings with it considerable costs. However, solutions to ensure higher levels of availability have traditionally been costly, hard to implement, and difficult to manage.

Omni Host makes it eaiser and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important applications. With our virtual infrastructure, organizations can easily increase the level of availability provided for all applications as well as provide higher levels of availability more easily and affordably. Omni Host makes it possible to minimize planned downtime, prevent unplanned downtime, and recover rapidly from outages. With Omni Host, we are able to:

• Provide higher availability independent of hardware, operating system, and applications
• Reduce planned maintenance downtime to ZERO for common maintenance operations
• Provide automatic restart of systems in the case of server failure

Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of physical environment's downtime. Hardware maintenance, server migration, and firmware updates all require downtime for physical servers. To minimize the impact of this downtime, organizations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-schedule downtime windows.

Omni Host makes it possible for organizations to dramatically reduce planned downtime. Because workloads in a virtual infrastructure environment can be dynamically moved to different physical servers without downtime or service interruption, server maintenance can be performed without requiring application and service downtime. With Omni Host Infrastructure organizations can:

• Eliminate downtime for common maintenance operations
• Eliminate planned maintenance windows
• Perform maintenance at any time without disrupting users and services

Fault tolerance capabilities are built into a physical environment. Because they are part of a virtual infrastructure, these capabilities are transparent to the operating system and applications running in virtual machines. These features can be easily configured and can be utilized by all of the virtual machines on a physical system, reducing the cost and complexity of providing higher availability. Key fault-tolerance capabilities built into the Omni Host Infrastructure include:

• Network interface teaming to provide tolerance of individual network card failures
• Storage multi-pathing  to tolerate storage path failures

For server failures, a component witin the virtual environement —ensures rapid, automated restart of virtual machines. It automatically and intelligently restarts affected virtual machines on other production servers. As a part of the virtual infrastructure,this solution can be easily configured for a server without dependencies on operating system, applications, or physical hardware.

Customers can also use third-party clustering software in virtual environments by clustering virtual machines with other virtual machines or clustering physical machines with other physical machines. Omni Host makes it possible to implement clustering without requiring the cost of identical servers, rebuilding clustering when physical hardware changes, and without the difficulty associated with testing clustering of physical systems.