Members of the IT industry will descend on Cannes this week for the VMworld Europe conference. At the event, Stratus Technologies will be announcing support for VMware’s technology, while 10 GbE specialist Neterion will showcase a 10GbE fibre I/O adapter that can virtualise up to 17 network paths.

Stratus has built support for VMware’s Infrastructure 3 system into its servers to offer customers what it dubs continuous availability.

Stratus availability consultant Andy Bailey pointed out that the systems use “built-in fault tolerant drivers that run in VMware’s ESX hypervisor, and hardened drivers for all the peripheral components and devices, like disk and network controllers”.

Bailey added that ensuring high availability through other server systems involves more work for IT teams, for instance setting up clustering systems. “You install the Stratus software on the server, and you automatically get continuous availability without any additional work. If people are consolidating or hosting a number of discrete applications on one single platform, as happens with virtualisation, the last thing they want is a failure of that node,” he said.

Also at the show, Neterion will release its 10GbE I/O adapter from its Xframe V-NIC range, which is able to virtualise up to 17 network paths running under VMware’s ESX Server platform.

Neterion vice president Ravi Chalaka said the new 10GbE adapter would give a “4x increase in I/O performance and a 50 per cent reduction in CPU utilisation”.

Although the show takes place the same week as the official unveiling of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft will launch its new server operating system without the Hyper-V virtualisation feature, which is due to ship by summer.