Containerization and virtualization are transformative technologies, each with unique strengths. When combined, they unlock unparalleled potential for edge environments, enabling businesses to achieve greater efficiency, resilience, and scalability.

To better understand their unique strengths, Rudy de Anda, head of strategic alliances at Penguin Solutions, explains their complementary roles. Virtual machines (VMs) are good when it comes to reliability, segregation, dedicating resources to critical applications, and supporting legacy applications in OT fields. Meanwhile, containerization is useful for IoT, allowing developers to build an application in one environment and then efficiently run that application in a different environment.

Recently, de Anda hosted a webinar with ITOps Times and appeared on our podcast to discuss the benefits of integrating these technologies. During these conversations, he talked about how Stratus platforms from Penguin Solutions can support both virtual machines and containers.

The Stratus ztC Edge® platform is a zero-touch computing platform with built-in fault tolerance that can be managed locally or remotely. It delivers reliable performance, robust computing power, and easy maintenance, improving operations and eliminating unplanned downtime.

“Our Stratus ztC Edge platform delivers fault-tolerant, high availability solutions,” he said. “The platform comes with a hypervisor, and that hypervisor allows you to select whether you want a virtual machine to be high availability or fault-tolerant, and it marries two nodes together… it does this in a way that’s invisible to the application. You don’t have to build any redundancy into your application. You don’t have to do any failover scripting or anything like that. The redundancy is done in the hardware itself.”

The same is true for the Stratus ztC Endurance® platform, which offers intelligent, predictive fault-tolerant computing and delivers 99.99999% uptime for critical applications. Stratus ztC Endurance is designed for installation in standard 19” server racks within controlled environments, whereas the rugged Stratus ztC Edge is built for harsh, unmanned edge locations.

“What both of them share is that you don’t really have to have a tremendous amount of expertise, from an IT perspective, to support these products,” said de Anda. “They bring fault-tolerance out of the box and make it very simple in order to deliver, in the case of Stratus ztC Endurance, seven 9s of availability to all your applications, and that’s by leveraging both the technology that’s under the hood as well as the services and support that come along with those products.”

An oil and gas customer of Penguin Solutions successfully implemented Stratus platforms to deploy new solutions in the field in order to meet updated TSA mandates. While deploying security solutions to protect their critical infrastructure, the customer also wanted to modernize their control systems and were starting to look at other areas that could be updated during this process as well.

“They took these two requirements, one from a control department, one from a cybersecurity department, and they brought virtualization in,” said de Anda. “They took the needs of both departments, put it on Penguin Solutions in order to make it fault-tolerant, and when they did so, they realized, this virtualization platform that we have here now allows us to have another virtual machine that’s dedicated to some of these IIoT things we’re trying to do.”

The customer ended up deploying the Stratus ztC Edge platform to host their SCADA system in VMs and then realized that if they deployed containers in addition to those VMs, they could also have AI anomaly detection software running in containers to analyze what was coming in through the video feeds.

“They can start taking live video streams that they have at the edge, leverage containerization and some AI techniques in order to start doing image recognition on those live feeds, and they could start doing things like PPE detection or security or even looking at production metrics from those live video feeds, all because they had both virtualization and containerization available at the edge,” he said.

As industries continue to evolve, the combination of virtualization and containerization is proving to be a game-changer for edge and enterprise IT. By leveraging platforms like Stratus ztC Edge and Stratus ztC Endurance, businesses can achieve unparalleled reliability, scalability, and efficiency—whether they’re modernizing legacy systems or deploying cutting-edge AI solutions.