Stratus To Unveil Fault-Tolerant Four-Way Wintel Servers

Stratus Technologies

One of the models, the ftServer 6500, is a four-way server for enterprise-class Microsoft Windows Advanced Server computing environments. It can can be configured with one, two or four Intel Xeon MP processors.

The other model, the ftServer 5240, comes with one or two 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processors. Both offer 99.999 percent uptime, company officials said.

The real winner with these new servers is Microsoft, as it brings its software into enterprise-class environments, said Ron Kramer, vice president and COO of All Computer Solutions, a Portland, Maine-based solution provider that has seen the new servers.

For low-cost fault-tolerant servers, solution providers have been limited to two-way Pentium 4 models, Kramer said. However, with the new Stratus servers, they can now offer up to four-way models with multithreading and the ability to integrate directly with Microsoft applications, he said.

While other solutions provide failover and fail-back capabilities, the Stratus servers can maintain the state of the application in the case of a system crash, a capability Kramer said is not available in the Unix space. For example, if 100 users are connected to an application server running a Microsoft application and someone is entering a keystroke when a problem occurs, the Stratus server makes sure the user is masked from the problem.

"That's huge. . . . This positions Microsoft business-critical applications in a level far superior to a Solaris or Unix environment," he said. "Where there is transactional centricity,that is, applications in banking, financial, emergency, health and medical areas, where failure is not an option,Stratus can deliver fault tolerance. There is no need to modify the applications."

About 60 percent to 70 percent of Stratus' business comes from the channel, said David Fleck, director of North American channels for the vendor. Stratus currently has about 150 solution providers worldwide and is looking for more partners in the retail banking, call center, public safety and manufacturing markets, he said.

Both servers are currently available. The list price of the ftServer 6500 starts at $65,000, which includes one processor and a factory-installed copy of Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The price of the ftServer 5240 with a similar configuration starts at $49,500.

The availability of the ft5240 means Stratus will stop selling its 800MHz Xeon-based ft5200 as soon as current stock is depleted, Fleck said.

NEC, which sells OEM versions of Stratus' fault-tolerant servers in the United States and abroad, is already selling the ft6500 in Japan, said Fleck. He did not know if NEC would bring either model into the U.S. market.