Stratus Launches Perfect Performance Initiative For Servers

The company's Perfect Performance program guarantees that if a customer running Windows 2000 Advanced Server on a four-way, triple modular redundancy ftServer 6500 experiences any unplanned downtime during the first year, regardless of whether the downtime was caused by a hardware or operating system failure, Stratus will pay the customer $100,000 in cash or credit, said Jim Gargan, vice president of worldwide marketing at Stratus.

\

The guarantee applies to four-way ftServers with triple modular redundancy.

Gargan, who joined the company after heading IBM's xSeries server business, called this the strongest guarantee ever put out by a server vendor. "For customers who doubt Windows is an enterprise-class operating system, this will remove the doubt," Gargan said. "We've been experiencing 99.9998 percent availability for all our servers shipped over the past year. Everybody talks three nines, four nines, four nines plus five. We're talking total availability."

This type of guarantee is definitely aimed at enterprise customers, said Ron Kramer, vice president and COO of All Computer Solutions, a Portland, Maine-based solution provider that works with Stratus' servers. "Basically, Stratus is putting their money where their mouth is," he said. "I personally believe they won't pay a nickel on this. They know and I know [that their systems won't go down."

Still, the guarantee will help customers become more aware of Stratus' technology, Kramer said.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

Other server vendors offer availability guarantees, but Gargan said the penalty phase is typically the cost of one month's service revenue. "We back up ours with a 100 percent guarantee," he said. "No tricks."

The guarantee comes with all ftServer 6500 systems sold starting immediately, as long as the customer buys the triple modular redundancy option and business-critical services, Gargan said. It is good for one year from the date of purchase. After the first year, Stratus will hook up customers with third-party companies for availability insurance, if they desire, he said.

The ftServer 6500, based on the 1.6GHz Intel Xeon MP processor, starts at about $150,000.