Customers Rate Stratus' Service and Support "Competitively Superior" in Independent Survey

MAYNARD, MA--(Marketwire - Apr 19, 2011) - Global IT executives rated technical service and support from Stratus Technologies well ahead of IBM, HP and Dell, according to results published by ITIC Corporation from its 2010-2011 Global Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey. ITIC conducted its independent Web-based survey of 470 corporate IT and C-level executives worldwide from November 2010 through February 2011. The survey's objective was to poll executives on the reliability of 14 of the most popular server hardware platforms and 18 of the top server OS distributions.

Eighty-four percent of Stratus ftServer customers gave the company ratings of Excellent or VeryGood. The next closest rating of 76 percent was from customers of HP; IBM and Dell scored 72 and 70 percent, respectively. The other three also received Poor and Unsatisfactory ratings from some customers, while Stratus had no low ratings. "Stratus received customer kudos for superior service and support," ITIC reported in its findings.

According to ITIC, Stratus won rave reviews from mid-market and enterprise customers for the depth and breadth of its technical service and support and the willingness of its support staff. A survey respondent interviewed said, "In the rare instance we have occasion to call Stratus support, they are extremely responsive and always willing to do whatever it takes to resolve the issue."

Embedded level-one service
The survey revealed that the service and support issues that irk IT managers most are lengthy waits for replacement parts for their servers and incompatibilities among the server hardware, server OSs and third-party applications. The latter point left IT managers "scrambling to escalate support issues to get the fix in a reasonable amount of time." Delays and incompatibilities are not a factor with Stratus ftServer systems thanks to the fully redundant fault-tolerant architecture and pro-active availability monitoring and management services.

"A faulty component or even a complete CPU failure will have no ill affect on applications running on an ftServer system when the issue occurs or later during repair. Business continues uninterrupted," said Roy Sanford, Stratus chief marketing officer. "The sophisticated diagnostics and system management capabilities in our server's Automated Uptime software layer constantly monitor over 500 server components and sensors, and manage system resources to protect against downtime and data loss. Combine that with our proactive service model and that's how we achieve mainframe-class performance from an industry-standard x86 server that's not only affordable, but incredibly simple to use and manage."

ftServer uptime assurance best-in-class
The survey also asked customers to rate server reliability, stability and performance, with best-in-class being one to five minutes of annual downtime. The Stratus ftServer 4500 and 6300 series models turned in almost identical top-end rankings (75 percent) as IBM's System z mainframe (76 percent), HP's Integrity and Fujitsu's Primequest and Primergy (74 percent) servers.

About Stratus Technologies
Stratus delivers uptime assurance for the applications its customers depend on most for their success. With its resilient software and hardware technologies, combined with proactive availability management, Stratus products help save lives and protect the business and reputations of companies, institutions, and governments the world over. To learn more about worry-free computing, visit www.stratus.com.

© 2011 Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All rights reserved.

Stratus and ftServer are registered trademarks of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. The Stratus Technologies logo is a trademark of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.