MAYNARD, MA--(Marketwire - April 19, 2010) - To help mark its upcoming 30th anniversary, Stratus Technologies conducted the Stratus4Uptime contest to find the Stratus servers with the records for longest in production and longest without unplanned downtime.
Customers from around the world submitted nominations. One nominee's application manages the signaling that guides high-speed trains between Brussels and Paris. Another's controls the messaging system for commercial and military aircraft in Chile. A state lottery with more than 5,000 retail outlets and several hundred thousand daily transactions nominated a server having no unplanned downtime going back to mid-2006.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch described its 23-year reliance on Stratus products for its Advanced Edit & Routing application: "AER edits, formats, and routes in excess of 100,000 orders per day from branch office and online clients worldwide to stock exchanges and trading systems in the U.S. and Canada. The AER application has run on a Stratus platform since it was first implemented in 1987 and has never experienced downtime due to a hardware failure. This unique environment enables us to guarantee the highest availability for our customers."
Winners announced
Double Eagle Steel Coating Company (DESCC), a Dearborn, Michigan manufacturing plant, has been running critical applications on the same Stratus server for 17 years. A supplier to the automotive industry, DESCC installed a Stratus XA/R10 continuous processing system in 1993, the same year Bill Clinton was sworn in as U.S. president, Mosaic 1.0 enabled Web browsing, and Linus Torvalds brought Linux to the world. DESCC has run a variety of enterprise resource planning operations on the Intel i860-based server, and still does today. "Around Y2K we thought it might be time to update the hardware, but we just didn't get around to it," said Phil Hogan, IT engineer. "The uptime performance and reliability of the server has never been a cause for concern. It's second to none."
Pittsburgh-based Highmark, Inc. processes all Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) claim submissions from doctors and hospitals -- approximately 170 million last year -- on a Stratus Continuum 1229. The server has operated with no unplanned downtime since February 2001 -- in fact, it hasn't been rebooted for more than four years. "For uptime reliability, nothing can touch Stratus," said Sharon Wilfong, software programmer II at Highmark. "Some of our servers are 15 years old. That's unheard of."
"People don't pay much attention to our servers because they don't have to; they just work," said David C. Laurello, Stratus president and CEO. "Our average server is on the job for more than seven years. The Stratus4Uptime contest prodded long-time and recent customers alike to ask themselves, 'just how long have those Stratus servers in the corner been humming away?' We got an incredible cross-section of global accounts and applications that depend on Stratus servers every day, year after year."
Today, Stratus ftServer® systems are powered by Intel Xeon 5500 Series multi-core processors, and run Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VMware vSphere 4. Since being introduced in 2001, ftServer systems have consistently operated at nearly 99.9999 percent uptime (or 32 seconds of unplanned downtime annually). Recently announced Stratus Avance™ software creates a high-availability computing platform using general-purpose x86 servers to deliver uptime of better than 99.99 percent for Windows and Linux applications.
About Stratus Technologies
Stratus Technologies focuses exclusively on helping its customers keep critical business operations online without interruption. Business continuity requires resiliency and superior availability throughout the IT infrastructure, including virtual environments. Stratus delivers a range of solutions that includes software-based high availability, fault-tolerant servers, availability consulting and assessment, and remote systems management services. Based on its 30 years of expertise in product and services technology for total availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries. For more information, visit www.stratus.com.
© 2010 Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All rights reserved.
Stratus and ftServer are registered trademarks of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. The Stratus Technologies logo and Avance are trademarks of Stratus Technologies Bermuda Ltd. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
Contact Information:
Ed Marshall
Beaupre & Co. Public Relations
603-559-5816
www.stratus.com