Going fault-tolerant for less

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The Boston Stock Exchange, which plans to deploy its Intel-based, fault-tolerant server in April, is not alone in looking at lower cost alternatives.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently announced that it was migrating its message-switched network off of aged Philips DS714 mainframe computers and onto four of Stratus' Xeon-based ftServer 6400s.

The FAA's National Airspace Data Interchange Network handles data filed by every plane that enters or leaves American airspace. The network, which processes more than 1.5 million messages per day, is the data interchange between the U.S. and other nations to communicate flight plans for commercial and general aviation and weather and advisory notices to pilots.

Downtime is not an option. But while the FAA was looking for a reliable system, it also wanted something that would be economical and easy to manage. The mainframes the agency was using, originally manufactured in 1968 and upgraded with new processors in 1981, had been getting increasingly harder to maintain, support and write code for.

"We looked at a lot of products, including HP NonStop computers. But there are not many out in the market, and it really boiled down to Stratus offering a more cost-effective solution," says Andy Isaksen, computer scientist for the FAA in Atlanta.

The Stratus ftServer "offered us the opportunity to program in the Windows environment, which made a few people nervous, but Stratus has been in the Windows fault-tolerant market for a long time," Isaksen says.

Isaksen will install two Stratus ftServers in his production network - one in Atlanta and the other in Salt Lake City. Two other identical servers are part of a test bed for running applications.

"The two centers run in a load-shared mode and at any instance can take over for each other," Isaksen says. "If one server dies, the other one almost instantly takes over so there is no loss of service to the aviation community."

The servers will be deployed in April and go online by early next year, Isaksen says.