Stratus debuts dual-core fault tolerant server

Stratus Technologies is bringing the power and performance of dual-core processors to its line of Windows-based fault tolerant servers with the introduction of the ftServer Wseries 5700 system.

Stratus executives say the two-way server, which includes two processing cores on each piece of silicon for a total of four processing engines, provides a 25% performance improvement over its existing four-processor ftServer Wseries 6600 server. In addition, the 5700 is smaller, coming in a 4U form factor, as opposed to the 10U 6600, with power demands of 1300 watts vs. 2200 watts for the 6600.

The 5700 starts at around $40,000, about half the price of the 6600. The 6600, which is priced starting at about $90,000, offers more memory – up to 24G bytes compared to 16G bytes for the 5700 – and a larger on-chip cache – 4M bytes vs. 2M bytes so applications such as large databases that draw on big amounts of cache will continue to run better on the 6600, says Denny Lane, director of product management at Stratus.

“But standard applications such as databases and server consolidation will run better on the 5700,” he says. “People are seeing hardware getting faster and faster so they can put more and more virtual workloads on there, but the risk is that old adage if you put all your eggs in one basket, you better have a pretty strong basket. That’s what we provide: the strongest basket out there.”

Fault tolerant systems are designed to provide extremely high reliability with multiple system components that operate in lockstep so that if one component fails another picks up and the system keeps running. In the past the systems, including HP’s NonStop line of servers, were based on proprietary hardware.

But recently, systems vendors have been focusing on making the systems less costly by building them on industry standard hardware. HP, for example, now builds its NonStop on Intel’s Itanium processor.

Stratus introduced its lower-cost, Xeon based servers in 2003 in an effort to bring highly reliable computing to cost conscious customers. It has been expanding the Wseries since then.

The ftServer 5700 supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and performs at better than 99.999% uptime, the company says.

The server, with 2.8 GHz dual-core Xeon processors is expected to be generally available by the end of the month and come with the option of Stratus’ new Active Upgrade technology, which enables servers to be patched or upgraded while running. Today, systems have to be powered down and then rebooted to make system changes.