Stratus extends fault-tolerance reach

Stratus Technologies is pushing into managed services, where it hopes its expertise in high availability will attract customers in such industries as financial services, e-commerce and manufacturing, where continuous uptime is critical.

At its Stratus World user conference in Las Vegas this week, the company expects to launch its Solutions Services Group, which will work with partners to help customers create, deploy and manage IT environments that are always on - from the server to the network to the applications. This summer, Stratus plans to unveil its Continuous Availability service platform, which is designed to give customers greater insight into and control over their systems (see graphic below).

The managed services are a departure for Stratus, which has offered professional services in the past, but for the most part limited to the deployment of its fault-tolerant systems. Now Stratus will offer its fault-tolerant expertise across the IT environment.

Hotel Booking Solutions, which handles availability and reservations for some of the world's leading hotels and travel Web sites, is a Windows shop that has used a Stratus ftServer as a fault-tolerant platform for its database for about three years. In the third quarter of last year, the company, which co-locates in Equinix data centers, began looking for a managed-services provider as it planned to move data centers and prepared for expansion.

"I wanted to move up to a managed-service approach and basically let our company focus on what we do best, which is writing software, and get out of the business of handling big production IT," says Greg Berman, vice president of engineering for the Atlanta-based company.

The company was drawn to Stratus hardware because the vendor partners with Microsoft to provide 99.999% uptime on Windows. Discovering that Stratus could also offer remote managed services for a continuously available business environment came as a surprise, Berman says.

"We went down a path that included IBM, EDS and other household names," Berman says. "Stratus was able to take our network design, they were able to take our overall Equinix design and run it through their models to tell us whether it was going to hold up or not."

The key advantage with Stratus is that the company zeroed in on the 99.999% availability that the online business needed, Berman says. "They were the only people from a consulting perspective that could walk us down that path to validate a lot of the design assumptions that were made," he says.