* Stratus and NEC release quad-core fault tolerant machine
These days, the pressure to keep your IT systems up and running is stronger than ever. There’s no room for downtime in the always-on business environment that most companies operate in. So it’s not surprising to hear the fault tolerant server vendors talk about increasing interest in their offerings.
In fact, Stratus and NEC joined forces two years ago to collaborate on the development of Intel-based fault tolerant servers, designed to be lower-priced and able to support standard operating systems in order to attract a wider range of customers to the fault tolerant design. Both Stratus and NEC have had Intel-based fault tolerant servers for a while now and both have servers that cost around $10,000 – a lot less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars these types of boxes used to cost.
This week, both vendors are announcing the latest in their Intel-based line-ups: a quad-core fault tolerant server. Since both Stratus and NEC have been using Intel chips for some time, it’s not surprising to see them joining the traditional x86 systems vendors like HP and IBM and updating their offerings with systems based on Intel’s new Clovertown, quad-core processor.
What’s interesting is to see fault tolerant servers becoming more powerful, while costs continue to stay reasonable. Pricing hasn’t been set for Stratus’ new ftServer 6200, though it will be more than Stratus’ current high-end offering, the ftServer 5700, which goes for around $35,000.
The ftServer 6200 “will allow [customers] to do more within a single box,” says Denny Lane, director of product marketing at Stratus. “You get almost a 50% performance boost just with the single [quad-core] chip and triple the performance with both sockets filled compared to the 5700.”
Stratus’ new ftServer 6200 comes configured with one or two 2.6 GHz quad-core Xeons. The system will be available with support for Windows in the second quarter and support for Red Hat Linux coming later in the third quarter.
By the way, Stratus is announcing the new machine at its Continuous Availability Summit in Orlando. The conference is aimed at looking at the high availability issue from a variety of perspectives. Get details on the summit here.
