Stratus Makes Cash Pledge For Fault-Tolerant Server

Stratus Technologies has pledged $50,000 (£30,785) for any customers that are hit with unplanned downtime with its latest fault-tolerant server.

Stratus announced its Zero Downtime $50K Guarantee program, which covers its ftServer 6300, the latest of its fault-tolerant systems powered by Intel’s “Nehalem”-based Xeon processors and running Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 operating system.

The program says that if problems with Stratus’ hardware, system software or operating system lead to unplanned downtime within the first six months of buying a system, Stratus will give the customer $50,000 in cash or product credit.

The program is open to all customers worldwide, and will end 26 February, 2010.

“When customers buy what they think is a fault-tolerant solution, they should expect a system that, for all practical purposes, has no unscheduled downtime,” Roy Sanford, Stratus’ chief marketing officer, said in a statement.

Stratus’s fault-tolerant systems are designed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime – or about 32 seconds of unscheduled downtime a year, according to the company. The servers offer redundant key components running in lockstep, so that if one component fails, the system will continue running with the other component, with no interruption to the customer.

The failed component can then be taken out and replaced while the server continues to run, and the new component will be brought into synch with the rest of the system.

The ft6300 is powered by Intel’s quad-core Xeon X5570 chips, running at 2.93GHz. The system is aimed at high-transactional, large data center applications, such as credit card processing and high-speed ATM networks. It’s also good for large database applications and virtualised data centre environments, according to Stratus.

The server Power Bundles #1 and #2 comprise the Windows OS, disk drives and supporting peripherals.