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Stratus' W Series 2300 Lowers Price Of Fault-Tolerant Computing

With the introduction of its new entry-level ftServer W Series 2300 fault-tolerant server, Stratus Technologies Inc announced that the benefits of 99.999 percent uptime reliability and business process continuity are now available for more applications than ever before, at record-setting unit prices as low as $10,000 per server in volume.

The W Series 2300 server is ideal for large, decentralized deployments at remote locations where lights-out system management is desirable, such as distribution centers, warehouses, branch offices and retail chains, as well as for public safety computer-aided dispatch applications in small-to-medium size municipalities. This Intel Xeon processor-based server will compete effectively against low-end cluster servers by providing single points of failure, standby-server configurations and high-end simplex servers.

"At Motorola, our goal is to deliver public safety solutions that exceed the industry's expectations of mission-critical systems, as we have done with our new Digital Justice Solution Select (DJSS)," said Kevin Tapply, vice president of Motorola Communications & Electronics Inc., Worldwide Public Safety Solutions, Integrated Solutions Division. "Continually pushing system uptime to higher levels plays a big part in achieving that goal. The W Series 2300 enables us to offer the entire DJSS suite of software products, including CAD, Records, Mobile, Field Reporting and Mobile Mapping in a single rack of compact, cost-effective fault-tolerant servers that deliver five-nines availability for both the hardware and operating system. It's a simple, all-inclusive, ultra-reliable solution for mid-tier municipalities and public safety authorities."

Supporting Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Edition, the highly affordable W Series 2300 system provides end users with the same component and subsystem redundancy and uptime reliability as all other ftServer models. Its radically different design, however, makes it 22 percent smaller and 63 percent lighter than the previous entry-level model. Like a duplex home, two identical physical servers reside side-by-side on the same printed circuit board, running in precision lockstep and functioning as one logical server. Should a component malfunction, its partner component is an active spare that continues normal operation without system downtime, data loss, or performance degradation.

A "Cluster Buster"

An IT manager challenged with hitting a low unit cost per server in a widely distributed environment generally faces high deployment and maintenance costs or sacrifices high availability in order to achieve the low price point. While simple and low cost, simplex servers typically lack uptime reliability and sophisticated remote servicing technology. High-availability clusters offer improved reliability for a higher price, but do not lend themselves to distributed computing environments because they're difficult to deploy, manage and maintain.

By comparison, the ftServer W Series 2300 system is as easy to deploy as a simplex server; any application written for Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition will load and run without modification, and will immediately benefit from operating in a fault-tolerant computing environment. The Stratus ActiveService Technology transparently handles the vast majority of system management and maintenance tasks remotely over an electronic service network, relieving the customer's technical staff of that time-consuming and costly responsibility.

This ftServer model is the first to use the new Virtual Technician Module (VTM). This remote access adaptor, with its own power and network connections, is Stratus' next-generation out-of-band system management processor. Regardless of the server's operational state, the VTM enables a service engineer to perform advanced remote diagnosis, troubleshooting and remediation.

"We've taken 99.999 percent uptime reliability and operational simplicity beyond the data center, beyond the departmental server, and to the outer reaches of the distributed computing model with the W Series 2300 system," said James A. Gargan, Stratus senior vice president of worldwide marketing. "Once again, Stratus makes a price/performance breakthrough for fault tolerance and the ftServer family and opens broad new market opportunities for our reseller partners."