Stratus servers--tolerant to a fault
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Let's be honest, there are segments of the IT market that are mighty frightened by the thought of an "ix" operating system. They've been tooling along with Windows, are perfectly happy with it (with Windows 2000, that is), and can't justify, or perhaps afford, what could well be the huge costs involved to port their life into a different environment. There are more than enough generic Windows servers out there to keep them happy for quite a while. But don't think because you want to stick to Windows it means you're relegated to the low end of data center computing. When generic isn't enough, Stratus Technologies will be happy to introduce you to its two newest products, the ftServer 5240 (2-way) and ftServer 6500 (4-way). Not only will these good boys let you play in Windows, but you can also put off worrying about IA-64 this and that. These are Xeon-powered boxes and the "ft" part of the moniker stands for "fault tolerant."
(Stratus Technologies isn't a start-up. It has a 21-year history behind it. It had a second coming in 1999 when Ascend Communications, Stratus' management, and Investcorp bought out the Stratus enterprise computer business. It's also global in as much as there is either a Stratus office or a Stratus accredited representative listed for nearly every region of the globe. They list none for the North or South Poles but those seem to be the only exclusions.)
If you've been backed into a cluster and are about to run down the hall to ask the kid working in the closet about fault tolerant servers, here's the skinny from Stratus' standpoint: The ftServer architecture uses replicated hardware components to eliminate single points of failure and safeguard data integrity. The replicated components both execute the same instructions at the same time, providing an active spare that continues to operate if its partner fails. Unlike a high- availability cluster, the Stratus approach does not impose recovery time. The end result is zero interruption in processing, zero loss of performance, and zero loss of data integrity, even in the event of component failure. And because the systems contain hot-swappable components, they can be replaced online while your ftServer system and applications continue normal operations.
There is room for confusion because further down the page Stratus claims to 99.9997 percent uptime (or greater--and there's a daily updated "uptime meter" based on Stratus' installed systems on its website) for its ftServer line. Even though that's a relatively small percentage, it's not really zero, and no down time is the expected nature of a fault tolerant server. Larry Sherman, Director of Technical Marketing for Stratus, jumped on the issue in this manner: "There is always the chance that both components may fail. It's unlikely but nothing is perfect. However, we've found that the vast majority of true downtime events are the result of software failures." (Linux shops need not giggle at this juncture. There's no suggestion that this affliction is limited to Windows environments. Stratus is also involved with HP-UX on its Continuum line and has its own VOS proprietary operating system.)
What Sherman does stress, however, is the reliability of fault tolerant hardware compared to clustering environments. Fault tolerance offers no time delay in its hardware fallback, where delays with clusters can typically range from several seconds to several minutes. Small as those intervals might be within the grand scheme of events, they're unacceptable to a wide variety of vertical markets such as brokerage houses, banking, manufacturing, 9-1-1 service providers, and even gaming. To be fair, IBM claims that its critical markets run parallel servers in their cluster environments. However, hardware and management costs for such an arrangement can be prohibitive in the mid-market where servers such as the 5240 and 6500 could prove to be bargains ($49,000 for the 5240 and $65,000 for the 6500, in base trim).
Would running Stratus' fault-tolerant servers lower your bottom line? TalkBack below or e-mail us with your thoughts.
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