More customers choosing to support e-mail/collaboration with 99.999% uptime

Stratus Technologies, Inc announced today that electronic mail/collaboration ranks third among applications using the company's industry-standard fault-tolerant ftServer systems, which deliver uptime reliability of better than 99.999%.

Microsoft Exchange popularity on ftServer systems is surpassed only by ATM/point-of-sale and manufacturing production and control. Stratus Continuous Processing technology is often the preferred choice for mission- and business-critical applications requiring the highest levels of uptime reliability possible.

The installed base of Exchange Server 2003 is projected to grow nearly 300% over the next year and will overtake all other versions of Exchange Server by the end of 2005, according to The Radicati Group. Industry analysts peg the number of seats in the 100 to 130 million range. More than 100 firms around the world - from 25-person offices to Fortune 100 companies - have chosen the Stratus ftServer platform to host Exchange to ensure that the software's capabilities are always available to all users whenever they need it.

"When you flick a light switch in your office, you expect the lights to go on every time without fail," said Denny Lane, Stratus director of product development. "The movement of Exchange onto ftServer systems is a clear indication that businesses are seeing Exchange capabilities in much the same way - as mission-critical and needing that same level of never-fail performance."

For example, Grupo Salinas in Mexico has taken delivery of 12 Stratus ftServer 3300, 5600 and 6600 servers to support the 25 000 Microsoft Exchange users and 7 000 Lotus Notes users in its four companies, which include retail chains and financial institutions. Grupo Salinas had considered outsourcing these operations to IBM but instead chose Stratus ftServer systems. The Stratus servers are displacing clustered servers from HP.

Microsoft Exchange software is the way work gets done in many offices and companies today. It has grown to become a business productivity tool, a means of communication, a mechanism for collaboration, an administrative necessity enabling day-to-day interaction among and between people.

"It's no surprise that many customers also want and need the assurance of uptime availability that Stratus ftServer systems so consistently provides," said Lane.

Independence Air, America's newest low-fare airline based in Washington, DC, depends on Exchange Server for part of its revenue stream. Customers receive reservation information and confirmations via e-mail, so every outage has a direct effect on cash flow. In 2004, the airline moved Exchange from conventional servers to two Stratus ftServer W Series 3300 servers to ensure maximum uptime.

"The Stratus servers have become a critical piece of our infrastructure because of how heavily we use Exchange to communicate with our customers," said Miguel Sian, Independence Air's manager of systems engineering. "We experienced inexplicable virtual memory leaks when we ran Exchange on conventional servers. Since we switched to Stratus servers, we have had no downtime."

Stratus was first in the industry to offer fault tolerance in an Intel processor-based server for the Windows operating system when it introduced the ftServer 5200 model in June 2001. The company has since expanded the number of ftServer models and lines and, in addition to Windows, Stratus now supports the Linux and VOS operating systems on Intel platforms.