Stratus Technologies Inc. is rolling out a new platform that brings its fault-tolerant Virtual Operating System environment to the Intel Architecture world.
The Maynard, Mass., company on Monday unveiled the first two models in the ftServer V Series, which are powered by Intel Corp.s Xeon chips but run Stratus VOS environment, which is aimed at transaction-heavy customers such as financial institutions and securities firms.
“This really completes our road map in helping move our customer base—with the operating system staying intact—to a server line that fits more easily with the Intel road map,” said Denny Lane, director of product marketing at Stratus.
It also standardizes the companys platforms, Lane said. Stratus now offers all of the operating systems it supports—Windows from Microsoft Corp., ft Linux and VOS—on Xeon-based systems. The majority of Stratus research and development dollars going forward will focus on the Intel architecture, according to officials.
In March, the company rolled out a line of fault-tolerant T Series servers aimed at the telecommunications industry. Both the T and V series lines originated within Stratus Windows-based W Series.
The new V Series systems come in the two-way 200 model and four-way 400 model, and offer customers better performance at a lower cost than the companys high-end Continuum systems, which run the VOS and HP-UX Unix OS from Hewlett-Packard Co., Lane said.
The Intel-based V Series systems, which are available immediately, offer three to five times the performance of the Continuum servers, at about 30 percent lower cost, he said.
Stratus sells two lines of servers, its Continuum family of high-end systems and a group of Wintel-based fault-tolerant servers. The latter systems feature at least two of each component running in lockstep, so if one component breaks down, the backup continues the process with no interruption.
Regarding VOS, Stratus had been rolling out a host of open-source tools and applications designed to enable users to integrate their VOS-based systems with other platforms. Included in the OpenVOS program were such technologies as Apache Web server and GNU C++.
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