Stratus Technologies is greatly expanding the support for standard Linux on its fault-tolerant servers.
The Maynard, Mass., company June 19 is announcing support for Red Hats Enterprise Linux AS 4 operating system across six system models, which includes a new line of servers aimed at the telecommunications industry.
Stratus has been able to offer standard Windows on the servers for several years, said Denny Lane, the companys director of product marketing.
“Now we are able to give customers a choice and offer them the same capability in the Linux space,” Lane said.
Four years ago, Stratus started offering its own variant of Linux, hardened so that it could run on the fault-tolerant servers, which offer replicated components—such as the processor, chip set and memory—running in lockstep.
The design gives customers high availability, with one component taking over for another in the case of a failure without interruption.
“Because of the immaturity of Linux, there was a lot of work to do to make it fault-tolerant,” Lane said.
The company in 2005 began offering standard Linux on select servers, but now is offering it on multiple systems.
The three enterprise systems offering the Red Hat OS are the ftServer one-way 2400, two-way 4300 and two-socket 5700 models—the latter running Intels dual-core Xeon processors.
All the systems can run either Linux or Microsofts Windows Server 2003, with no price differential.
Stratus new T Series for the telecommunications industry offers the T40 CO, T40 AC and T65 AC, all built with Stratus Continuous Processing architecture designed for the telco space.
The T40 CO is NEBS (network equipment building standards) Level 3 compliant for use in environmentally hostile situations; the T40 AC isnt.
Lane said Stratus will only offer the Red Hat operating system for now, but said that could change in the future.
“We will evaluate other distros,” he said. “We cant commit to when [Stratus may offer other distributions].”
Lane said initial discussions regarding a standard Linux OS 18 months ago were with SuSE Linux—now owned by Novell—but that demand by partners and customers convinced Stratus to switch gears and go with Red Hat.
Stratus systems also support Miracle Linux, a distribution available in Japan, he said.
The new systems will ship in the first week of August, Lane said.