Cliff SaranHardware supplier Stratus has licensed its high-availability
Windows server technology to PC manufacturer NEC, a move that paves
the way to high availability on affordable hardware.
Last week, NEC announced it was to license the Stratus
technology for a new line of high-availability PC servers.
With an entry-level price of about $12,000 (£8,100), NEC claims
the new Express5800 fault-tolerant servers represent a significant
reduction in the entry-level price for high-availability machines.
The Express5800 can be configured as a one or two-way systems.
Stratus offers dual and triple redundancy in its own server
family. The servers can be configured with up to 4Gbytes of memory
and are based on Stratus' version of Microsoft's Windows 2000
device driver software in an attempt to reduce the risk of
operating system crashes.
Applications run in step on the three motherboards
simultaneously. When one fails, Stratus said another motherboard
takes over running the application.
Through a service contract with Stratus, a new motherboard is
then dispatched to the end-user automatically, to replace the
failed component.
Stratus builds servers such as the FT Server 6500, which it
claims can offer 99.999% availability on Windows 2000.