Stratus Technologies

Stratus Technologies is a Maynard, Massachusetts based producer of fault tolerant computers. Stratus Technologies is now (since 1999) what used to be called Stratus Computer founded in 1980. Stratus Computer was a Marlborough, Massachusetts based producer of fault tolerant mini computers. It competed with Tandem Computers and to a lesser extent Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minis. From 1985 to 1993 its computers were resold by IBM under the IBM System/88 brand.

History

The company's traditional markets have been financial services companies such as banks and stock exchanges. Beginning in the 1990s, the company moved into the telecommunications industry, particularly in the area of network management and custom services, with the result that its telecommunications revenues surpassed those from enterprise computing. This led to a buyout of the company by Ascend Communications (later acquired by Lucent Technologies).

The enterprise server portion of the business was of little interest to Ascend and that portion was spun off in a management buyout in 1999, with funding from international investment firm, Investcorp.

Now privately held, the Stratus Technologies of today is owned by private equity investors Investcorp and MidOcean Partners (formerly DB Capital Partners) as well as Intel Capital and NEC.

Products and customers

Its product line was originally based on Motorola MC68000 processors, but then migrated to Intel i860 processors and finally Hewlett-Packards' PA-RISC architecture. More recent systems are based on Intel processors and run VOS, Microsoft Windows 2003 and Linux. The original VOS operating system had many features copied from Multics and continues to be deployed on the current generation Stratus servers. Stratus has a home-grown UNIX product, based on the original UNIX, called FTX (Fault-Tolerant UNIX) and still supports it although it is not sold on new servers anymore. The company sells the VOS operating system running on V-series ftServers. Since August 2006, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is shipped and supported on T-series ftServers, while Windows Server 2003 ships and is supported on W-series ftServers. In 2006 Stratus purchased Emergent Network Solutions of Allen, TX. The ENTICE application from Emergent serves as the foundation for the Stratus Telecom solutions.

The company has recently started offering Stratus Avance, a virtualization product. Avance allows deployment of applications across high-availability virtual machines, freeing up existing servers while providing high availability.

Stratus has a large presence in Phoenix, Arizona and Maynard, Massachusetts, with a smaller presence in and Allen, Texas, in the USA and several worldwide offices, in locations such as the UK, the Netherlands, South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Japan.

The company has a vast customer base, but popular types of its customers include banks, emergency response centers (such as 911 in the USA), police departments, fire departments, hospitals, clinics, governments, credit card companies, stock exchanges, telcos/phone companies, Internet providers, and much more. This is by no means a complete list, but several Stratus customers fit into these categories.

External links

* [http://www.stratustelecom.com Stratus Telecom homepage]
* [http://www.stratus.com Stratus company homepage]
* [http://groups.google.com/group/stratalums Stratus Alumni Google Group homepage]