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Uptime Assurance Solutions for Public Safety and Government

Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) deal with emergencies 24/7/365. Server downtime shouldn’t be one of them.

Advances in computer technology, the 911 system, and public safety software applications have helped to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of PSAPs and first responders.

Public safety 911 call takers, dispatchers, and first responders all depend on the applications and information managed by computer systems to protect lives and property. It is no longer just the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) application that it is mission-critical; it is also the supporting applications that provide the information needed to assure the efficiency, effectiveness, and safety of emergency response operations. This includes:

  • Records Management Systems (RMS) that provide real-time access to dispatch logs, and police, fire, rescue, motor vehicle, court and corrections records.
  • Deployment of next-generation 911 systems (NG9-1-1) that enable call intake, recording, and dispatch of voice, text, images, video, and digital information regardless of the source.
  • Geographic Information Systems (GIS) used for call location mapping and vehicle location.
  • Mobile communications for voice and data.

The key to achieving the server uptime required for mission-critical public safety applications is to detect and prevent failures before they happen, not simply to react after the failure has occurred. Stratus fault-tolerant ftServer systems and Stratus Avance high-availability software deliver the highest uptime levels in the industry for mission-critical PSAP applications.

Get Public Safety Uptime
Public Safety
“Seconds are a precious commodity in the business of life safety, property protection, and crime prevention and investigation.”
- Gary J. Thomas, Assistant Chief/9-1-1 Coordinator, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

Preventing unplanned downtime was an essential criterion for Allegheny County’s Emergency Services 9-1-1 Division. Read how they prepared for every kind of disaster.
  1. KEY SOLUTIONS
  2. CASE STUDIES
  3. TESTIMONIALS
  4. RESOURCES

Stratus support technology, built into our fault-tolerant server hardware and high-availability software, automatically detects and resolves faults, and enables advanced online remote service. You can rely on Stratus and our partners’ uptime expertise in applications such as:

  • Computer-aided dispatch (CAD)
  • Records management systems (RMS)
  • Mobile communications
  • E911
  • Geographic information systems & mapping (GIS)
  • Public safety answering points (PSAP)
  • Courts and jails management
  • Photo imaging
  • Automatic fingerprint identification system(AFIS/APIS)
  • Peripheral interface switch
  • Case management
  • Microsoft Exchange Server
Allegheny County Emergency Services 9-1-1 Division

Allegheny County’s Emergency Services 9-1-1 Division handles 4,500 to 5,000 calls for police, fire and EMS dispatch services each day. Preventing unplanned downtime was a non-negotiable criterion in the county’s RFP process, and a primary reason for installing Stratus ftServer systems. At the County’s primary site, two CAD applications run in virtual machines (VMs) on one ftServer system while a second ftServer system supports the Microsoft SQL CAD database. The overflow/disaster recovery site mirrors primary-site operations in near real-time and can take over complete operations in a very short period of time.

Read the case study (PDF)
St. Charles County Department of Dispatch and Alarm

Dispatch and Alarm is a county government PSAP in Missouri that supports 34 fire stations, 16 ambulance bases, and over 120 mobile units. It responds to over 40,000 calls a year serving a population of over 350,000 citizens. And, they have just one IT manager. They require flawless CAD performance, 24 x7. Even regularly planned maintenance poses significant problems. That’s why they chose Stratus. According to Travis Hill, IT Manager, “We’ve been running our original Stratus ftServer system for nine years now with absolutely no downtime.”

Read the case study (PDF)
Ambulance Service of New South Wales

The Ambulance Service of New South Wales is the third largest in the world responding to a request for assistance every 28 seconds; that’s over one million calls per year. Downtime is not an option. They must be operational 24x7. Their primary data center supports four dispatch centers. Additionally, they maintain a mirrored disaster recovery site. They chose Stratus ftServers because they are field-proven to provide the highest achievable levels of uptime and are easier to manage than alternative solutions.

Read the case study (PDF)
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport

More passengers travel through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport than any other on the planet. In 2010, the airport added a new Centralized Command and Control Center (C4) to provide a single point for managing police, fire, and emergency medical services. A Stratus ftServer system was chosen because of its resilient technology, 24/7 uptime assurance, and proactive availability monitoring and management services.

Read the Case Study (PDF)




More than 300 PSAPs rely on Stratus uptime solutions to keep public safety applications up and running. Here is what some of them are saying:

“Seconds count with 911, so we can’t tolerate an outage of our Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system. The Stratus ftServer system offered a cost-effective way to get the continuously available computing we were looking for.”

Tracy Jarman
Deputy Chief
San Diego Fire & Life Safety Services

“The proactive monitoring that Stratus provides is certainly a huge advantage, because it means we don’t have to do all that work on our own.”

Roger Hanssen
Director, Information Technology
Ambulance Service of New South Wales

“We’ve been running our original ftServer system for nine years now with absolutely no downtime.”

Travis Hill
IT Manager, Department of Dispatch and Alarm
St. Charles County, Missouri

“During any server downtime, Avance software ensures the continuation of processing automatically, without any data loss and without intervention by a system administrator. Other virtualization solutions didn’t achieve this as seamlessly.”

Arndt Schnuetgen
Senior Consultant
MTS Systemhaus

“We chose ftServer because of the cast iron guarantee of 99.999+% uptime; the simplicity of installing, implementing and supporting it (and the associated savings) and Stratus’s track record.”

Mark Appleyard
Managing director
MIS System Engineering

“We looked at the Stratus ftServer as a platform that would give us internal redundancy to ensure that if something broke, the system kept going and could be repaired on the fly.”

Roger Hanssen
Director, Information Technology
Ambulance Service of New South Wales

“I’ve been very pleased with the performance of the Stratus hardware and the support I’ve gotten from them…We have not experienced any unplanned downtime in five years.”

Dan Negris
CAD Administrator,
Department of Information Technology
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport

“Even though we scarcely believed it ourselves, the Avance software implementation really did take only about 20 minutes — including virtualization and high availability. We could not have done it in this way with other solutions.”

Eike Schinke
Lengede Township

“It takes a very strong and stable system, not only to produce that data, but also to make sure it’s available without fail...That’s what Stratus and TriTech do for us. There is no doubt in my mind that this technology has helped us save lives.”

Bob Watts
Director, Department of Dispatch and Alarm
St. Charles County, Missouri

Protecting PSAP Applications From Downtime

Strategies for Safeguarding the Mission-Critical Applications that First Responders Depend Upon. If you are considering a technology upgrade for legacy software or are about to publish an RFP for updating all or part of your PSAP operations, it is important to understand what it takes to minimize unplanned downtime for your applications and systems. Protecting PSAP Applications from Downtime is an ebook that addresses different strategies to improve the availability of mission-critical applications and minimize the possibility of disruptions caused by server failure. It describes the advantages and disadvantages of dedicated servers, cluster technology, virtualization, high availability and fault-tolerance.

Read the White Paper (PDF)
Stratus ftServer Architecture for Windows Environments: Automatic 99.999+% for Microsoft Windows Operating Environments

This paper presents an overview of Stratus uptime assurance technology for ftServer Systems running Microsoft Windows. Fundamentals behind the purpose-built design are explained in detail.

Read the white paper (PDF)
ftServer 2700, 4700, and 6400 Family Product Sheet

Sixth-generation Stratus® ftServer® systems deliver affordable continuous availability, comprehensive data protection and up to four times the performance of previous ftServer generations. Powered by mult-core Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel QuickPath Architecture, the ftServer 2700, 4700, and 6400 models feature Microsoft® Windows Server® and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, operating environments.

Read about the ftServer sixth-generation family (PDF)




Protect PSAP Applications from Downtime

Download the Free eBook

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Public Safety Survey 2012

How does your PSAP stack up? Download the survey results

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TESTIMONIAL

“TriTech and Stratus worked alongside our staff to ensure that our CAD and disaster recovery software and hardware is fully redundant and can be fully operational during a disaster scenario.”

- Paul Gareau
Manager of IT Services
Emerrgency Medical Care, Inc.