For this month’s customer spotlight, we’re taking a look at how downtime can affect travel and transportation. Located in Atlanta, Georgia, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is the world’s busiest airport, with nearly 90 million passengers traveling through the airport annually.

Who doesn’t love a good summer vacation at a far away destination? But before you can really start enjoying your trip, you have to get there. It sounds basic – pack, fly, enjoy – but nothing’s ever that easy. The more traveled fliers know to expect long lines at check in and maybe even delays on the runway. But one thing they aren’t expecting is getting caught in an emergency situation. Unfortunately, these things happen and the last thing you want is being in need of emergency services that are delayed because the control center is down.

It’s safe to say that no airport can tolerate system downtime, but what about the airport that has more travelers going through than any other airport on the planet? Stratus customer, Hartsfield-Jackson Airport has over 90 million travelers pass through their doors each year, and they recognized the critical need to be prepared to handle all types of emergencies. Therefore, in 2010 they added a new Centralized Command and Control Center (C4), providing a single point for managing incidents across its entire campus, which enables computer aided dispatch of police and fire units stationed at the airport. With the system being such a focal point in airport operations, security and safety, the importance of uptime was crucial. Although first responders could communicate via radio and phone, an application or server outage undoubtedly would hinder fast communication, and potentially put lives on the line.

The airport decided to take advantage of Stratus’ fault-tolerant ftServer system which lets the system seamlessly ride through issues that would cause a conventional server to crash. Additionally, unlike using a server cluster for redundancy, the ftServer system doesn’t require IT administrators to use special software scripts and systems management procedures to ensure uptime. Paired with the proven reliability and efficiency of RESPONSE CAD software, Stratus’ 24/7 uptime assurance and proactive monitoring gives dispatchers the stability they need for continuous real-time access to vital information and communications.

In five year’s Hartsfield hasn’t experienced any unplanned downtime – now that’s something to add to the bragging rights beyond being the busiest airport in the world!

Learn More: Protecting Emergency Response Applications at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

Starting this month, we will begin featuring stories about our customers in the Customer Spotlight Series, a new section of the blog that showcases the diversity and results our customers are seeing. This month’s spotlight is on Rexam, one of the world’s top five consumer packaging companies. Rexam is a manufacturer of consumer packaging and beverage cans, serving a number of markets including the beverage, personal care, healthcare and food markets.

As consumers, we demand the most from companies in this fast-paced world. The same applies to manufacturers. Consider the supply chain for Rexam and their customers such as Anheuser-Busch and Coca Cola. If they experience instances of downtime that slow down their production, the domino effect runs through various areas of their operations and supply chain, including replenishment of materials, orders and invoices. If any one of those areas is affected by downtime, the end consumer, not to mention the rest of the organizations involved in the supply chain, will be affected and the aftermath can include missed production goals, cost overruns and a tarnished reputation.

According to a recent Stratus Technologies survey conducted in partnership with IndustryWeek, in the first quarter of 2012, approximately one in every three manufacturers have experienced downtime affecting one or more of their manufacturing applications. For manufacturing plants like Rexam, running at full-capacity, downtime isn’t acceptable for operations. Whether it is planned or unexpected downtime, Rexam realized downtime was hurting their bottom line and was adding overhead. 

With 99.999+ percent uptime and no need for plant-level support, the Stratus fault-tolerant, high-availability servers were the choice for them. The servers were also appealing to Rexam because from the view of an application, they looked like ordinary Windows servers. This was important to Rexam because one goal was to minimize the training involved with this implementation. Availability was also an important element to Rexam’s decision to select Stratus for their 17 manufacturing plants.

 After the pilot tests from a single plant signaled the system was delivering expected levels of availability, Rexam implemented Stratus’ high-availability fault-tolerant servers  in the remaining 16 North American plants. 

In this day and age, finding opportunities to take the data center offline is hard enough on operations, let alone bearing the stresses of unplanned downtime. Heading into the summer months, Rexam is happy to ensure the end-users get the most out of their leisurely downtime, and don’t have to sweat from stresses of IT downtime.

For more on Rexam’s story, check out the Rexam Case Study.

I was on Spiceworks today and ran into this conversation about 100% uptime.I had a few thoughts but am interested in what others had to say, as well. Share them below, or on Spiceworks!

Most SLAs will claim 100% uptime (which most of you know is unattainable) with the provisions that “an outage doesn’t count if it is under 10 minutes” or caused by certain factors, or a host of other excuses.

Uptime, in the above context then, has two components: reliability and availability. Availability refers to the amount of time the server is working, and the reliability refers to the number of times the server fails.

To put it in a simpler context, imagine we are in a boat. Availability refers to the percentage of time in a given time period that we are out of the water, and reliability refers to the number of times we get wet in that same time period.

There are three typical solutions for business critical applications: clusters, fault-tolerant servers, or the cloud.

Microsoft clusters, which only work for cluster-aware applications, work as a team of servers. When one server fails, the next server takes over the application, however, whatever transaction was happening at the time of the fault is lost.

Fault-tolerant servers work in tandem: two servers are doing all the work all of the time, at the same time. If one fails, the application is still running and the users never know a fault has occurred. (Incidentally, with our Stratus servers, when a fault occurs or is about to occur, the server will call home to our service center for pro-active maintenance.)

This can be hard to imagine, so here is an analogy. For clusters, imagine a dance team enters a competition. They start the music and a dancer starts her number, but falls and breaks her ankle. A new dancer takes her place, the music is restarted, and the dancing continues.

For fault-tolerant servers, imagine the Rockettes. If one Rockette falls offstage, kicking and dancing is still happening.

On to the “cloud” option. Clouds, like Rackspace, Amazon Cloud, or even many parts of the Google brand , sound like a great plan. But clouds, despite their name, do not run on rainbows and unicorn dust. Their data and applications live on a physical server which is vulnerable to faults.

Just as an aside, a private cloud is another great option: hosting your own cloud on a high availability solution like a fault tolerant server or a cluster.

Rreading the fine print in SLAs is crucial. SLAs should be meaningful, and incur damages onto the company if they are broken. To give some perspective, if our ftserver customers incur ANY downtime at all for any reason, no matter how small, we pay $50,000. Again I say, responsible, customer-oriented companies have wiggle-proof SLAs.

Stratus® ftServer® systems are designed to use industry-standard hardware components and to support off-the-shelf operating systems so that they appear as standard x86 servers to third-party management tools. By adhering to industry-standard protocols, Stratus provides a suite of tools to manage ftServer systems both locally and remotely and to integrate them with a wide variety of third party management tools.

More importantly, this management capability is augmented by the fault-tolerant architecture of the ftServer system itself and the robust Service and Proactive Availability Management that back it up. This combination insures that ftServer systems seamlessly integrate within existing management frameworks and that they provide the highest levels of uptime and ease of management.

This session describes the tools available for monitoring and managing ftServer systems in a variety of scenarios ranging from local or remote configuration of a single server to integration with an enterprise management software suite controlling a large-scale heterogeneous server infrastructure.

Stratus^® ftServer^® systems are designed to use industry-standard hardware components and to support off-the-shelf operating systems so that they appear as standard x86 servers to third-party management tools. By adhering to industry-standard protocols, Stratus provides a suite of tools to manage ftServer systems both locally and remotely and to integrate them with a wide variety of third party management tools.

More importantly, this management capability is augmented by the fault-tolerant architecture of the ftServer system itself and the robust Service and Proactive Availability Management that back it up. This combination insures that ftServer systems seamlessly integrate within existing management frameworks and that they provide the highest levels of uptime and ease of management.

This session describes the tools available for monitoring and managing ftServer systems in a variety of scenarios ranging from local or remote configuration of a single server to integration with an enterprise management software suite controlling a large-scale heterogeneous server infrastructure.

Date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Time: 10:00AM ET

Speaker: Dan Fallon is a Consulting Product Manager for Stratus Technologies, Inc. He has over twenty years of experience managing a variety of hardware and software products in the computer industry. Dan is currently responsible for the Operating System and Storage product portfolio for the Stratus ftServer line of fault-tolerant servers.

Register for the WebEx here!