Information Technology Intelligence Consulting’s (ITIC) recent report on Continuous Availability with Stratus ftServer and Microsoft SQL Server provides a number of insights on what customers of the major hardware providers experience in terms of downtime. Here are some of the highlights:

– 83% of Stratus ftServer customers “rarely experience server hardware failures on each server
platform,” as compared to IBM Power Systems (77%), HP Integrity (73%), and Dell Power Edge
(72%.) Intel White Boxes, Oracle x86, Oracle SPARC , IBM System X and HP ProLiant all trailed
with scores between 52% and 64%.

– 54% of survey respondents say their business requires a minimum of 99.99% uptime — the
equivalent of 52 minutes of downtime per year.

– 1 out of 4 respondents said the hourly cost of downtime for each business-critical server or
application topped $100,000. Ten percent said hourly downtime losses exceeded $250,000.

– Since 2002, Microsoft’s SQL Server has been the most secure database platform. From January
2008 through November 2011, the National Institute of Standards and Technology recorded
only 22 security vulnerabilities for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 . In stark contrast,
NIST recorded 156 security vulnerabilities for Oracle’s 11g database server.

The report provides concrete statistics on what customers of Oracle, HP, Dell, IBM, and their
competitors should expect in terms of outages – and what solutions will offer better alternatives.
Delving into pricing, total cost of downtime and customer satisfaction, ITIC gives a comprehensive guide
to those looking for the best availability solution.

To read the report, click here.

While Stratus has been a global leader in Uptime Assurance for Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server customers for many years, recent performance advances in Xeon server technology and related storage subsystems has extended Stratus well into the world of legacy UNIX systems and databases. Coupled with SQL Server 2008R2, an exciting new market opportunity has developed – Mission Critical SQL running on Stratus ftServers. Now you can learn how to deploy a more available mission critical Windows/SQL based solution for less than a comparable UNIX alternative such as Oracle RAC. Learn how Stratus’s Uptime Assurance extends the HA Failover Clustering options for SQL and provide a superior solution.

Date: Wednesday, July 20, 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.

I had the chance to speak at the Microsoft Connected Health Conference in Chicago this week, where Stratus was among a number of Microsoft partners sponsoring this event. This was a well received conference with good insights on technology and services. Talking with practitioners and other partners also laid bare some limitations with Microsoft products – and why Microsoft embraces their healthcare partners so readily. A few important gaps in healthcare IT are solved with Stratus capabilities in line with key Microsoft products:

Microsoft SQL Server: It is the foundation of just about every EHR system. And few if any practice under 25 doctors or 100 users need Enterprise edition. However the Standard edition does not support high availability. So many practices that ask for high availability see their costs skyrocket because of this, along with the other costs involved with Windows Clustering. And yet many of these practices don’t have the IT expertise to install and manage Windows Clustering in the first place. The result? Most small to mid size EHR installations have NO high availability and are extremely vulnerable to these systems going down.

Answer? Stratus Avance and Microsoft SQL – provides high availability for any version of SQL Server, ease of implementation and operation so little IT knowledge is needed, and far lower costs to make this approach much more affordable to small and mid size practices.

Microsoft BizTalk: Is widely deployed for information exchange requirements so think HL7, EDI, CPOE, etc – critical healthcare applications which need to be available. Downtime for these systems can have serious consequenses. BizTalk is widely deployed for these kind of critical data interchange needs yet isn’t really supported by Windows Clustering – talking with several consulting partners who specialize in this area it’s a critical application need that doesn’t have a viable Microsoft high availability solution.

Answer? Stratus Avance or ftServer and Microsoft BizTalk – viewed as a single system, either of these Stratus solutions provide higher availability than Microsoft Clustering could hope to achieve, and give a powerful, yet cost effective solution for BizTalk high availability.

Microsoft has it right with it’s partner ecosystem.