Solutions Services Industry Solutions Products Client Success Stories Partners Support & Documentation Site Map
Columbus Data Services Depends on Stratus® ftServer® System for ATM Transaction Processing
Events following Hurricane Katrina experience inspire confidence in Stratus and S1
"It’s not just the product; it’s the people behind it. Our experience with S1 and Stratus has proven how true this is."

Ron Schuldt
President
Columbus Data Services

MAYNARD, MA, April 24, 2006 – Helping Columbus Data Services (CDS) ride out Hurricane Katrina has won Stratus Technologies a new contract to expand CDS’ ATM/EFT network, Stratus announced today. CDS, which has run S1 Corporation's Postilion® application on a Stratus® ftServer® W Series 4600 system since August 2005, is adding to its existing disaster recovery capabilities with a second fault-tolerant Model 4600 server to run the transaction processing application.

"Stratus and S1 went above and beyond to make sure we had what we needed to keep our business running smoothly, with the uptime protection of a fault-tolerant server, when flooding followed hurricane. Their proactive response and the performance of their products during the aftermath of Katrina make the addition of a second Stratus ftServer system a very easy choice," said Ron Schuldt, president of CDS.

Located in Dallas (formerly New Orleans), CDS provides small- to mid-size financial institutions and ATM deployers a single source for complete ATM programs that include transaction processing services.

Passing the test
The need to sustain continuous service for some 18,000 independently owned ATMs -- and growing transaction volumes -- was behind Columbus Data Services' decision last summer to move its Postilion software from a two-server cluster onto a Stratus ftServer W Series system.

The Stratus server's built-in component redundancy yields an advantage sought by CDS: protection for 99.999 percent or higher availability without the overhead of managing two separate servers in the primary data center. The server fits smoothly with the EMC disk array where the application’s database resides. And with a cost-effective, high-performance Intel® Xeon® processor, plus headroom in memory and I/O, the ftServer W Series 4600 offers the company horsepower and capacity for the future.

For all these reasons, the fault-tolerant ftServer system has earned a place as CDS' server of choice for maintaining the high uptime levels required for the Postilion application, which runs in a standard Microsoft® Windows® operating system environment.

About a week after an uneventful and smooth migration onto the ftServer production system, a chain of events that started with Hurricane Katrina would put Stratus Technologies and its server to the test.

CDS' operations rode through the storm flawlessly. The company had been able to continue processing transactions in New Orleans remotely from its Dallas disaster recovery site; a generator provided electricity after public utilities could no longer operate. After the levee broke and New Orleans flooded, the decision was made to cut over ATM processing from New Orleans to Dallas.

S1 and Stratus had contacted CDS to offer help as events unfolded. With the recently installed ftServer system stranded in New Orleans for the foreseeable future, Stratus shipped a loaner ftServer system overnight to Dallas so that redundancy could be restored to CDS' transaction processing as soon as possible. As new Stratus customers, CDS management was pleasantly surprised at the cooperative support being extended -- a proactive response above and beyond any contractual obligation or service agreement.

"It’s not just the product; it’s the people behind it. Our experience with S1 and Stratus has proven how true this is," said Schuldt.

About Stratus Technologies
Stratus Technologies is a global solutions provider focused exclusively on helping its customers achieve and sustain the availability of information systems that support their critical business processes. Based upon its 25 years of expertise in server and services technology for continuous availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, life sciences, telecommunications, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries.

Stratus press contacts

For more information