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Powering 24 x 7 customer service and access to critical data with the Stratus^® ftServer^® System

When your company develops the most reliable Windows^®-based servers on the planet, availability and reliability inevitably top your list of priorities. That is exactly the case for the Service Operations Group at Stratus Technologies, which among its other duties, ensures that the database behind the company's ActiveService™ Manager (ASM) is always available - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across all time zones.

The ASM is visible as well as crucial because it is the Web-based service tool at the center of service call management for fault-tolerant Stratus^® ftServer^® systems. It's how customers and channel partners interact with the company's Customer Assistance Centers (CACs) in real time, which makes it an integral part of the Stratus approach to preventing server downtime.

The Service Operations Group had long planned to migrate the ASM's database from an older Stratus Continuum^® system onto the ftServer series. The time for action arrived as Oracle phased out its support for the Oracle 8i™ database, so the group opted for a scheduled upgrade of the ASM. Their chosen platform included the ftServer 6500 system, an Oracle 9i™ database, an EMC^® CLARiioN^® CX400 storage array, and Gigabit Ethernet.

"Minimum downtime and minimum risk are our watchwords for any upgrade to the ActiveService Manager's database," says John Green, Production Manager of the Service Operations Group at Stratus Technologies. "We anticipated that migrating the ASM's database to the ftServer system would help us more than meet these goals. The proof is in the doing, of course."

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Migration Like Clockwork

The company's customers and channel partners around the world depend on the ASM: They review call tickets (reports of potential problems) automatically created by ftServer systems, and they initiate and update support calls that are instantly routed to the appropriate resource at a Stratus CAC. Furthermore, the ASM displays the entire incident history of ftServer systems installed at a customer's site.

The ASM is part of the ActiveService Network, which allows around-the-clock monitoring and remote troubleshooting of Stratus servers located anywhere.

"The ASM empowers our customers and service professionals with two-way communication and information resources that speed time to resolution. Because Stratus does business globally, there is really no time of day or night when we can take the production system offline. We planned our hardware and database migration accordingly," says Green.

The Service Operations Group team scheduled the upgrade for a Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time to avoid interfering with prime business hours anywhere in the world (8 a.m.- 8 p.m. local time). The team chose a mature migration tool, the Oracle^® Import/Export utility. They paired this utility with uptime-maximizing techniques created by Stratus: the Migration Transaction Queue (MTQ) and the Fallback Transaction Queue (FTQ). Data were copied from the Oracle 8i to the Oracle 9i database while users continued reading and writing to the ASM.

Using Stratus' FTQ technique provided the safety net of being able to revert to the Oracle 8i database if anything were to go amiss during the transition. Data were then resynchronized after all transactions were fed into the Oracle 9i database running on the ftServer 6500 system.

Green notes that the impact of the successful migration proved minimal indeed. The more than 40 gigabyte database was in read-only mode for less than two hours, with a mere 15 minutes when the ASM was not accessible to users.

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Stability plus performance

After a migration that took place with the precision of a fine timepiece, the Service Operations Group is well pleased with the stability of the ftServer system. Green observes that technical professionals may be concerned about the risk in any migration involving a change to the operating system - in this case, from the HP-UX^® operating system to a Windows^® environment. But the superior uptime of the ASM following the move continues to validate the Service Operations Group's decision.

The group has been equally satisfied with the performance that the new platform has brought them. Both the CPU and disk storage on the older system had been running at high utilization rates between 60% to 100% busy. CPU utilization on the ftServer 6500 system has been running at only 20% to 30% busy under the same heavy (and growing) load; the EMC RAID storage has run between just 2% to 5% busy.

This leaves the database system that powers the ASM with plenty of capacity to handle an expanding workload. Should even more processing performance be needed, the group has the option to upgrade their current 2-way ftServer 6500 system to a 4-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) model.

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Reliability that shines

The Service Operation Group reports that managing the ftServer system on a day-to-day basis requires little time or attention. The group considers the system to be virtually self-sufficient during normal daily operation, which is a notable advantage for the organization's small staff. Without continuous access to the ASM, however, the other benefits would not be enough.

"Stratus customers expect the gold standard of reliability - and they get it in their servers. The infrastructure that supports their systems has to function at the same exceptional level. Every day, our own ActiveService Manager is a shining example of how well ftServer systems protect the availability of essential database applications, " said Green.

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