Stratus Technologies
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stratus Technologies is a Maynard, Massachusetts based producer of fault tolerant computers. Stratus Technologies is a 1999 spinoff of Stratus Computer founded in 1980. Stratus Computer was a Marlborough, Massachusetts based producer of fault tolerant mini computers. It competed with Tandem Computers and to a lesser extent Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minis. In the 1980s its computers were resold by IBM under the IBM System/88 brand.
Its traditional markets were financial services companies like banks and security exchanges. Starting in the 1990s, the company moved into the telecommunications industry, particularly in the area of network management and custom services, with the result that its telecommunications revenues surpassed those from enterprise computing. This led to a buy-out from Ascend Communications (later acquired by Lucent Technologies).
The enterprise server portion of the business was of no interest to Ascend. That portion was spun off in a leveraged management buyout in 1999, with funding from international investment firm, Investcorp. Now privately held, the Stratus Technologies of today is owned primarily by Investcorp, Intel Capital, DB Capital, NEC, and the management and employees of the company.
Its product line was originally based on Motorola MC68000 processors, but then migrated to Intel i860 processors and finally Hewlett-Packards' PA-RISC architecture. More recent systems are based on Intel processors and Microsoft Windows 2003 and Linux. The original VOS operating system had many features copied from Multics and continues to be deployed on the current generation Stratus servers. Stratus also has a home-grown UNIX product, based on the original UNIX, called FTX (Fault-Tolerant UNIX). Linux continues to play a growing role in new Stratus T-series servers, and in the recent past, the VOS operating system has been sold running on V-series ftServers (essentially similar to Windows-based ftServers, but running the VOS OS instead). Since August 2006, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also shipped and supported on ftServers.
Stratus also has a large corporate presence in Phoenix, Arizona in the USA and several worldwide offices, in locations such as the UK, Holland, South Africa, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Japan.
The company has a vast customer base, but popular types of its customers include banks, emergency response centers (such as 911 in the USA), police departments, fire departments, hospitals, governments, credit card companies, telcos/phone companies, Internet providers, and much more. This is by no means a complete list, but several types of Stratus customers fit into these categories.
