Stratus Technologies, Inc. announced a class of industry-standard "medical grade" servers that provide the extreme reliability healthcare practices need to confidently computerize critical data such as patient charts and financial information. Stratus medical grade servers are designed to prevent failure and downtime. That sets them apart from conventional high-availability servers, which are designed to recover after a failure has occurred and disrupted operations.

    Stratus medical grade servers are field-proven to be capable of delivering the uninterrupted 24/7 access to digital data and information that ensure quality of care, workflow efficiency, automated decision support, effective management and cost control. In addition to being an ideal application platform, Stratus medical grade servers can support virtualization initiatives to cut IT overhead by consolidating applications on fewer physical servers.

    "As healthcare continues the migration to increasing reliance on clinical automation systems, high-availability hardware will become accepted as an infrastructure necessity. Equally important as raw availability will be ease of management and the ability to perform both hardware and software upgrades while the application continues to execute," stated Gartner Inc. Healthcare Research Director Barry R. Hieb, M.D.

    Disaster recovery strategies based on conducting periodic local backups often fall short, incurring costly data losses and prolonged application or system downtime that can have devastating business consequences. A thorough recovery plan should encompass more than just your servers or network — considering availability from a complete information lifecycle perspective.

    The specialized architecture, complete component redundancy and self-diagnosing and servicing features of Stratus servers provide uptime reliability in excess of 99.999 percent - less than five minutes per year in continuous operation. Stratus' line of medical grade servers is built with Intel dual- and quad- core processors. All models support applications written for Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems. Stratus ftServer systems also support VMware Infrastructure 3.0 virtualization software.

    More than 400 Stratus ftServer systems are installed in hospitals, clinics and physician practices worldwide. The company allies with leading software providers and systems integrators, including firms such as Agfa, Sage and JJWild/MEDITECH, to deliver comprehensive, resilient system solutions to the healthcare industry. Further, as virtualization technology sweeps through IT data centers everywhere, the need for a trustworthy physical host platform has never been more necessary.

    Virtualization is more than hardware consolidation.  It’s a means to achieve higher availability and ensure improved disaster recovery. Yet putting all of your “eggs in one basket” should be done judiciously – because the virtualization layer could be a single point of failure for all of the virtual machines it supports. And the exposure rises as you run more virtual machines on a single server.