Guild Companies--Stratus Offers Free Upgrades to ftServer Customers

Here's something you don't see every day in the Wintel server racket. Fault-tolerant server maker Stratus Technologies is offering customers who buy its ft5600 servers a trade-in credit equal to the value of the base ft5600 machine, if customers need to upgrade to the bigger ft6600 servers that the company announced in early September.

The ft5600 is logically a two-way capable Xeon DP server that uses 2.8 GHz processors and supports from 512 MB to 6 GB of main memory. Physically, it is actually two servers linked by ftServer Access Adapter cards and a special hypervisor layer that Stratus ported from its Continuum line of Unix fault-tolerant machines, so it would work with Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition. The ft6600 is a logical four-way-capable Xeon MP machine, which uses 2 GHz or 2.8 GHz processors and supports from 2 GB to 12 GB of main memory. It is actually two machines linked by Stratus hardware and software to look like that logical machine.

Fault-tolerant machines, like those in the Stratus ft and Continuum lines, or those in Hewlett-Packard's NonStop (Tandem) server line, have double- or triple-redundant components that allow data processing to continue even when one of the components fails. This makes the machines doubly or triply expensive, but also gets availability up over five nines and approaching six nines.

The trade-in helps cushion the blow on the cost of upgrading from one machine to the other. Most two-way Xeon DP and four-way Xeon MP servers are based on radically different designs, with unique chipsets, and the components used in each type of machine cannot be upgraded. The trade-in offer is a way to create a "free" upgrade path where, technically, one actually is not possible.

To a certain extent, all of the server vendors that do offer upgrades across different machines within a product family are doing exactly what Stratus is doing with its fault-tolerant Wintel servers. When IBM does an upgrade of a pSeries or an iSeries midrange server, for instance, the machines often have nothing really in common, but customers want to preserve their system serial numbers, so that they don't have to revise the depreciate schedules on their machines. IBM takes back the old components in the server (which is sometimes everything but the frame), then charges customers only a percentage of the list price for the new server, as an upgrade fee. The more two machines are separated in time, the higher the cost of the upgrade.

In the case of the Stratus boxes, the ft5600 and ft6600 share many of the same components, although the CPU complexes are very different. The upgrade trade-in deal, which is good for two-years, allows customers to put the money they invested in the ft5600 CPU modules toward the cost of acquiring new ft6600 modules.

The effects of the Stratus deal are simple. First, it allows customers to start out small, with even a two-way ft5600 machine and only one processor activated, and to know that they can grow and not be economically penalized when they have to move up to an ft6600 machine. This should make it easier to sell ft5600s into smaller accounts that would like high availability but may not think it is a wise choice. And second, customers who buy a ft5600 will probably more strongly consider upgrading to an ft6600 as the two-year mark approaches, because after that, the ft6600 upgrade costs real money. Stratus will actually help push future upgrades if this approach takes off.