Stratus computing solutions have been behind-the-scenes and working at the heart of the world’s mission-critical workloads. Managing Director of Asia South, Foong Lin Hoe and Regional Sales Director North ASEAN, Xyvier Goh, were in Kuala Lumpur recently to introduce the platform and talk about why they are in the best position to offer truly fault-tolerant computing solutions.

Stratus’ latest ztC Endurance portfolio is a massive system that incorporates all the hallmark features of Stratus computing platforms – out-of-the box easy deployment, fault tolerance, and high availability of up to seven 9’s. This platform builds upon convenient capabilities like proactive health monitoring, and serviceability to run mission-critical applications without downtime or data loss.

Foong Lin Hoe, Stratus Technologies

It also leverages the latest best-of-breed hardware like Xeon processors from Intel and all the bells and whistles that come with it. The new Endurance portfolio introduces a new predictive availability layer called the Stratus Automated Uptime Layer with Smart Exchange, that is the culmination of over 100 million hours of availability data.

Xyvier said, “We analyzed that data, we built (an algorithm) model, and we came up with this product.” He also observed that when the market talks about high availability (HA) and fault tolerance, the technologies tend to be reactive.

Xyvier Goh, Stratus Technologies

“This is the first product to be predictive – meaning it is proactive before failure,” he described adding that it achieves this by tracking a wide range of failure points and automatically taking corrective steps before operations are impacted.

An especially useful feature that makes it suitable in IT or operational technology (OT) environments is the redundant modularity of the hardware – compute, networking, power supply unit and storage components are hot-swappable and do not require IT or OT specialized expertise or tools. This makes Stratus computing platforms, including the latest ztC Endurance portfolio, highly manageable and serviceable.

Manageable and serviceable with endurance for manufacturing

“We have been building up for a lot of adoption in the operational technology (OT) or industrial space,” described Lin Hoe who anticipates adoption of the ztC Endurance platform by the oil and gas industry, for example. “(This is) especially in the higher capacity compute space for the edge environment. So, (this means that it) can be upstream, midstream, downstream and so on.”

Lin Hoe highlighted a terminal automation use case for downstream operations in oil and gas, whereby finished products have to be transported to retail destinations.

This phase itself is mission-critical because finished products have to be filled into different transportation modes be it trucks, barges, tankers, or trains, and in a timely fashion. “So, we see use cases like this to be relevant for the ztC Endurance.”

Lin Hoe also talked about the use of video analytics in manufacturing during the final quality control phase. “For example, high-speed snapshots of products on an automobile assembly line – video analytics requires high processing capabilty.”

Besides that, it becomes important to also reliably and accurately record and store inspection data over time to ensure quality, and to address potential issues if they arise and a product recall is required.

The Stratus portfolio’s fault tolerance and high-availability, not to mention predictive maintenance layer, makes it highly suitable for the mission-critical requirements of various industries like those in the industrial and enterprise spaces.

Stratus’ computing platform solutions are currently deployed in more than 50% of Fortune 100 companies worldwide, with particularly strong adoption in the manufacturing and financial services sectors.

Going to market with an evolved future-proof roadmap

Stratus partners with independent software vendors (ISVs) at a global level to execute proof of concepts to ensure product compatibility, and also come up with joint value propositions to customers.

It becomes important to also reliably and accurately record and store inspection data over time to ensure quality, and to address potential issues if they arise and a product recall is required.

In countries like Malaysia, Stratus also has an appointed distributor and solutions specialist. Lin Hoe explained, ”The appointed distributor’s role is to manage the market for us, for example create new business, tap into new clients, and even maintain existing customers today directly by themselves or through a layer of resellers.”

According to Lin Hoe, there is a product evolution roadmap to include GPU processors. Under the SGH or Smart Global Holdings family of brands where Stratus Technologies belongs, there is also Penguin Solutions.

“Penguin Solutions’ bread and butter is high performance computing (HPC) with reference customers that are hyperscalers the likes of Meta, or organizations that are starting to leverage generative AI, and so on,” said Lin Hoe who also added that Stratus and Penguin leverage on each other’s’ respective expertise in fault-tolerance and AI.

In this regard, it is only a matter of time before Stratus begins to leverage AI processors, the likes of NVIDIA GPUs, or graphics processing units.

Lin Hoe sees Stratus’ new platform as being a game changer and “a very unique product that can be easily adopted in the IT-OT convergence space.”

The current Intel chipsets that power it are also ideal for on-premises AI processing.

Another area where Lin Hoe sees potential, has to do with a current trend of companies virtualizing more and more of their IT environments. These virtualized environments also require cybersecurity and cannot afford to have any downtime. Stratus’ high availability is suitable for the always-on network function virtualization (NFV) required to secure these environments, 24/7.

“When you move to virtual, it becomes more important to ensure the hardware (powering it) is very, very reliable.

“And that’s where we come in,” Lin Hoe concluded.