The average Stratus Technologies' fault-tolerant server now provides "six nines" of uptime per year, which means it's down for about as long as it takes to put in contact lenses or less time than previewing a song on iTunes, Stratus announced today.

Stratus' worldwide (TM), which tracks the performance of Stratus' ftServer systems, first registered the sixth nine in May. Availability has remained at 99.9999 percent since then. Six nines uptime translates to 31.536 seconds of unscheduled downtime per year, compared to Stratus' longtime mark of more than five-nines, or 5.25 minutes per year.

Continuous availability is growing more important in corporate data centers with the spread of virtualization. As IT staffs consolidate as many as 15 servers into one physical server, the impact of crashes and performance degradations is that many times greater. Low downtime reduces the chances of a company losing revenue or violating regulations because of interrupted data collection or processing. Conventional servers and server clusters, by contrast, can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to resume operation after an outage. Downtime costs the average company $148,000 per hour for an average application, according to Gartner, Inc. so every gain in uptime is a significant savings.

"It's just one more digit on the meter, one more nine, but it means a lot," said Denny Lane, director of product management at Stratus. "Our server platforms have risen to such a high level of uptime performance that you couldn't reboot a computer in the amount of time an ftServer system might be out of service. This new level of uptime - still at affordable prices - makes ftServers that much more useful to organizations with applications that need maximum uptime, like electronic medical records, public safety dispatch, and email."

Stratus computes and updates ftServer performance daily, based on all reported service incidents over the preceding six-month period. Both hardware and operating system incidents for Windows Linux are included in the availability measurement. The Uptime Meter defines availability as the period of time that the system is fully operational. To see the Uptime Meter and read more about how Stratus calculates uptime, please visit . To listen to a podcast on "six nines" availability, please visit

Stratus Technologies focuses exclusively on helping its customers keep critical business operations online without interruption. Business continuity requires resiliency and superior availability throughout the IT infrastructure, including virtual environments. Stratus delivers a range of solutions that includes software-based high availability, fault-tolerant servers, availability consulting and assessment, and remote systems management services. Based on its 28 years of expertise in product and services technology for total availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries.