Stratus: the Tool that Guarantees High Availability for your Industrial Applications.

We welcome Arnaud Kurowsky, Business Development Manager at Stratus, to our Barcelona offices. Together, we discuss the new partnership that Stratus and Wonderware Iberia have signed. And, of course, it was a good time to revisit the benefits of a Stratus architecture and what it could bring to all manufacturers, in a modernization and Industry 4.0 process.

What is Stratus?

Stratus is an American company that has evolved for 40 years in the field of high availability and fault tolerance. It is a server creator, which originally offered MainFrame servers and whose first customer was a dairy.

Stratus did not work immediately with industrialists and concentrated its offer mainly in the financial sector, with transaction solutions. Today, 4 of the largest credit card companies are among our clients. For example, one could cite Visa or Amex.

Fifteen years ago, we focused our offer on the trades of the industry and more specifically on the so-called “critical” applications. Simply to guarantee the continuity of services in industrial processes. And for the last 5 years, especially with the evolution of Industry 4.0, we focused our attention on the Edge market, the basis of Industry 4.0, where we realized that we need a central point between the IoT and the cloud to agglomerate the incoming information.

Why Did You Sign a Partnership with Wonderware?

Today, there are IT platforms on the market that measure performance and help operators to improve their production, activity, traceability, and quality. All these solutions are perfect, as long as the hardware that supports them works well!

Stratus leverages Edge Computing expertise to support Wonderware Iberia in the industrial markets of Spain and Portugal.

What are the Benefits of a Stratus Architecture?

The current principle of Stratus solutions is in the first virtualization 1.0. In this case, we add a virtualization layer to make the different software resources reliable, only on a single server.

Of course, we offer Virtualization 2.0, which adds a layer of high availability and fault tolerance. This is what we can more commonly call redundancy.

Our idea is to offer redundancy solutions for Wonderware software, simple, protected, and autonomous:

• Simple to implement and maintain.
• Protected by redundancy, high availability, fault tolerance, and cybersecurity. Whoever says “virtualization” also says creating several VM (virtual machine) sessions on these platforms. We can implement a virtual machine, especially for a firewall, for example. Therefore, we protect all the devices that are below and that are not protected.
• Autonomous, in the sense that for 40 years, we have been offering our clients the possibility of remote maintenance or even preventive maintenance on the equipment. Today, on Stratus platforms, we control around 500 alarm points on the hardware, so when we see repeated errors on a hard drive or power supply, we know how to predict a future problem. We warn our clients and immediately send them a hard drive because we know that the current hard drive will soon fail. We meet the needs of companies with limited IT resources.

Who Do You Contact with this Offer?

We are targeting all manufacturing industries that have critical applications and companies with limited IT resources. Our applications are extremely simple, allowing maintenance teams to manage independently.

We also offer our offer for all isolated applications, such as a wind turbine field or a photovoltaic panel field. Imagine that these environments are located, for example, in the desert, it is very expensive to move a technician in case of problems. The remote solution will make things easier by avoiding travel and thus saving significant costs.

In concrete terms, the entire food industry, the process part, the pharmaceutical industry, all cement plants, or all industrial processes with large inertias, glass factories or foundries, for example, are among the sectors in which we can intervene.

Why Did You Create an Edge Offer?

The latest addition to the Stratus Edge family, the ztC Edge 110i is designed for companies looking for greater data processing and storage capabilities at the edge of the cloud.

More powerful than its predecessors, it is designed for critical business applications, including those that support real-time data collection and analysis at the edge. The ztC Edge platform is also distinguished from complex IT solutions by the ease of implementation, use, and administration it provides to users.

With this offer, the idea is clearly to strengthen our presence in the Edge market, which is becoming increasingly important, especially with the democratization of Industry 4.0. This Edge part will become increasingly critical, so we must offer redundant, simple, protected, and autonomous solutions.