Stratus Technologies
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Stratus Technologies is a Maynard, Massachusetts based producer of fault tolerant computers. Stratus Technologies is a 1999 spinoff of Stratus Computer founded in 1980. Stratus Computer was a Marlborough, Massachusetts based producer of fault tolerant mainframe computers. It competed mostly with Tandem Computers.
Its traditional markets were financial services companies like banks and security exchanges. Starting in the 1990s, the company moved into the telecommunications industry, particularly in the area of network management and custom services. Its telecommunications revenues surpassed that of its enterprise computing revenues. This lead to a buy-out from Ascend Communications (later acquired by Lucent Technologies).
The enterprise server portion of the business was of no interest to Ascend. That portion was spun off in a leveraged management buyout in 1999, with funding from international investment firm, Investcorp. Now privately held, the Stratus Technologies of today is owned primarily by Investcorp, Intel Capital, DB Capital, NEC, and the management and employees of the company.
Its product line was originally based on Motorola MC68000 processors, but then migrated to Hewlett-Packards' PA-RISC architecture. More recent systems are based on Intel processors and Microsoft Windows 2003 and Linux. The original VOS operating system had many features copied from Multics and continues to be deployed on the current generation Stratus servers.