Stratus guarantees 99.999 percent availability for NuPay

NuPay, a Payment Solutions Service Provider, has standardised on Stratus Technologies’ Stratus ftServer solution for their entire real time product range

NuPay offers authenticated, non-authenticated as well as point of sale transactions in card based, e-commerce and electronic funds transfer (EFT) environments to all industry sectors that need managed transaction solutions. 

According to Gerhard Mentz, IT manager at NuPay, the company’s merchants expect its service to be accessible anytime and anywhere as, in today’s competitive market, being unable to process transactions for any length of time translates directly into financial losses and customer dissatisfaction.

“Our previous technology architecture proved to be unreliable and, as we expanded our provision of payment solutions beyond the micro finance industry, we had to reassess our technology alternatives. Our primary objective for the new architecture was to provide 99.999 percent availability on the Windows operating system and looked to identify a platform that would run in this environment,” he says.

Having had experience with Stratus ftServer before, Mentz says NuPay’s initial discussions with Stratus Technologies veered around virtualising and consolidating its transaction switch application and SQL database server onto one fault-tolerant server.

“After extensive discussions around the benefits of virtualisation and being able to run many applications independently on a single server, we decided to standardise on Stratus ftServer, a solution that most financial providers rely on for continuous availability,” he says.

Pieter van der Merwe, availability solutions architect at Stratus Technologies, says the ftServer ensures uptime though its Continuous Processing features, including lockstep hardware, failsafe system software and ActiveService capabilities, all inside a single server.

“Stratus ftServer has been designed for enterprises, government agencies and financial service providers, such as NuPay, who are looking to achieve and sustain the highest levels of availability for their critical business process, communications, and computing needs.”

Says Mentz: “Stratus Technologies has been a great resource and soundboard for us along our virtualisation journey, extending their co-operative support above and beyond any contractual obligation or service agreement.

“Thanks to the high performance of the Stratus ftServer, we have sufficient capacity and Fault Tolerance capability to aggressively drive further growth and reduce the need for additional systems. It’s a decision that we have never had to rethink,” he concludes.