Kabira's certification of the ftServer system is part of a joint marketing agreement between the two companies and paves the way for the companies to jointly offer a high-availability, high-performance solution on a platform with exceptional uptime reliability for business-critical transaction processes at acquiring and issuing banks.

"From the customer point of view, the Stratus-Kabira collaboration promises to deliver an exceptionally robust, effective and reliable electronic payments processing solution," said Philip Izzo, Stratus director of financial services. "Both companies share a commitment to providing the highest possible levels of business process availability for business- and mission-critical applications. It is built into our corporate DNA."

"The industry's technology value leaders in high-availability, fault-tolerant hardware and high-performance, next-generation financial transaction processing software have come together to deliver leading-edge payments solutions for the global payments industry," said Chris Clabaugh, vice president of Business Development at Kabira Technologies. "We believe this collaboration provides a new level of dependability, availability and scalability."

Stratus high availability features

Introduced earlier this year, the Stratus ftServer 6200 system uses the most current multi-core Intel processor technology. The ftServer 6200 system is Stratus' most powerful server for transaction-intensive business operations and next-generation telecommunication services, as well as a high-performance database engine and virtualization platform.

Each Stratus server has two customer-replaceable units (CRU) that run in lockstep to simultaneously process the same data. Each CRU contains CPU and I/O in a 2U standard 19-inch rack, and is the equivalent of a simplex server. To the operating system and application, the two physical CRUs appear as a single logical server. Should one CRU experience an event that causes it to go out of service, the partner CRU, operating system and application continue to run unaffected, thereby eliminating unplanned downtime, failover and data loss. Stratus server uptime availability is field-proven to be better than 99.999 percent.

Kabira's payment switch capabilities

The Kabira Financial Payment Switch (KFPS) is a next-generation acquiring and switching system for processors and issuers of electronic payment transactions. KFPS enables payment institutions to reduce their time to market in rolling out new payment services and lowers the cost of acquiring and switching payment transactions. Designed for diverse enterprise payment processing installations, the Kabira Financial Payment Switch combines transaction delivery, network integration and settlement support capabilities with extension points for integrating modern payment applications in a high performance, secure manner. Moreover, KFPS provides one of the best transaction processing speeds in the industry, topping 2000 transactions per second on a single "open system" server. KFPS is also designed to enable ready creation and management of network interfaces and possesses an extremely high-speed communication framework for interfacing with external systems. This level of "extreme transaction processing" not only handles peak-plus volumes with ease but also provides enough headroom for future growth. Because of this, KFPS is well suited for payment institutions planning to rollout new payment products such as prepaid, or bring card processing in-house.

Stratus and Kabira: Extending High-availability (HA) beyond the data center

According to Massimo Pezzini, Principal Analyst, Gartner, Inc., "Traditional Online Transaction Processing architectures are wearing thin when it comes to supporting the growing transactional workloads generated by modern event-driven architectures." "Extreme Transaction Processing Platforms (XTPP) are responding to this need." Kabira Financial Payment Switch software deployed on the Stratus ftServer 6200 system is a prime example of XTPP architecture. With this solution, issuing banks and payment processors have the benefit of a cost-effective, high-availability hardware and software platform running on industry-standard x86/64 architecture. This platform runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is able to mirror transaction states to additional Stratus servers in other facilities. The combined Stratus/Kabira solution eliminates the deficiencies encountered by hardware-only or software-only HA solutions and have each been proven to deliver 99.999% uptime over years of operation.