Case Study: Makro SA achieves 99.999% always-on availability for EFT credit and debit card processing with Stratus Technologies' ftServer systems

ALWAYS-ON AVAILABILITY Future-Proofs Leading Retailer’s EFT Credit And Debit Card Processing Infrastructure

Makro South Africa, a 16‑store warehouse retailer, faced a critical payments challenge after a two‑hour card‑processing outage in 2005 that cost the business more than one million rand and damaged its reputation. When re‑architecting its payments infrastructure in 2011 to an active/active model, Makro questioned whether to retain its Stratus ftServer platform despite having enjoyed reported continuous availability since 2005, weighing the higher cost against the high risk of downtime (about 60% of customers pay by card and 2–3 hours of outage could cost millions).

Makro and integrator UCS Solutions chose to stay with Stratus, running ACI Postilion in an active/active configuration on ftServer systems, keeping the old server as a hot‑swap for disaster recovery and relying on Stratus’ proactive monitoring and support. The deployment delivered the promised uptime assurance — quoted confidence of 99.999% and no hardware‑related downtime over years of operation — protecting sales and reputation while providing operational peace of mind.

Makro SA

Pieter Schoeman

IT & Projects Director