Case Study: St John New Zealand achieves 24/7 earthquake‑resilient countrywide CAD availability with Stratus Technologies

High Availability for countrywide CAD ensures that emergency services run even during severe earthquakes

St John New Zealand, the nation’s primary ambulance and emergency care provider, needed a single, always-on computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system to manage 1.2 million calls a year across an earthquake-prone country. Their legacy dual-server setup required manual failover and suffered frequent outages of up to two hours, hampering coordination among regional centers and limiting transparency and disaster recovery capabilities.

St John implemented Stratus ftServer fault-tolerant systems across its dispatch centers to run the CAD application, with reciprocal production/disaster-recovery configurations and vehicle mobile data terminals for real-time location tracking. The result: zero downtime on ftServer systems over five years despite thousands of quakes (some magnitude 6–7), proactive 24/7 monitoring, leaner IT operations, consolidated infrastructure costs, and full nationwide visibility and resilience for emergency dispatch.

St John New Zealand

Colin Lawrence

ICT Operations Manager