Case Study: Stader Daily Newspaper achieves over 99.99% uptime and reduced costs with Stratus Technologies' Avance software

Stader Daily News Achieves High Availability Using Stratus Avance Software

Stader Daily, the leading regional newspaper in Germany’s Stade, Buxtehude and Lower Elbe area (printing over 32,000 copies), relied on integrated editorial, production and digital communications systems in which Microsoft Exchange had become business‑critical. Any email or server downtime risked delaying production, losing ad revenue and disrupting operations, so the paper needed a highly available, low‑cost solution that wouldn’t require replacing existing telephone systems or major hardware investments.

The paper implemented Stratus Avance software on two HP x86 servers (with MTS Systemhaus support), which presents the pair as a single logical server and hosts multiple virtual machines. Five virtual servers now run critical apps with automatic failover (1 ms shift) and continuous synchronization, delivering >99.99% availability (<1 hour/year). The rollout took two evenings, required minimal training, used existing infrastructure, reduced energy and admin overhead, and yielded significantly lower TCO (about 40% cheaper than a classic virtualization approach and ~50% less than a cluster).