Case Study: Northwestern University achieves always-on building management with Stratus Technologies' everRun MX

Stratus ensures always-on availability for building management systems

Northwestern University, a leading research institution with campuses in Evanston and Chicago, needed to ensure continuous operation of its building management systems to protect sensitive research environments and museum collections. Even brief outages in temperature, humidity or air quality control could jeopardize experiments, art loans and millions in potential research revenue, so the Facilities Management IT team sought a more reliable, always-on solution.

After evaluating options, Northwestern implemented Stratus everRun MX within its VMware environment to protect Tridium NiagaraAX, Johnson Controls Metasys and Siemens APOGEE applications, running each in its own protected virtual machine (Level 3 for NiagaraAX, Level 2 for APOGEE and Metasys). The deployment was smooth, integrated with existing infrastructure, and delivered continuous availability, fewer after-hours incident calls, and the stable environmental controls required to preserve research integrity and collections—backed by vendor and 24/7 Stratus support.

Northwestern University

Todd Voight

User Support Lead & Facilities Management IT department