Case Study: Ruhrkohle AG achieves uninterrupted, fail-safe mine operations with Stratus Technologies' ftServer

Stratus Guaranteeing Continuous And Reliable Operations At Auguste Victoria Coal Mine

Ruhrkohle AG (RAG), operator of the Auguste Victoria coal mine in Germany, faced an urgent reliability challenge: its underground control rooms manage life‑safety systems (ventilation, gas monitoring) and the remote operation of heavy machinery for some 3,500 employees, so any IT failure could have severe safety and operational consequences. When RAG migrated its systems from Unix to Windows it reviewed its infrastructure and decided it needed simple, built‑in server redundancy rather than traditional clustering to guarantee uninterrupted control-room operations.

RAG deployed Stratus ftServer fault‑tolerant systems, which run as a single, self‑regulating machine and required no changes to existing software or extra training. The implementation scaled across RAG’s mines and today 38 Stratus servers support operations; they have delivered continuous, service‑impact‑free operation since the 2003 migration (one internal component failed without affecting service), and RAG maintains a service agreement with Stratus to preserve high availability and miner safety.

Ruhrkohle AG

Peter Riede

Servicing & Sales Department for BK 12 IT Infrastructure