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MAYNARD, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 06/27/12 -- When it comes to protecting critical production applications, most manufacturers are not taking advantage of proactive high availability solutions to prevent downtime. The majority of businesses choose reactive backup solutions, leaving applications unprotected from downtime, which can cause significant damage to a manufacturer's reputation and bottom line. In partnership with IndustryWeek, Stratus conducted a survey of manufacturers to determine what type of solution or high availability strategy they are using to protect against downtime.

Findings from the survey include:

• Companies with annual revenues that exceed $1 billion are more likely to have advanced strategies in place to protect against downtime; 43 percent of these companies use built-in high availability functions, 32 percent use fault tolerant servers, 20 percent use Windows clustering and 16 percent use high availability software.
• The most popular solution for high availability is backup, which is used by 64 percent of businesses. Comparatively, 24 percent of survey respondents use built-in high availability functions for their applications, while just 21 percent of manufacturers reported using fault tolerant servers.
• 12 percent of survey respondents reported using no solution or high availability strategy, leaving their business at risk of extended server downtime.
• According to survey respondents, the most important factors when making high availability purchasing decisions were the total cost of ownership, ease of solution deployment, management and initial purchase price and a company's unique high availability requirements.

"Like all businesses, maintaining continuous server uptime is critical for manufacturers. Even a few minutes of downtime can result in significant financial loss, and Aberdeen Group estimates that one hour of downtime costs business an average of $110,000," said Dave LeClair, director of product management and marketing, Stratus. "From this survey, it is obvious that businesses need to be doing more than anticipating failure -- they need a high availability plan in place that proactively prevents downtime. Otherwise, businesses put themselves at risk of short-term and long-term damage that can occur from any type of downtime."

More than 500 IndustryWeek readers responded to the "Manufacturer IT Applications Survey," representing a broad range of company sizes and products produced. The magazine tabulated results by annual revenue categories -- less than $100 million, $100-$999 million and above $1 billion -- and by the average of all respondents.

The full survey results were presented during a webinar hosted by IndustryWeek on May 31, 2012. Featured speakers included NetSuite's GM of Manufacturing/Wholesale & Distribution, Roman Bukary, and Stratus' Director of Global Alliances, Peter Cook, who offered insights into what manufacturers are currently experiencing with regard to downtime, as well as some best practices to prevent it. You can read about additional survey results on virtualization and downtime.