Stratus Technologies, one of the leaders in hardware fault tolerant platforms, has acquired its main competitor, Marathon Technologies in a move that consolidates the best of hardware and software fault tolerant computing systems into a single entity. Stratus’s claim to fame came from its hardware fault tolerant servers that were built in pairs, with duplicate hardware, to ensure that no single component failure will cause any system downtown. Stratus built very solid and reliable systems but on its own proprietary hardware and this acquisition now expands Stratus’s ability to provide software fault tolerance to any industry-standard physical or virtual server. This opens opportunities for new customers no matter what physical hardware the customers uses and prefers.