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Mission-critical blades now available

Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have the best of both worlds?

That’s exactly what the new HP Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem offers: the ability for the first time to employ industry-standard blade technology in support of 24x7 mission-critical computing.

“Up to now, enterprises have tended to have two types of infrastructure to manage: industry-standard servers for most operations and either mainframes or non-industry standard servers for high-demand, mission-critical computing,” says Winston Prather, Vice President and General Manager, HP NonStop Enterprise Division. “The move to blades across the HP product line means that businesses can now use bladed infrastructure across the enterprise. They get all the cost and space efficiencies that come with blades, in an affordable industry-standard architecture that can support their 24X7 mission-critical operations.”

According to a report by The Standish Group International, the new Integrity NonStop BladeSystem has a lower total cost of ownership than competing offerings.*

Standish examined the performance of automatic teller machine (ATM), point of sale (POS) and electronic funds transfer (EFT) applications and found the cost per transaction was lower when the application was running on the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem platform than on competing systems. The platform also demonstrated higher uptime, coupled with lower cost per minute of downtime, when compared with other systems.

The NonStop NB50000c combines:

• The power of dual-core Intel® Itanium® processors
• The standards-based modularity and efficiency of the HP BladeSystem platform
• The high availability and fault-tolerant data integrity of HP’s Integrity NonStop technology

Lab tests performed by HP show the new product doubles the performance in half the footprint of existing systems, allowing enterprises to accommodate the applications and transaction volumes needed to grow their business.

“The NonStop NB50000c system is a good fit wherever a transaction has to happen in real time, and wherever people will lose money—or worse—if it doesn’t happen,” says Randy Meyer, Director of Product Management, Strategy and Technology, HP NonStop Enterprise Division. “Now those organizations can get all the benefits of high reliability and availability while also benefiting from the move to efficient blade technology, in terms of reducing total cost of ownership, building adaptive infrastructure, reducing power consumption, simplifying IT… on multiple levels.”

Through patented process-pair technology, improved middleware and a new NonStop operating system, the NB50000c  provides:

• Instant software takeover in the event of a software or hardware fault
• Multiple failure fault tolerance
• Increased manageability
• Improved performance
• Ease of upgrades
• Support for the latest dual-core Intel processors

Proven benefits

John Hart, group managing director of technology engineering at CME Group, a CME/Chicago Board of Trade Company, says his business has achieved outstanding throughput and response time using the HP Integrity NonStop Platform.

“Suffice it to say that when you’re moving $6 trillion in a single day, downtime is expensive. This is a business in which we do everything we can to avoid any downtime at all, and we’ve been incredibly successful at operating a high-reliability, stable environment. The Integrity NonStop system plays a key role in this success.”

CME Group’s Hart is enthusiastically looking forward to the benefits his company will gain from the NonStop platform running on a bladed form factor. 

“We’re looking for performance. Our expectation of the blade environment is that we will be able to take advantage of faster processing speeds… The blade environment is also more compact; it will use less space in our data center, and space is a premium for us,” he says.

“As NonStop becomes more affordable through a bladed architecture, people who never thought they could get the ultimate in availability are saying, ‘hey, I think I could—and should—do that’,” Meyer says. “For instance, we’re starting to see government agencies with lots and lots of data to move now looking at NonStop as a means to extend performance.” Often, says Meyer, older systems can be redeployed for testing and R&D work, preserving the value of the customer’s initial investment.

Presenting the new opportunities realized from the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem to savings-conscious business executives should be easy, Prather suggests.

“They already understand that you can drive down costs by moving to an industry-standard architecture, but in the past it has been more problematic to do that for the most mission-critical applications.

“Now they can take advantage of volume economics to drive down total cost of ownership for even the most business-critical application.”

*“Trends in IT Value,” The Standish Group International, June 2008.

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