For the organizations that run the modern world, the consequences of server downtime are unthinkable: missed or delayed emergency calls, overwhelmed stock exchanges and central banks unable to clear multimillions in transactions, to name a few. That’s why so many of these organizations are dedicated to fault-tolerant NonStop technology.

In fact, even as blades advancements came to other server lines, these organizations have remained loyal to their NonStop servers. Foregoing blades form factor seemed a small price to pay for rock-solid uptime.

Today, nobody has to choose between the two. Now, the advantages of HP Integrity NonStop’s fault tolerance can be had with the processing power, form factor, and power and cooling advances of blades

The HP Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem sports all the advantages that savvy professionals love about blades. It is the first to combine the high reliability and fault tolerance of the NonStop platform with reductions in cost of ownership, improved performance, and a form factor that doubles the processor power and uses less than half the space of previous generations of NonStop servers.

That’s good news to people like John Hart, managing director of technology engineering for CME Group. The CME Group, which was formed by the 2007 merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, handles more than 15 million transactions every trading day.

To Hart, the availability of a NonStop blade means that the exchange can do more with the same space—a huge win for an organization whose transaction volume has grown an average of 300 to 400 percent a year for several years. “The blade environment is more compact; it will use less space in our data center, and space is at a premium for us,” says Hart.

Hart’s experience is typical of longtime NonStop users, who know the value of high-availability servers that experience only a few minutes or seconds per year of unplanned downtime.

But the news that such a highly reliable server is available in a less expensive, easier-to-administer form factor might be even more game-changing to those who couldn’t previously take advantage of the HP Integrity NonStop platform.

“For new sets of customers who perhaps viewed older NonStop servers as too large, too expensive, or too hard to maintain, a lower-cost, fault-tolerant blade is a more attractive value proposition than the pedestal-based NonStop systems,” says Jean Bozman, research vice president for research firm IDC’s Enterprise Computing Group.

In particular, for organizations worried that frequent additions to capacity could mean expensive downtime, Bozman says that ”flexibility in bladed server deployments helps to reduce operational costs at customer sites by adding capacity on an as-needed basis, while addressing two of the top IT challenges identified by data-center managers: availability and the more efficient use of data-center ‘real estate’.

“It will be possible to add fault-tolerant computing within the chassis of a c-Class BladeSystem, allowing HP customers to mix fault-tolerant blades with blades that are running other workloads. This will make the bladed server system an integration point for a wide range of applications within the enterprise, while protecting mission-critical workloads with fault-tolerant high availability,” says Bozman

Furthermore, the new blades can be less expensive to own when compared to other high-availability alternatives. A recent study by The Standish Group, an independent research firm, has shown that the new Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem has a total cost of ownership per transaction that is 35 percent less than that of the IBM z9¹. And that, when combined with HP NonStop reliability, makes for a good night’s sleep for the people who run the businesses that never do.

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