When is it okay in today’s world for your business applications to be unavailable to your customers? The answer is:  NEVER! 

Find out how Equens used HP Integrity NonStop to provide a reliable, stable, always-on infrastructure in this highly competitive market.

I finally got out to see the movie Avatar in 3D last week with a bunch of friends. I enjoyed the movie, and the animation and 3D effects were wonderful.

What is more interesting is the infrastructure behind the movie. A lot of the work was done on HP BL2x220c blades in HP Bladesystem c7000 enclosures. Imagine racks of them - or about 40,000 processors and 104 Tb of memory, according to the Reality Check - Server Insights blog posting at http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/reality-check-server-insights/archive/2010/01/13/the-it-behind-the-big-blockbuster-sci-fi-hit-avatar.aspx.

This is a great example of scaling out to do a huge job. But, the nice thing is that the same infrastructure can also be used for HP Integrity BL860c and BL870c blades . Even the HP Non-Stop servers are available in a bladed architecture, and they have some of the highest levels of uptime in the industry.

Compared to rack-mount servers, our customers save floor space, power and cooling, and even management time and expenses compared to the save compute power in a rack-mount chassis. So, whether you are scaling out to render a new movie, running a mission critical database instance, or helping run a commodities exchange, a HP BladeSystem infrastructure can help run your business today.

Jacob

Well, it is a slow news week in the enterprise space, so I figured that I would send out something fun. We've recently posted a couple of videos about the high level value proposition for HP-UX 11i v3. They are available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGOUakRlHa8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH9aM9QvDA0

Of course, there are a number of other videos on YouTube. They include the Disaster Proof video from a few years ago, posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMCHpUtJnEI. I actually have a piece from those blown up systems, and I've seen many other pieces, courtesy of one of my former managers who was actually there when they blew up the systems. While the video includes HP-UX 11i, it also includes Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, and NonStop running on HP Integrity servers. Proof, once again, that HP delivers resilient, mission critical environments.

Jacob

This should be easy for me to remember: some former HP employees started Tandem Computers Inc. in 1974, the same year that I was born.  Years later, it would re-join the HP family when HP merged with Compaq. At HP, you can't talk about mission critical computing without mentioning HP Integrity Non-Stop servers from time to time.

While I spend most of my time working with HP-UX 11i, which provides core mission critical capabilities for many enterprises world wide, there are times that I come across customers who truly need scalability, uptime, and data integrity that not even a leading UNIX operating system can provide. For these customers, HP Integrity NonStop servers are a great, proven solution.

HP Integrity NonStop servers today take advantage of the modularity of HP BladeSystem. It scales to 16 processors in a node, and up to 255 nodes in a real time cluster. Naturally, it offers uptime that gets measured in years, as NonStop servers have done for years. This is a great proof point that blade servers, at least from HP, are ready for the most mission critical workloads!

Needless to say, I'm not an expert on HP Integrity NonStop servers. However, they are something that I find interesting, and for more information on 35 years of NonStop, you can go to http://h20223.www2.hp.com/nonstopcomputing/us/en/messaging/news-systems-35-anniversary.html.

Jacob

We finished a fabulous Superdome Tech Day yesterday with a number of bloggers. I need to go and see what they have written, but I know that at least one site actually covered the event live. There were also a lot of tweets using the tag #HPSuperdome.

There were a couple of questions, thoughts, and interesting things that struck me.

1. OpenVMS is on HP Integrity servers. A few of the bloggers thought that OpenVMS was dead, and they were glad to hear that it is still alive, well, and being developed.


2. HP Non-Stop servers are also Integrity servers, using the HP Itanium processor. They aren't Superdomes, but this was also something that a lot of people we not aware of in the room.


3. I had a great chat with Jean Bozman from IDC after her presentation. It was interesting to note that the UNIX server business has consistantly been 31-32% of the overall server market revenue since they started counting the market in 1996 up until 2008. The overall market goes up and down, and the UNIX business with it. However, this explains to many people why UNIX servers will be around for a long time. The Windows and Linux on x86 markets have definitely grown, but it was mostly at the expense of "Other Servers" while the UNIX business has remained steady.


4. We had a chance to look at a Superdome. Not just a new Superdome, but an original pre-production Superdome delivered months before the product was announced. It doesn't have any of the skins on it, but has been upgraded over the years with all the new components. It's still used for performance work today, almost 10 years after it was first installed.


5. We finished the day with a quiz on the benefits of moving from an IBM mainframe to an HP Superdome. The questions were based on facts that come up during things like the Mainframe TCO challenge . We had a lot of fun with that, but some of the TCO savings by moving to a HP Superdome just blew people away.

Are there any of these topics that you want to hear more about? Leave me a comment, and I'll see if I can address them in more detail in a future blog post.