Financial turmoil fails to slow Integrity sales
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
HP has bought its NonStop Integrity system to the C-Class blade platform allowing enterprises to run their mission-critical applications in a much more compact, energy-efficient and cost-efficient manner. This is possible due to the increased manageability and intelligence designed into HP's blade architecture, and the company is focusing on banks and telecommunications companies here in Thailand.
Sandeep Kapoor, HP's business manager for NonStop servers, said that NonStop blades leverage the cost economics of volume computing, using industry standard memory and disk drives around the Intel Itanium dual-core blades themselves.
HP NonStop is designed to run mission-critical applications where any stop would result in a tremendous loss of revenue, customer satisfaction or reputation. This could be a bank's ATM system, credit card system or mobile telephone network.
Kapoor said that a leading stock exchange in Europe thought it could save money building a system on the Microsoft .NET platform. Its next generation trading platform has been online for just 12 months and has already suffered two major outages, the last time for seven hours. He was implicitly referring to the London Stock Exchange.
"The exchange lost triple digits in loss of stamp duty and who knows how many claims. Our customer base does not feel that [anxiety] as they are very satisfied in their sleep," he said.
The newest generation of NonStop is based on the Intel Itanium dual-core Montevale chip and eight blades fit in one chassis.
Kapoor said that despite the finance world going through a lot of turmoil, that has not impacted the NonStop business where HP is still continuing to grow at double digit rates.
One of the biggest wins was for the Home Locator Service (HLR, the core of a telco network) of India's largest telco, its 50 million subscribers making it the biggest HLR implementation in the world outside of the US.
The system was based on HP NonStop Integrity Blades and it was HP's own Consulting and Integration group that created the software for it. Traditionally HLR has been the domain of telecommunication network providers rather than IT.
Another win was the world's busiest port (Singapore), which handles one sixth of total world container traffic. It has to handle 40,000 containers a day and coordinates everything from ship docking down to the forklifts that operate in the port.
The world's newest stock exchange, in India, also uses HP Integrity NonStop Blades. Kapoor said that the exchange had done a study and concluded that if they were to use an open Linux platform, they would need 150 servers rather than the two HP integrity servers at over ten times the cost and management complexity.
He noted that the market that HP NonStop plays in is termed "Availability Level 4," which means five nines or 99.999 per cent uptime. IBM's P-Series would be in AL3, which is 99.9 per cent uptime, while its Z-series would be in the same market as HP NonStop. If 10 hours of downtime a year is fine, then a Unix system might be most cost effective.
He said that most banks in Thailand are sitting on hardware last refreshed in 2005 and would get a four to six times improvement in cost per transaction by refreshing their hardware alone. Nine of the top 10 Thai banks use HP NonStop in their data centres.
To encourage people to migrate from legacy mainframe systems, HP is offering a free Integrity Blade under its Mainframe Freedom Programme with free hardware and software for a year.
A single NonStop Integrity server can power 10,000 ATMs, more than enough for most banks. Another area HP is interested in is telecoms, and a lot will happen when Thailand finally gets 3G sometime next year.
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