NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs

NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs—540083-001
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1 Introduction
NonStop systems have traditionally been used primarily for online transaction
processing applications (applications that keep the database up to date at all times by
recording transactions as they occur). NonStop systems are unique because of their
combination of fault tolerance, high performance, data integrity, and scalability. Integrity
NonStop servers and software have been very successful in industries in which these
attributes are essential to the operation of the business. These industries include
financial services, securities and commodities exchanges, and telecommunications,
where online transaction processing is key. The market for these servers and software
is expanding into other industries as well, including health care, travel and leisure, and
retail sales.
The Integrity NonStop server’s attributes are applicable to today’s environment as real-
time information becomes more important to many businesses’ competitiveness. More
and more businesses find that they need to operate 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week,
and downtime is unacceptable for these businesses. At the same time, businesses’
information technology (IT) environments are becoming more complex. The demands
on these IT environments are increasing to meet changing business needs. The
Integrity NonStop server has the combination of attributes required for this new and
changing environment, with unmatched availability, performance, data integrity, and
scalability.
It has been estimated that over one third of businesses worldwide operate “24 x 7”,
and that number is expected to grow. The message is becoming increasingly clear: to
maintain a competitive edge, businesses need to be real-time; that is, they must be
continuously available and must be able to respond quickly to new information.
The explosive growth of the Web as a way of conducting business is largely
responsible for this increase in the number of industries that cannot tolerate downtime.
Downtime and poor performance cause Web sites to lose millions of dollars a year.
Customers expect Web sites to be available any time of the day or night from any point
on the globe, yet it is not uncommon for a Web site, when visited during scheduled
maintenance, to display a message such as:
“This site not available due to database reorganization.”
When this happens, the customer generally loses patience and takes his or her
business to a competitor.
Downtime can occur for many reasons. It can be unscheduled, for example, a power or
disk drive failure, or scheduled, for example, to reorganize a database. But customers
are not concerned with why they are not able to access the Web; they just know that
the Web site is down, and they will move on to a competitor.
Performance is closely related to availability. In fact, as seen by the end user,
availability and performance are the same thing. An application that performs poorly;
that is, does not deliver immediate responses, can be just as annoying to the customer
as an application that is unavailable due to a planned or unplanned outage.