NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs

Introduction
NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs—540083-001
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The Adaptive Enterprise
There is also a close relationship between availability and scalability. Scalability refers
to the ability of an application to grow while maintaining a high level of performance.
The Internet has demonstrated that the size and complexity of an application directly
affect its availability. There are several reasons for this. A large application requires
more system components, meaning more things can fail. Planned outages are longer
because a larger application takes longer to start and stop. And it takes longer to
reorganize larger databases.
Data integrity means that neither the failure of a particular transaction nor the failure of
a hardware component, such as a processor or disk drive, can corrupt the data in the
database.
The combination of fault tolerance, high performance, data integrity, and scalability
make NonStop systems ideally suited to occupy a central position in a corporation’s
computing infrastructure. NonStop systems can accept transactions from a wide
variety of input devices, such as bar code readers, cell phones, point-of-sale devices,
and so on. The NonStop system can process those transactions, in some cases acting
as the database of record and storing the data in its own database, or in other cases,
passing that transaction request to another server or to another system within the
business. But the NonStop system is a continuously available “hub” that can accept
data from a variety of sources, perform a transaction, and pass it to another system or
database or store it in its own database. The NonStop system is the central component
that can be relied on to always provide continuous availability and high performance
under a massive workload.
Today the NonStop system is at the center of the computing infrastructure for many
Fortune 100 corporations, and it plays a key role in HP’s Adaptive Enterprise real-time
solutions. A real-time enterprise is a company that has immediate access to current
information throughout the entire enterprise and can respond appropriately to that
information.
The Adaptive Enterprise
Faced with unrelenting pressure to do more with less in an environment of constant
change, today’s CIO must balance traditional IT requirements– manage costs, mitigate
risk and increase quality of service– with the new requirement of business agility.
For example, a car manufacturer needs to move from two new model introductions per
year to six, without sacrificing quality. An entertainment company must double its
production of animated features without doubling costs. A retailer relies on real time
supply chain insights to solve problems before they happen but cannot risk losing data
through security breaches.
Businesses need to answer the question, “How quickly can your business sense and
respond to change, and better yet, how can you capitalize on change and turn it into a
competitive advantage?”
The Adaptive Enterprise is HP’s vision for helping customers synchronize business
and IT to capitalize on change. HP characterizes the vision in these terms: “The