NonStop Systems Introduction

NonStop Systems Introduction—527825-001
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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). What makes NonStop systems unique is their
combination of fault tolerance, high performance, and scalability. NonStop servers and
software have been very successful in industries in which these attributes are essential
to the operation of the business. These industries have included 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 NonStop server’s attributes are more 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 on a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-
week basis, and for these businesses, downtime is unacceptable. 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 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 on a “24 x
7” basis, 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 are causing 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 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.