NonStop Systems Introduction

Introduction
NonStop Systems Introduction—527825-001
1-2
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.
The combination of fault tolerance, high performance, 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 NonStop database, or in other
cases, passing that transaction request on 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 many of the Fortune 100 corporations’
computing infrastructure and plays a key role in HP’s Adaptive Enterprise Zero Latency
Enterprise (ZLE) Solutions. A zero latency 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 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 can’t risk losing data
through security breaches.
Businesses will 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
Adaptive Enterprise is about leveraging IT to not only support change, but to embrace
it. It’s about driving business strategy and business processes into the underlying
applications and IT infrastructure to fuel business success.” An adaptive enterprise
dynamically links IT and business strategy so that IT is automatically driven by