Hewlett-Packard Co. announced several enhancements to its HP Integrity NonStop portfolio that centre on helping IT departments manage mission-critical systems and deploy new applications and services faster.
“We integrated a lot from a manageability point of view with business technology offerings,” said Dick Bird, business manager of business critical systems with Hewlett Packard Co.’s servers, storage and networking.
Enhancements include NonStop BladeCluster Express 1.2, designed to give better performance of dispersed mission-critical data centre systems.
NonStop SOAP 4.0 should help improve business decision-making by allowing IT departments to aggregate “islands” of data spread across the enterprise while also seamlessly integrating with open source software like Spring, Apache Axis2, MyFaces and Hibernate.
NonStop SQL 2.3 database has been upgraded to help IT departments increase service levels through simplified software programming, better application capacity and performance.
Bird said given the NonStop platform allows for high system availability resulting in high service levels, the technology is often seen in consumer-driven environments like retail, banking and emergency response centres. “When you are purchasing your Christmas presents, you don’t want that transaction taking longer than it has to,” said Bird.
HP customer and Dutch financial services provider Rabobank uses the HP NonStop platform to manage virtual financial transactions. “Rabobank looks to HP NonStop technology to handle our mission-critical financial services applications and help mitigate risks associated with virtual banking,” said Diederick de Buck.
Bird said the HP NonStop platform, which has been around for 35 years, is today based on industry standards and is not the expensive proprietary technology it used to be.
But having been around for that long, applications built on the NonStop platform are typically at least 20 years old, and need to be modernized, said Bird. The platform enhancements also address this need regarding legacy systems, he said.
Bird said HP itself completed a massive application modernization project last summer, after which it reduced the number of applications in use while modernizing others. The experience garnered, he said, is put toward the company’s converged infrastructure offerings.