Prepress
HP Puts More “Up” in Uptime
Monday 20. April 2009 - Company sets new standards for system availability with updated mission-critical computing software
HP today unveiled enhancements to its HP Serviceguard Solutions software and HP-UX 11i operating environment designed to maximize server availability for customers with 24/7 demands.
Targeting the mission-critical computing market, HP Serviceguard A.11.19 features online reconfiguration, integrated workload balancing and predictable performance as a system scales, assuring customers that the system will be available whenever they need it.
The latest version of HP-UX 11i has been optimized for blade systems, the industrys fastest growing server infrastructure.(1) This adds the automation and management benefits of HP-UX 11i to the cost reduction, management and performance features of HP BladeSystem infrastructure.
For the last three years, HP has been the highest-ranking systems vendor in the Availability and Clustering Software (ACS) market, based on IDCs annual report on ACS revenue.(2) HP Serviceguard high-availability software for HP-UX 11i Unix systems contributed strongly to HPs ranking in the market, including sales of HP Serviceguard software licenses and support.
“We have significantly improved the performance of our data center while reducing costs by consolidating four standalone servers with a mixed operating environment to just two HP blades with a single operating environment,” said Jim Gross, director of IT Operations at AAR Corporation, a product and service provider to the aerospace and defense industries. “Standardizing on HP-UX 11i v3 across our environment has made system administration simple and cost-effective, while HP Integrity blades provide the form factor needed to consolidate.”
Continuous service-level availability
The HP Serviceguard Solutions portfolio, part of the HP Virtual Server Environment suite of software, is tightly integrated with HP-UX and Linux to protect mission-critical applications from downtime caused by maintenance, human error or infrastructure failures.
Additional updates to the HP Serviceguard Solutions portfolio offer the following benefits:
Restores services 83 percent faster(3) than the previous version. With Serviceguard, the performance level does not degrade even as the server cluster grows.
Eliminates 100 percent of planned downtime associated with typical cluster maintenance and configuration. Customers can add or delete resources or change parameters of an application package online while the application continues to run.
Integrates workload balancing to ensure servers do not become overloaded after a failover ¬- the only high-availability clustering solution to do so.
Reduces administration costs by up to 25 percent(4) through a time-saving graphical display of dependencies between applications for intuitive management.
Improves the security of privacy data and allows for network growth with full compliance of IPv6 as well as mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environments. This is required by U.S. and Japanese government agencies.
“Twenty-five years of UNIX leadership, coupled with the longest publicly available UNIX roadmap in the industry, ensures that HP-UX is the operating environment of choice for customers,” said Brian Cox, director, Software Planning and Marketing, Business Critical Systems, HP. “This new version of HP-UX will enable customers to better handle orders for new business and reduce the costs of their technology infrastructures.”
More information about HP Serviceguard is available at www.hp.com/go/serviceguardnow.
Automation and management to improve uptime
The HP–UX 11i v3 Update 4 operating system offers new benefits through automation and simplified management, including:
Reduces deployment times from days to hours for high-bandwidth replicated servers through e-delivery, which enables downloads of the HP-UX 11i system software.
Up to 50 percent reduction of the planned downtime typically required to upgrade from older HP-UX 11i v3 releases through Online Operating System Update. New software versions can now be installed online.
Reduces energy costs per processor through Green Active Processors. This is achieved by dynamically controlling the power required for active processors based on workload requirements.
Protects sensitive data by overwriting and erasing disks with Disk Scrub.
In addition, the combination of HP-UX 11i and HP Integrity servers with Intel Itanium processors delivers the reliability, availability and scalability required by customers with mission-critical workloads.
“HPs investment in UNIX-level data and application redundancy, online mobility and system failover with HP-UX 11i v3, combined with Intels investment in processor-level RAS features, make HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i extremely flexible and reliable for mission-critical workloads,” said Rory McInerney, vice president, Digital Enterprise Group, and director, Enterprise Microprocessor Group, Intel. “Our joint work pays real dividends for our customers.”
Availability
HP Serviceguard A.11.19 solutions and HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4 are available worldwide. Additional pricing information is available from local HP representatives.