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HP: Down the 'NonStop' memory lane

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

BENAULIM (GOA), INDIA: Goa is currently celebrating the 35th year of HP's NonStop portfolio, and interestingly, in 1974, the first ever NonStop system (the T/16), was created by a company called Tandem Computers, which was founded by a group of engineers from HP.

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The idea back then was to safeguard systems from 'single-point failures' at prices only marginally higher than non fault tolerant systems. The first versions came bundled with a proprietary Operating System called T/TOS (Tandem Operating System), later renamed Guardian.

The mainframe guaranteed 100 times less failures and uptimes promises were in terms of years and not hours - all this with 2-CPU systems, at prices just marginally higher than systems that ran of single CPUs.

As the years rolled by, a fibre optic bus system called FOX was incorporated along with MS-DOS based PC called Dynamite, and later, a 'minicomputer-sized device' called the NonStop CLX. Also added was the NonStop SQL database along with newer versions and additional features.

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Tandem was acquired by Compaq in1997 and incidentally by HP in 2002, bringing with it a new set of competencies and enhancements. The first obvious and immediate outcome was the un-tethering of NonStop from its proprietary shackles.

The only component of the original NonStop that has been retained is the NonStop Kernel, with streamlining the product line to be 'modern' and 'standard', with modernization and standardization as the core competencies.

Explaining this in detail, Winston Prather, VP and General Manager, NonStop Division HP said, “The evolution of NonStop can be understood in three steps - the S-Series offerings that are proprietary to a certain extent, the Integrity range of HP servers which marks HP's commitment to Intel's Itanium processors, and the latest range of NonStop servers that run on Blades.”

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He said the Integrity range brought with it the 'openness' to sync up with development platforms like Java, Eclipse and Apache, and also with any company's existing software deployments.

“Scalability was incorporated into the NonStop along with fault tolerance to enable enterprises to upgrade NonStop depending on their business forecasts, along with HP's software tools that aid in testing, development and monitoring of applications written across an array of languages and platforms,” Winston explained.

The NonStop portfolio currently stretches till the single core NS 1200 and the dual core NS 2000 blade-based system.

According to Winston, India's unique challenge of skyrocketing real estate prices and concerns of power and cooling for agile enterprise computing are addressed by the NonStop, and in the months to come, quad core processor-based blades would be added to the existing portfolio, taking forward the promise of uninterrupted fault-free computing power for mission critical enterprises at competitive pricing.

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