The IT giant is looking to gain a foothold in the mid-market with the latest addition to its NonStop systems line.By Mehak Chawla
HP’s Business Critical Systems, based on its Itanium range of processors, have long been among the company’s flagship offerings for the enterprise segment. The IT giant has been consistently broadening its solution portfolio in this regard, despite glitches like the lawsuit with Oracle over the latter withdrawing support for Itanium hardware.
With the worldwide revenues from the Itanium range waning, HP is banking on its NonStop platform that started out as Tandem and came to HP through its acquisition of Compaq over a decade ago. These systems have an installed base in India that rests on the back of the ongoing build-out of the country’s core infrastructure. These systems are driving essential services including ATM networks, Core Banking Systems, railway ticketing and stock exchanges.
Santanu Ghose, Director, Business Critical Systems, HP India, identified some growth areas for Non-Stop systems in India. “Core infrastructure including the ATM network, oil and steel industry and the Railways are likely to drive demand for NonStop systems in India. In fact, the ticket reservation system of the Indian Railways is based on our Open VMS and Integrity systems.”
Apart from these core infrastructure projects that roll down from the center and state governments, HP is also tailoring its NonStop Systems for the mid-market.
New kid on the block
HP recently announced the availability of NS2100 or NonStop 2100 that’s based on the rx2800 i2 rack-mounted server, sporting Intel’s Tukwila quad-core Itanium 9300 processors.
Ghose argued that mid-market companies aspiring to grow into large enterprises would require such systems to scale up. “Within the SMB segment, which is the growth engine for India, some verticals are flourishing and mid-sized companies in these verticals are on their way to becoming big players. They need a class of high-end systems such as the NonStop systems. However, these systems have to be at a different entry price point than what enterprises are prepared to pay.”
HP’s putting the spotlight on SMBs in verticals such as healthcare, retail and cooperative banks as a starting point for its NS2100. This two-socket server comes with one socket populated and, depending on the model, up to four cores are activated in that single CPU. This system can grow from 2 to 4,080 CPUs.
NonStop machines use clustering to make parallel databases look like a single one to applications, giving customers the feel of running a single system. The software also has in-built fault tolerance, which means that if you lose a server node to a malfunction or for any other reason, processing continues unabated on the remaining nodes. Ghose stressed the point that routine maintenance and repairs could occur while the system remained online and that capacity could be added to the system without taking it off the grid.
Single view system
According to Ghose, the buck for virtualization stops at the server level and, in some cases, goes as far as storage. However, unless an organization practices virtualization from the ground up, the return on investment is by no means guaranteed. “IT has five layers, starting from floor space, power, cooling, network bandwidth and, finally, computing (server and storage). To get the full benefit of virtualization, you have to virtualize all of these layers. Otherwise you can’t go on to the Cloud because it is all about cost arbitrage.”
NS2100 has been designed with the aim of providing mid-sized organizations with a single virtualized platform to help them to scale better. “Since our integrated systems are heavily virtualized, they are ready for the Cloud. The Cloud has to be about converged infrastructure and that is what these systems offer. The NS2100 is integrated on a single platform that’s managed by one set of software and viewed and operated as a single system.”
HP is also playing its convergence card with the NonStop systems. This NonStop environment is likely to go nicely with Project Odyssey, which Ghose declared to be “HP’s answer to the modern Cloud” that the company is working on.
BYOD and mobility are driving infrastructure convergence within organizations. “Business requirements are emerging out of the handheld device. It’s a converged device but it has some challenges. For instance, the response time is significantly lower than on conventional laptops and desktops. Also, the mobile device has no shut down time; therefore, applications have to be always on. That’s driving convergence in systems.”
Traditionally, IT has always been in silos but, when an enterprise wants to enable access from mobile devices, it realizes that unless the infrastructure is converged, it can’t facilitate mobility and BYOD in a secure fashion.
“Non-Stop is essentially a Cloud-in-a-box offering because it is fabric-based and virtualized. It can do load balancing on its own, and it behaves like a single system. That’s something that is likely to appeal to SMBs that lack large IT departments to service and manage systems,” said Ghose.
Pricing and go-to-market
Although HP is mum about the price points of the NS2100 in India, Ghose said that the packaging and pricing would prove attractive to the mid-market. “A lot of people think that NonStop is a very expensive system but, given a certain volume, it actually generates the lowest TCO.”
Media reports in the US & UK peg the NS2100 at about $88,000, significantly lower than its siblings. It also costs a lot less than an NB54000c setup, which could be an important factor for small and mid-range customers who don’t need the full processing capability of the NonStop BladeSystem but want fault tolerance all the same.
According to Ghose, HP is going to follow the same dual route to market for the NS2100 as it has with most of its enterprise products, with 75% of the sales network shaping through the channel partners and the rest through direct deals.
Although HP does not break out sales of the NonStop product line from those of other systems in the Business Critical Systems unit, analysts believe that NonStop could drive significant growth for HP, especially once the upcoming eight-core Poulson Itanium 9500 processors come into play. HP is largely silent on the issue but the general expectation is for the wait to be over around mid 2013. Till then, NonStop seems to be a viable alternative for larger SMBs looking to cluster systems for high availability.
