HPE Nonstop Compute: Two new fault-tolerant solutions for mission-critical applications

[ComputeExperts]

Explore the latest advancements in HPE Nonstop Compute solutions, featuring fault-tolerant systems and mission-critical innovations.

For over five decades, HPE Nonstop Compute solutions have been synonymous with reliability, innovation, and performance in industries where uninterrupted operations are not just desirable—they’re essential. These platforms are everywhere, silently powering the world around us, whether you are doing mundane tasks such as ATM withdrawals, paying for your coffee, going on a metro train trip, booking your railway tickets, or enjoying cupcakes from a baking company. These solutions have consistently delivered fault-tolerant platforms that redefine what mission-critical applications can achieve, and today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of two transformative additions to the HPE Nonstop Compute portfolio: the entry-class HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5 and the flagship HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5.

Introducing HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5 and HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5

Optimized for extremely high levels of availability, the entry-class HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5 and flagship HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 featuring Intel Xeon processors are part of a powerful, trusted, and secure portfolio of solutions that are ideal for high-volume OLTP, mixed and intensive data processing workloads in verticals, including retail banking, payments, logistics, transportation management, and smart manufacturing execution systems (MES). Both the entry-class and the flagship platforms are designed to meet the demands of modern enterprises seeking to accelerate business processes, enhance operational efficiency, and help ensure fault-tolerant continuity. Best of all, current customers don’t need to worry about any downtime when migrating to the new system.

 Key highlights of the new platforms

• Double memory capacity: Up to 8 TB DDR5 memory for NS9 X5 and 512 GB for NS5 X5, enabling faster transaction processing and higher workload productivity.¹
• Enhanced system interconnect: With 2x faster InfiniBand connections, the platform helps ensure ultra-fast communication between nodes (for NS9 X5).²
• Higher networking bandwidth: 2.5x the previous generation, designed for today’s data-intensive operations (10x the previous generation for NS5 X5).³
• Advanced storage connectivity: 32 Gb Fibre Channel support for external storage, improving data accessibility and integration.⁴

This announcement coincides with an operating system update available on all HPE Nonstop Compute x86-based systems that introduces several enhancements, including the support for C/C++17 standards for enhanced application integration and an increase in the capacity to handle named processes for greater development and debugging flexibility. In the security area, the update introduces support for a multifactor authentication (MFA) connector that enables integration with enterprise authentication providers helping to comply with regulations and compliance standards such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for payment cards, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA) for the healthcare vertical and SOC2, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for general data management policies.

The new solutions feature Intel Xeon processors for up to 15% more performance capacity.⁵

• The entry-class HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5 is available with the Intel Xeon Bronze 3400 series processors.
• The flagship HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 is available with Intel Xeon Gold 6400 series processors.

Benefits that matter

Modernize your mission-critical workloads

The HPE Nonstop Compute platforms are tailored to redefine how enterprises approach mission-critical workloads. These new solutions not only include the hardware, networking, and software enhancements to boost productivity, but they also leverage the HPE Nonstop fundamentals of reliability, availability, and scalability. Hence, these platforms are ideal if you want to either upgrade your infrastructure for better efficiency or transition to new applications to power use cases that demand faster transaction processing, such as in payments processing, MES applications.

Migrate confidently without unplanned downtime

To grow business and cater to new markets, enterprises need to transform their IT and infrastructure landscape. When migrating to newer platforms, mission-critical customers need to minimize risk and hence need a seamless transition experience. The HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 can be clustered with the past two generations of HPE Nonstop Compute solutions, enabling customers to seamlessly add new servers to multigeneration configurations. This capability allows enterprises to migrate confidently without downtime and scale operations as needed. In addition, our highly skilled HPE Nonstop engineers, who are part of a mission-critical culture, provide expert support and services throughout the entire migration process and lifecycle of these solutions.

Achieve peace of mind

When it comes to mission-critical applications, customers need a partner they can trust to keep their operations up and running at all times and keep security threats at bay, since the cost of a cyberattack can be incredibly high, especially in the financial services space. The fault-tolerant and highly secure HPE Nonstop Compute solutions have been providing this trust and reliability for more than 50 years and continue to evolve and innovate on the platform. From a security standpoint, these solutions include comprehensive security spanning the platform, data, users, communication, and applications. They offer out-of-the-box security infrastructure for customers and applications to protect and secure their resources, a zero trust security design, AI/ML-based monitoring and predictions, and advanced forensics to trace user actions. HPE Nonstop Compute digital resilience framework and fraud detection solutions take a comprehensive approach encompassing security measures, analytics, and AI, combining data assets in real time while staying in compliance with security standards to help ensure state-of-the-art data protection.

 Watch the HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 hardware tour video here 

Why choose HPE Nonstop Compute?

The new platforms are a testament to HPE’s commitment to delivering powerful, seamless, trusted, and secure solutions for mission-critical applications, with continued innovations in the software stack. HPE Nonstop Compute solutions have fully integrated software that includes OS, security, management, middleware, database, and a modern application development environment, all engineered to work together as one fault-tolerant, highly performant, and scalable platform. This integrated solution from a single vendor helps ensure consistent and timely certifications, road map commitment, end-to-end security, cohesive service-level agreement (SLAs), and consistent customer experience.

The HPE Nonstop Compute platforms have a unique, self-healing architecture that offers unmatched data availability and integrity and provides fault tolerance through a shared-nothing, full system cluster with fault-tolerant OS services and database. Consequently, this architecture also lends massive scalability to these platforms and the application to scale linearly from 2 to more than 4000 processors without architectural bottlenecks or downtime while adding capacity. With all the above capabilities, these platforms have been consistently ranked as Availability Level 4 (AL4), the highest availability rating of IDC.⁶

To top it all off, you can use the new solutions to deploy your applications where you need them. These highly tailored, factory-integrated, and turnkey solutions provide a consistent user experience across on-prem, colocation, or hybrid cloud environments. With the enhanced HPE GreenLake cloud integration, customers can get cloud operating experience with a consumption-based model to optimize their costs. Customized, expert, and mission-critical-aware HPE Services helps customers make the most of the new HPE Nonstop Compute solutions by providing a comprehensive portfolio of customized services, including financial and asset management assistance to accelerate business operations and successfully migrate their complex workloads. 

The HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5 and HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 platforms embody the next chapter of mission-critical innovation, reliability, and scalability. Whether you’re processing payments, detecting fraud, or optimizing smart manufacturing systems, these solutions propel your enterprise into a future defined by uninterrupted operations and unparalleled productivity.

To learn more about HPE Nonstop Compute solutions, read the press release or visit our HPE Nonstop Compute webpage.

¹ HPE Nonstop NS8 X4 supports a maximum of 4 TB of system memory as compared to a maximum of 8 TB available in HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5. HPE Nonstop NS4 X4 supports 256 GB as compared to the 512 GB in HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5.

² HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 uses InfiniBand HDR200 vs. HDR100 for NS8 X4.

³ HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 offers 25GbE connectivity as compared to 10GbE in HPE Nonstop NS8 X4.

⁴ Current generation features 32 Gb Fibre Channel connectivity as compared to 16 Gb in the previous generation.

⁵ Based on internal benchmark comparing HPE Nonstop NS8 X4 to HPE Nonstop Compute NS9 X5.

⁶ “IDC's Worldwide Computing Platforms Taxonomy,” IDC, #US49554324, March 2024.

Meet the Authors:

Emily O'Shaughnessy, HPC & AI Marketing
Vikas Kapoor, HPE Nonstop Compute Marketing