Undergoing a digital transformation involves recognizing that we now live in an always-on, connected society. That means things like latency and outages can have greater impacts on the business than ever before. According to ZDNet, the average cost of downtime is around $5,600 per minute, or about $300,000 per hour—and that's just an average. Some companies lose even more.
That said, it's not just costs you have to worry about. Downtime also affects your customers, your brand image, and the overall quality of the services you provide.
Organizations that can't afford these losses need IT infrastructure that doesn't stop. NonStop servers are precisely that—servers designed by HPE to help you avoid the cost of downtime by maintaining uptime for your most critical workloads regardless of faults occurring on the system. A manufacturing customer using HPE NonStop to track assemblies running 24 hours a day on their manufacturing floor, quoted that an hour of downtime costs their business a million dollars. And NonStop helps save that cost.
Servers for a nonstop world
Many businesses today are becoming digital natives, leveraging solutions that are specifically designed to run and constantly to support wholly digital business initiatives. HPE NonStop systems have been powering enterprises' mission-critical workloads for more than four decades, and in today's digital world, they continue to prove their value by serving as the basis for disruptive tech like blockchain, IoT, and real-time analytics.
Unlike conventional server solutions, NonStop is its own unified infrastructure solution. It's a complete, integrated system with its own operating system, security layer, network layer, middleware, database, and management software. From there, your critical workloads and apps sit on top and run. To put it simply, NonStop servers are a converged infrastructure—and have been since before convergence was a market trend.
Today, NonStop has advanced even further to offer the NonStop software stack for separate purchase as a virtualized stack that can run on VMware environments. This option allows NonStop to run on Intel x86 servers that you as a customer may already have in your data center.
Under the hood, the HPE NonStop server OS is the mechanism of fault-tolerance delivery. It accomplishes this with a shared-nothing, parallel processing architecture that provides multiple levels of error detection to keep key systems up and running.
That said, every IT pro knows that nothing is bulletproof in the world of technology. Even if there is an issue, though, HPE NonStop servers are capable of fault isolation, with workload takeover capabilities that provide application and database resiliency, both locally and on a global scale. For both technology and business leaders, these servers can swiftly detect, understand, isolate, and resolve hardware or software issues. Moreover, the servers perform these functions without affecting critical applications, users, or performance.
All of this amounts to the highest fault-tolerant, affordable system on the market. On IDC's Availability Spectrum (AL1–AL4) HPE NonStop is classified as AL4, the highest possible Availability Level rating.
This explains why:
- More than 50 percent of global 500 banks use NonStop servers.
- The largest retail payment processors in the world leverage NonStop.
- NonStop supports more than 75 percent of the Global 500 telco companies.
Supporting the world's most critical systems
To better understand what this kind of technology can offer an organization, consider the needs of a global financial services organization. In a digital world, financial services leaders are tasked with meeting very specific requirements for performance, security, scalability, and resiliency. Recall your most recent ATM transaction. When making that transaction, you trusted the bank not only to keep your data secure, but also to respond to your query in real time.
In this environment, the availability of all of the mission-critical services supporting ATM functionality is critical. Any failures of ATM relays and data services are unacceptable. However, financial services organizations are facing unique challenges in today's business environment that threaten the availability of their ATM relays. These organizations must increase performance while accommodating a growing number of online transactions.
To properly manage these always-on, global transactions, financial services leaders need an architecture that can deliver maximum performance alongside resiliency and scalability. To support these needs, many financial leaders leverage HPE NonStop for their critical ATM transactions.
Deploying NonStop enables financial organizations to deliver services 24/7, 365 days a year without any data loss. Workloads can continue perpetually without the business devoting extra resources to prevent and mitigate downtime. Financial organizations can focus more on growing their business while enjoying higher performance for their ATM services, transactions, and core data services.
The promise of innovation
Along with improving the performance of core applications, NonStop can also be the perfect system to support innovative technologies. For example, its fault tolerance and massive scalability allows NonStop to be a perfect vehicle for blockchain. HPE is exploring this in the lab right now.
Solutions like blockchain might be new, but many large enterprises are now considering deploying it in their large data centers with all the demands of performance and stability that these enterprise workloads require. Some financial organizations are experimenting with using blockchain ledgers to trace, audit, monitor, and process transactions and now want to see how this might work with mission critical functions surrounding those transactions as well. While traditional blockchain systems offer limited scalability and lack resiliency and proper security features, leveraging HPE NonStop as the blockchain infrastructure, ensures all three in great measure, and would enable an enterprise-grade blockchain deployment.
Thanks to their fault tolerance and industry-leading resiliency, HPE NonStop systems can empower these use cases and more. With this solution in place, you can ensure that your customer's experience is digitally enabled, always positive, and, yes—nonstop.
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