HP NONSTOP

Operating "Nonstop"

HP Using New OS For Robust, Fault-Tolerant Servers
Reliability is a true measure of any enterprise network. Corporate resources must often be up and available in the face of constant threats from users, bugs, and attacks. Network admins must implement and support fault tolerant systems, which is sometimes a challenge given today’s OSes and applications. Bill Buer, HP product manager, offered some information about HP’s NonStop OS and its recent support for 64-bit Intel servers.

A Long Road

The NonStop OS is certainly not a new platform. The kernel has been around for over 20 years, the result of a push to provide a complete fault-tolerant environment including a combination of hardware, software, and middleware that provides a 100% application uptime. Buer says, "Most systems strive to keep the [hardware] running, but the HP NonStop system addresses every level of the application stack to provide the most robust environment in the industry. Obviously one of the most key elements of the stack is the OS itself."

The improvements for NonStop have been many. "Over the years there have been new releases of the OS that were able to take advantage of new chip architectures, such as the MIPS RISC architecture. What is new here is that HP has announced that the platform that runs the NonStop OS is moving to a standard chip environment, which is the Intel Itanium Processor family. This means our customers will be able to take advantage of the 64-bit capability of Itanium, initially in the memory address space but longer term in having a full 64-bit operating environment," says Buer. Today, the NonStop OS runs on any MIPS-based HP NonStop server. In the future, this will also be any Itanium-based HP NonStop server. Of course, users may need to recompile their applications’ source codes to take best advantage of the Itanium.
NonStop is intended for multiprocessor servers but strives to overcome the loss of performance seen when SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems share memory resources. Buer says, "Each additional processor provides a sharply reduced benefit compared to the previous processor. Indeed, SMP systems become impractical with as few as eight processors. The NonStop server’s loosely coupled, shared nothing parallelism provides cost-effective, liner scalability, and, as a result, predictable response times in the face of swelling data volumes, expanding user populations, and a growing number of concurrent queries. Each processor has its own dedicated resources, so an added processor provides a full processor’s worth of performance." Results from large transaction processing and database benchmark tests using the NonStop Kernel OS show that even with more than 112 processors, each additional processor can execute at least 98.2% of the throughput of the first processor.

Performance Features & Management

HP NonStop servers already serve in many mission-critical applications, including the majority of the world’s securities, credit card, point-of-sale, and ATM transactions, as well as emerging zero latency enterprise systems. The NonStop OS is a versatile platform for parallel processing and application throughput. Buer says, "The NonStop Kernel OS enables critical business application processing to be transparently distributed across multiple processors and even multiple systems, either centralized locally or geographically distributed anywhere in the world. This is accomplished without application code changes or relocation of I/O devices because the NonStop Kernel message-based architecture efficiently connects all local and remote devices and processes between as few as two through as many as 4,080 loosely coupled processors working in parallel. Growth within a single server, an HP NonStop ServerNet Cluster, or the entire network can occur without disrupting application and database processing."

The combination of ServerNet technology and the NonStop Kernel OS enable both the data bandwidth and the number of processors to increase as needed to accommodate demanding and data-intensive applications. "Regardless of how large the system grows, the NonStop Kernel OS distributes the workload among the available processors, making efficient use of system resources and achieving exceptionally high aggregate throughput from parallel processing. The NonStop Kernel OS and its compilers automatically create a fully re-entrant code execution environment that makes replication and parallel processing highly efficient," explains Buer.

NonStop-based systems are also fully compliant with many existing system management applications, such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, and CA Unicenter. Buer says, "System management products from HP’s NonStop Enterprise Division and its partners give flexibility and choice to tailor specific system and network management environments to specific business needs. All management solutions for HP NonStop servers automatically inherit the platform advantages of availability, scalability, and manageability."

The Security Question

Given the long line of security vulnerabilities appearing for such OSes as Windows, the security and integrity of a NonStop OS should be a real concern for any admin considering a platform shift. NonStop is certainly not invulnerable to attack, and identifying vulnerabilities and releasing fixes/patches are a high priority for HP. "Security related patches will be communicated to our customer base with appropriate dispatch, with full disclosure of the risks involved with not applying the patch. HP has a team of people that helps identify vulnerabilities on all HP platforms, and HP has policies for identifying and responding to potential vulnerabilities as quickly as possible." Still, he emphasizes that NonStop’s modularity and process separation help to make the OS more secure than other platforms. Pricing for NonStop should be established later in 2004, with general availability in 2005.