By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co, which currently offers a 99.95% uptime guarantee of its hardware, operating system and first networking layer will extend the coverage to Oracle databases running on its systems this summer and to the distribution network via its relationship with Cisco Systems.
It is by extending the one-to-one relationships it has with its partners to cover 99.95% uptime coverage that it will extend its high availability program to the next level. It claims it’s already offering end-to-end uptime – all the way to applications availability to users – and by the end of 2000 will be offering 99.999% uptime. It is currently pushing Oracle to provide sub- minute failover in its products, is working with EMC Corp on storage availability. But to realize its five nines goal has already begun to optimize the development of new products – hardware, OS, management and integration tools – to meet the five nines requirement. It won’t have to be retro-fitted. This is one way HP says it is differentiating itself from the competition. It is currently adding availability monitoring to its collection of performance monitoring services including the HP observatory which monitors certain customer sites around the world.
Reacting to criticism of the five nines program that it ignores the key determinants of uptime – people and processes – HP says it wasn’t a marketing concept that needed technology to fill it. It was developed by a marketing manager who sat in on a future technology presentation riddled with nines in performance and availability projections. Where Sun is linking systems availability directly back to employee compensation programs helped by The Uptime Institute, HP says its filed teams are already rewarded based upon reported customer satisfaction. It’s not working specifically with the Institute on five nines because it has traditionally focused on other kinds of problems, HP claims. It is interested in any efforts to create availability benchmarks by which users could compare different solutions.
