Hewlett-Packard Co and Oracle Corp are collaborating on high- availability systems and services, and yesterday announced a series of joint initiative. The two – who say they are each other’s best customers – plan to offer users a high availability bundle consisting of HP-UX servers, the Oracle Parallel Server and middleware, along with the proactive services and support necessary to reach annual availability of 99.95%. The eventual aim, which the two hope to achieve by 2000, is 99.999% downtime, or five minutes a year. Also announced was an integrated services initiative, where customers have a single number to ring for services, regardless of whether the problem is hardware or software related. They also described a performance assurance program, where measurement tools from both companies are used to calculate an upgrade program for customers who want to keep their systems performing above a specified level, despite software upgrades and increased workloads. Other initiatives include efforts to configure the Oracle Application Server to conform to HP’s QOS quality of service standards, the integration of HP’s Omniback highly available backup system with Oracle software, HP’s agreement to make its platforms and middleware compatible with Oracle’s Network Computing Architecture, and ongoing work to optimize Oracle software for Intel’s forthcoming ia64 Merced chip. HP says it’s already been running Oracle routines through its Merced simulator, though says it’s too early at this stage to talk about the kind of performance it’s been getting. The two aren’t currently prepared to guarantee that NT systems can achieve 99.95% reliability, saying they have so much more experience an data gathered about Unix. All of this will start rolling out over the next few months, but Oracle and HP are releasing a bundle of Oracle Financials and ERP applications packaged for mid-range HP servers as a first proof of concept, due out this month.
