Hewlett-Packard Co will today extend its five-nines high- availability alliance to two more partners, SAP AG and BEA Systems Inc, and extended HP OpenView to support it. Five nines is HP’s 99.999% uptown guarantee for hardware, operating system, database, storage and networking, now extending to applications as well. The five nines translate to five minutes downtime per year.
Back in March (CI No 3,625), HP added Oracle Corp, Cisco Systems and EMC Corp to its list of five nines partners. According to John Pickett, mission critical program manager for HP’s high- availability marketing center in Cupertino, the EMC relationship has survived the very public falling-out the two companies had over their OEM deal a few months later.
HP has been working on some specific deliverables with SAP to reduce planned and unplanned downtime and to increase availability through manageability. The first will be HP Somersault, due out initially on HP/UX during the first half of next year, with an NT version to follow. Somersault is said to eliminate R/3’s Enqueue Services as a single point of failure, by providing process mirroring. Currently, if there is an Enqueue failure in the middle of a batch job, users have to reboot, even if they are near the end of a twelve hour batch processing task. HP has also extended its MC/ServiceGuard middleware for managing high-availability clusters to support R/3, and added technology maps to help customers plan high availability aspects at the early stages of an installation.
BEA will integrate its Tuxedo transaction processing monitor into the five nines infrastructure through HP’s Event Monitor, and is jointly developing a Tuxedo Smart plug-in for HP’s OpenView. Plug-ins are already available for Cisco Works, Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. HP says the aim is to offer transparent failover for users of Tuxedo. It says it has around 1,000 joint customers with BEA.
With recent high visibility outages affecting internet commerce companies such as Ebay Inc – which uses systems from HP’s rival Sun Microsystems Inc – HP is keen to emphasize that it is the only company to offer high availability guarantees that extend to other vendors. It claims not to have suffered comparable downtime on the systems it supplied to Value America, said to be the largest virtual mall on the web.
