Palo Alto, California. February 5, 1996
Delivering on its commitment to continually enhance high-availability, open-enterprise computing, Hewlett-Packard Company today announced major enhancements to its suite of high-availability solutions for today's mission-critical HP 9000 UNIX system environments.
The enhancements include enterprise-class clustering functionality, network- and system-management tools, high-availability storage products and integrated high-availability software solutions.
"HP is committed to delivering the best high-availability solutions to HP 9000 customers and believes this is an essential component to ensure the continued success of UNIX system platforms into the next century," said Carol G. Mills, general manager of HP's General Systems Division. "HP continues to deliver solutions to meet customers' requirements for availability, flexibility and scalability with a breadth and depth of products that is unmatched in the industry."
Recognizing the importance of managing clusters in distributed environments, HP also today has introduced cluster management software, which integrates enterprise clusters directly into the OpenView framework. Using this software, operators receive an easy-to-understand, visual map of its clusters on their networks. Cluster management software monitors clusters and key cluster components and delivers status information to a centralized management console. Changes of status that affect availability of applications trigger color-coded changes on the network map displayed on the console.
With the new software, enterprise clusters located anywhere on a customer's distributed network are transparently integrated directly into a Network Node Manager station, thereby enhancing productivity and application availability by enabling operators to directly monitor and manage enterprise clusters. Cluster management software enables automatic detection, monitoring and control of clusters and key cluster components, such as nodes, LAN interface pairs and highly available applications. Operators receive up-to-the-minute configuration and status information about clusters and can launch administrative tasks through the System Administration Manager with a click of a button. For more advanced analysis, cluster management software provides detailed configuration information for clusters via pull-down menus. This provides operators with fast access to low-level cluster information, such as IP addresses, heartbeat interval and failover options.
HP also has integrated its OpenView backup management product, OmniBack II, directly with the online-backup utilities available from Oracle, Sybase, SAP R/3 and Informix databases. OmniBack II, which was announced in May 1995, helps customers reduce downtime by allowing them to back up data online without bringing down databases.
New features for MC/ServiceGuard include increasing the number of supported cluster nodes from four to eight, enabling more flexible cluster configurations. In addition, MC/ServiceGuard Serial Line Heartbeat now offers a lower price entry-level cluster and lower price points across all two-node configurations. These new enhancements are available with MC/ServiceGuard on HP-UX(1) 10.1.
MC/ServiceGuard is a cluster manager that monitors the relative "health" of various cluster components, including system processors, memory, network adapters and application processes. In the event of a component or application process failure, MC/ServiceGuard responds by quickly reallocating system resources to restore application services to end users. With MC/ServiceGuard, applications can be deployed in cluster environments with no code modification.
MC/LockManager is a cluster manager that works in conjunction with Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) from Oracle Corp. MC/LockManager and OPS cooperate to provide a single logical view of multiple Oracle7 databases running on nodes of an enterprise cluster. Working together, these two products combine the best aspects of HP's enterprise clusters and Oracle's OPS: high availability, data integrity, configuration flexibility, scalability and reduced database-administration cost.
MC/LockManager, expected to be available in March on HP-UX 10.1, supports all new servers, including the D-Class, K-Class and the T520 -- the most recent additions to the HP 9000 family -- and high-availability storage systems. MC/LockManager now provides applications package failover capability to use with Oracle Parallel Server and other applications. In addition, MC/LockManager now supports up to four nodes within a single cluster.
The recent introduction of the D-Class server at the low-end of the HP 9000 family offers customers an entry-level, high-performance and cost-effective server with single-system, high-availability features. These features include hot-plug internal disks, CPU deallocation, memory-page deallocation, an integrated uninterruptable power supply (UPS) port and remote-management capabilities. In addition, the new server supports high-availability products, including MC/ServiceGuard, MC/LockManager, MirrorDisk/UX, high-availability arrays and high-availability storage systems.
Continuing its Middleware Engineering Initiative, HP is maximizing the level of integration between enterprise clusters and other key middleware and vertical solutions. HP today is delivering additional cluster solutions that eliminate downtime and improve manageability.
HP's Middleware Engineering Initiative is an ongoing program that provides added value by testing specific configurations and applications to deliver end-to-end solutions to customers. HP has introduced new and improved solutions, including High Availability for OSI, Web Cluster, High Availability for SAP R/3, TELEPACE cluster, High Availability for SNA and High Availability for NFS.
The High Availability Storage System, HP's newest storage enclosure, delivers flexibility and ease of use and offers state-of-the-art availability. HP's High Availability Storage System is designed to meet the needs of an entire enterprise, whether it is housing data associated with mission-critical applications or enabling decision support for workgroups and departments.
Available in rackmount and deskside versions, the new enclosure accommodates 2GB and 4GB disk-drive modules as well as DDS-2 tape drive modules at first release. It features hot-pluggable, easy-to-access storage modules, redundant power supplies, power cords and cooling fans, and supports one or two single-ended or fast/wide differential SCSI-2 buses. Availability is increased with the support of dual SCSI-2 buses that facilitate disk-mirroring in the same enclosure, strengthen fault resilience and provide flexibility to optimize performance.
With the introduction of HP's High Availability Storage System, HP now has the most complete on-line storage portfolio in the UNIX system marketplace. Other products within the portfolio include HP High Availability Disk Array for midrange computing and Symmetrix 3000 for data-center computing. HP's storage solutions are scalable from deskside to data center, with robust high-availability and high-performance features. Each product within HP's on-line storage portfolio offers different features and benefits, but all are designed to meet today's mission-critical needs.
Currently Available
MC/ServiceGuard ranges from $3,900 to
$24,000/license
HP 9000 D-Class Server begins at $8,050
High Availability Storage System begins at $2,600
Available First Quarter 1996
cluster management software $1,300/license
MC/LockManager for HP-UX 10.1 ranges from $8,500 to
$38,000/license
Hewlett-Packard is the second-largest computer supplier in the United States with computer-related revenue in excess of $25.3 billion in the 1995 fiscal year.
Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 102,300 employees and had revenue of $31.5 billion in its 1995 fiscal year.
Information about HP and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com.
HP-UX 9.X and 10.0 for HP 9000 Series 700 and 800 computers are X/Open Company UNIX 93 branded products.
