HP server targets mainframe users

摘要

HP last week released the first blade-server version of its NonStop computers highly fault-tolerant system designed to compete with IBM's mainframe. HP also is trying to steal some thunder from IBM with an interesting proposition: The company is offering its new Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem "at no charge [with] a full year of NonStop platform software" to customers willing to junk a mainframe application. Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice dismissed the trade-in offer as "marketing bravado" and "juvenile." Nonetheless, HP's NonStop, based on Intel Itanium processors, certainly can compete with the IBM mainframe, he says. "It's a strong product. I'm not going to read too much into fisticuffs with IBM. At the end of the day, there aren't many system architectures that can do six, seven or eight 'nines' of reliability If you're serious about vast uptime and never, ever going down, as good as Unix has become ... it doesn't have the decades of experience with the kind of reliability that mainframes and NonStop do."