HP Enhances High-availability Solutions for HP 9000 Mission-Critical Environments; HP Adds New Enterprise Clustering Functionality, Network- and System-management Tools and High-availability Storage Solutions

Business Wire, Feb 5, 1996

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(R) 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."

NETWORK AND SYSTEM MANAGEMENT

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 ENTERPRISE CLUSTERING FUNCTIONALITY

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.