HP server strategy

Every corporate IT department juggles competing priorities at one time or another: How to increase revenue and cut costs, How to maintain ongoing operations and complete projects already underway; while getting new projects off the ground. With a platform based on HP servers you don't have to compromise.

From basic infrastructure to the most demanding business applications, the HP portfolio can support many combinations of business needs. Our customers draw from a broad selection of products, services and solutions; and they stay with us through multiple generations of hardware and software enhancements.

The scenarios below depict HP servers in action, addressing a variety of business needs across many industries. Read on to find out how a sampling of our customers gained the computing power, reliability and flexibility they required to get ahead in the global marketplace.

Computer system downtime is a luxury most companies can no longer afford. Customers expect and require 24/7 operations. Business continuity including: high availability, disaster tolerance, data protection and recovery and security solutions; has emerged as a top priority in the enterprise.

Whether they trade futures and options, route critical 9-1-1 calls, or process a high volume of credit card transactions, a wide variety of businesses rely on HP Integrity NonStop servers when user levels are paramount. The reason? Every piece of hardware that makes up a NonStop system can be swapped on the fly. That means dramatic reductions in the need to reboot and fewer caching problems. IT administrators can change discs and controllers without affecting operations.

Moreover, a standards-based architecture built on the Intel® Itanium® processor provides broad choice, allowing customers to use the same environments and development tools they already know and trust: Windows®, SQL, HP OpenView, Linux®, UNIX® and more.

Using NonStop servers is a strategy that has worked for 20 years at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), according to managing director and CIO Jim Krause. CME began using HP NonStop in 1985 to run its trading floor. In 1998 the exchange moved its mission-critical Globex electronic trading platform to HP NonStop servers in order to better support round-the-clock trading.

Today, CME relies on 13 HP NonStop systems to handle peak transaction volumes of 13 million transactions a day, with an average response time of less than 55 milliseconds. These servers touch all four of CME's major product groups: interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange and physically delivered commodities like eggs and butter.

"In this business, you don't like to see your name in the paper because a computer problem has shut the markets down prematurely," says Krause. "The HP NonStop platform eliminates that worry for us. Its reliability has been a key factor in the success of our electronic markets."

The Vattenfall Group is one of the leading energy producers in northern Europe, delivering electricity and heat to about three million private households, companies and public utilities. Its full-service IT provider Vattenfall Europe Information Services GmbH supports many of the companies within the Vattenfall Group, as well as companies in which Vattenfall has holdings, such as GASAG Berliner Gaswerke AG, Western Europe's largest municipal gas supplier.

When Vattenfall needed to resolve productivity issues and performance bottlenecks while at the same time improving scalability and cutting costs, it decided to upgrade from an HP ProLiant platform to Integrity rx5670 and rx2600 servers, an Itanium 2-based platform. The company was able to increase the performance of its business-critical SAP solutions by 250 percent while cutting costs by 33 percent.

"Obviously we could not afford to sacrifice availability or performance, but cost is really the main argument in such a competitive business. We chose HP Integrity servers for their competitive price/performance," says Uwe Worch, head of IT Strategy at GASAG.

Many other global brands rely on HP Integrity and Integrity NonStop servers for their most demanding workloads and business applications:

• RadioShack runs HP NonStop systems for communications and credit card processing. An HP NonStop server collects daily sales figures from more than 5,000 retail stores; the data informs key business processes such as inventory replenishment and financial accounting. HP laptops, desktops, ProLiant servers, HP-UX and Superdome computers round out the company's IT infrastructure.

• When Cabelas, the world's foremost mail-order outdoor outfitter, determined that its eight-way Sun server and Redbrick software configuration was not meeting current and future growth needs, the decision was made to upgrade to HP rp5400 servers and the HP-UX 11i operating platform. This resulted in an 80 percent increase in data processed, a 40 percent increase in performance and a 50 percent decrease in data load time.

As one of the largest food companies in the world, General Mills has long pursued a strategy of IT standardization and consolidation. The company operates its entire global enterprise on HP systems; from HP Integrity servers that run the company's SAP enterprise resource planning and Business Information Warehouse, to the HP iPAQ Pocket PCs used by its retail sales force. More than 1,000 HP ProLiant servers run Microsoft server applications worldwide and host nearly 50 consumer Web sites.

When General Mills acquired Pillsbury Company in 2001, the companies needed to combine General Mills' 8,000-square-foot data center with Pillsbury's 28,000-square-foot data center. At the same time, the company's IT management saw an opportunity to consolidate its SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse database servers and central instance (CI) in a single instance, on a single server, in a single partition.

The decision produced favorable results: General Mills consolidated five PA-RISC Superdome servers to three HP Integrity Superdome servers and an HP Integrity rx7620 server, in a move that ultimately reduced the data center size by a factor of seven. "We run SAP ERP and Business Warehouse in one large partition on a 32-processor Integrity machine, and the performance is just super," says Vandy Johnson, director of operations for General Mills.

Many HP customers have experienced success with server consolidation projects:

• A relatively small consolidation led to greater-than-expected savings at FedEx Canada. The company challenged HP to identify areas of its IT infrastructure that would benefit from consolidation or renewal. HP recommended replacing five older servers with two HP rp7410 servers, which opened up bandwidth for FedEx Canada to handle the company's Latin American operations as well. As a result, savings escalated from a modest $50,000 Canadian to $2 million.

• On a larger scale, Renesas Technology became the third-largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world when Hitachi Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation joined forces in 2003. But before the combined company could deliver results, it had to integrate two disparate systems. Renesas chose HP-UX and Windows using HP Integrity Superdome servers and built the system using HP Express Service to manage the configuration details. The new Renesas system, being rolled out in 2005 to 2007, is expected to affect order processing, material management and production planning for 20,000 users across 40 offices within Japan and overseas. Targeted benefits include improved decision making and real-time management, as well as greater productivity and profitability.

From flight simulation and America's Cup Yacht racing to weapons system design, HP servers address customer needs across the vast arena of High Performance Computing (HPC): workgroup computing, enterprise computing and supercomputing. For example, when Airbus UK wanted to accelerate simulation capabilities, reduce the cost of simulation, and maintain a standard reference architecture for its high performance technical computing needs, the company turned to HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i.

"Airbus UK needed a solution that could enable backward and upward compatibility for our engineering simulations so that we could run applications decades from now and know that the math libraries will be compatible and our numerical results consistent," says Nigel Barry, IT architect, Airbus UK. "HP's HPC reference architecture has enabled us to meet this need through multiple generations of hardware, most recently with the HP Integrity servers running HP-UX 11i."

Airbus UK currently runs 10,000 applications on HP Integrity servers, most of which were transferred from the previous PA-RISC architecture. With its HP systems, Airbus UK can run 20 to 30 simulations for wing designs each night.

HP Integrity servers are not the only option: At Dallara Automobili, a dedicated HP server platform of 16 ProLiant DL145 servers running Linux, along with a four-processor HP ProLiant DL585 server based on AMD Opteron 848 and 850 processors with 32 GB of RAM, gave the performance boost the company needed to gather precise aerodynamic calculations for models in wind tunnel simulations.

The HP server portfolio continues to evolve, keeping pace with changes in the industry and setting the direction for future innovation. Why choose HP servers? Three reasons: choice, innovation and experience.  And because dozens of companies across a wide range of industries must be doing something right.

The true vote of confidence reveals itself in the frequency with which our customers embrace new elements of the HP portfolio and the length of time they stay with us. When the time came, Airbus migrated from PA-RISC to HP Integrity. Meanwhile, CME is transitioning to HP Integrity NonStop.

For its part, General Mills gained headroom and capacity that it anticipates will help accommodate future growth and performance. "If we double again tomorrow, with the HP Integrity platform, we're ready," says General Mills' Johnson. "From an architectural standpoint, we won't have to change a thing. And that's a very comforting thought."

Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.