'India is a huge market for our NonStop server range'

Hewlett-Packard (HP) took close to 100 of its NonStop customers from across
the country to Goa to discuss its future technology initiatives towards fault
tolerant computing. Zia Askari from CyberMedia News caught up with HP Asia
Pacific Region NonStop enterprise division executive director and GM Herbert
Zwenger to speak about HP's NonStop bet and what value would it bring to its
customers as it shifts its NonStop series from the existing MIPS based
architecture to Itanium architecture.

What is HP's focus as far as high-end NonStop server range is concerned?

The NonStop family has been designed specifically to perform the mission
critical fault tolerant computing for our customers. So the focus is to keep
moving towards better performance and customer experience for this range of
products.

NonStop advanced architecture is raising the bar on availability and
scalability of fault tolerant computing environment. Our product line helps
enterprises in recovering from multiple points of failure. Seamless scaling of
applications across multiple platforms is helping our customers to reduce time
to market their solutions.

Promoting the concept of zero latency enterprise (ZLE) is another focus area
for us in this region. If an enterprise adopts ZLE model, it can improve its
customer satisfaction ratings by upto 20%.

ZLE demands for a real-time infrastructure to be in place, our NonStop series
is ideally poised to provide that.

Globally, we have seen a lot of implementations for our ZLE based solutions.
Recently US-based Sprint has taken more than 50 such deployments. In India, we
are engaged in talks with some our customers and we are pretty positive about
the deployments in this part of the world.

What kind of growth areas do you see for this line of business? How do you
plan to tap these areas?

With our NonStop line of products being widely used by stock exchanges and a
number of Banks, we have a fair amount of presence in segments like banking as
well as telecom. However, there is a lot of scope in areas like oil segment.
Here, both public and private sector companies are interested in taking our
products for fault tolerant computing.

Interestingly, we have observed that 24x7 availability applications are
growing faster than the total server market in India. This makes India a very
important destination for us. Here we have got about 180 NonStop developers
working at TCS in Mumbai, more than 200 NonStop developers work at Wipro in
Bangalore and HP has about 110 NonStop developers or engineers. So the idea is
to grow the entire ecosystem and as other segments are opening up to concepts
like ZLE or fault tolerant computing, we would see these numbers grow
significantly.

At present, we have 24 high-end customers like the ICICI Bank, Mumbai Stock
Exchange, Reliance among others. This figure is likely to grow considerably as
we move forward and here we would be adding more segments like manufacturing and
oil.

What is the status of your architecture shift from the current MIPS based
to an Itanium based?

All our customers worldwide including in India are more than exited about
the Itanium shift. This would mean faster processor capabilities to the NonStop
series and also the price barrier would also come down. Itanium based NonStop
servers are likely to cost less, so that would mean a dual-benefit to our
customers — a faster processor platform and the fault tolerant computing
capabilities of NonStop.

When we bundle both these components, than it becomes a very tempting
proposition for a lot of enterprises in worldwide and in India as well.