HP brings NonStop to blade platform

HP today released a new carrier-grade server platform that for the first time marries the high-availability capabilities of its NonStop line of servers with its more modular, low-power consumption blade platforms.

The new HP Integrity NonStop NB50000c-cg Carrier-grade BladeSystem delivers four times the performance in half the physical footprint when compared to an equivalent HP NonStop S-Series server, a past-generation platform that is still widely used in telecom offices.

The idea behind the new platform is that service providers deploy new network architectures like IMS and LTE, they are going to continue to require the high-performance capabilities of the HP NonStop line, which in addition to telecom are used for applications like stock exchanges and emergency response systems. At the same time, carriers want to take advantage of the capabilities of more modern blade server architectures, including two-way and four-way processor capabilities, modular expansion via plug-in blades and lower-power consumption, said Rene Champagne, Industry Solutions Director, Communications, Media & Entertainment, HP Business Critical Servers division.

“This is one hundred percent NonStop. From an architectural point of view, it will be recognizable to any customer that’s used a NonStop platform in the past,” said Champagne. “At the same time, it has a commonality of management and other capabilities with other HP [server] products.”

In new IP-based network architectures, service providers need high-powered generic server platforms to run a variety of new network elements, including Home Location Register (HLR), Home Subscriber Server (HSS) and a variety of messaging, media and other packet processing boxes. While the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks that would require such elements have been relatively slow to roll out, the race to deploy next-generation wireless architectures like LTE is accelerating the demand for more processing power, said Champagne. High-availability systems are also required for intensive OSS/BSS applications, such as real-time charging, he added.