There was a time when the advanced technology of HP’s Integrity Superdome X and even the vendor’s Integrity NonStop X technology was out of reach for the channel.
This is not the case any longer for HP, as the company announced the expansion of its Compute line for X86 architectures at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, Spain. This will include HP Integrity Superdome X and NonStop X units.
Jeff Kyle, director of product management for HP Servers, told CDN that previously channel partners who had mid-size customers which grew over the last five years and increased their data may have move to this type of HP solution without them. Now they get to grow along with these customers instead of handing it off to a bigger player.
“It’s what I like about this announcement. Traditional HP UX customers and channel partners, which are an established environment, brings more channel partner into the relationship. It’s all about the ecosystem now. Channel partners are going to be able to provide more expertise; sometimes even more than HP and that’s why we are opening it up,” Kyle said.
More customers are doing data warehousing and real time analytics, which prompted HP to make this kind of a move with Superdome. The HP Integrity Superdome X can now blend x86 efficiencies with Linux workloads supporting databases as an example.
Channel partners were once prohibited because of specialized training for advanced technologies such as Superdome.
“Channel partners have grown up on this and can now take part in Superdome because they have the expertise now where they did not have it before. This is what we like. Its standard based and so someone who knows Oracle or SQL Server and business intelligence they will get to be a part of this and it expands our opportunity as well,” Kyle said.
Many of these new partners had to develop business intelligence solutions for customers who were making other choices and therefore the channel invested in Linux, x86 and data centres. “We want these channel partners to take what they know and apply it,” Kyle added.
While this announcement opens up the channel opportunity for HP, Kyle said that the market for Superdome and NonStop will still be mainly for mid-size and up. This announcement was made to strengthen HP’s solutions for mission-critical environments.
“These are workloads specifically for business processing and decision support like ERP, OLTP, core banking where zero downtime is the goal; any downtime costs money and these are very demanding environments and requires high performance and scalability,” he said.
For example, Superdome X was designed as a prototype called “Dragon Hawk” for SAP Hana and is able to deliver 12 terabytes of in-memory computing. Superdome addresses data set in-memory instead of off disk and this can speed up the decision making process potentially by 10 to 20 times. In the SAP Dragon Hawk prototype SAP witnessed a 1,000 times speed improvement.
Pricing has not been released yet. However, Kyte said that the goal for these products is to deliver more scalability than other x86 solutions out in the market. “They will be attractively priced for those who are consolidating. These systems will not be priced out of the customers reach in x86,” he said.
