NonStop is a series of server computers introduced to market in 1976 by

Tandem Computers Tandem Computers, Inc. was the dominant manufacturer of fault-tolerant computer systems for Automated teller machine, ATM networks, banks, stock exchanges, telephone switching centers, and other similar commercial transaction processing applicati ...

Inc., beginning with the NonStop

product line Product may refer to: Business * Product (business), an item that serves as a solution to a specific consumer problem. * Product (project management), a deliverable or set of deliverables that contribute to a business solution Mathematics * Produ ...

, which was followed by the

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

Integrity NonStop

product line extension A product line extension is the use of an established product brand name for a new item in the same product category. Overview Line extensions occur when a company introduces additional items in the same product category under the same brand n ...

. It is currently offered by

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States. HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the H ...

since Hewlett-Packard Company's split in 2015. Because NonStop systems are based on an integrated hardware/software stack, HPE also developed the NonStop OS

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

for them. NonStop systems are, to an extent, self-healing. To circumvent single points of failure, they are equipped with almost all redundant components. When a mainline component fails, the system automatically falls back to the backup. These systems are often used by

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets. Because ...

stock exchange A stock exchange, securities exchange, or bourse is an exchange where stockbrokers and traders can buy and sell securities, such as shares of stock, bonds and other financial instruments. Stock exchanges may also provide facilities for th ...

s, payment applications, retail companies, energy and utility services, healthcare organizations, manufacturers, telecommunication providers, transportation and other enterprises requiring extremely high

uptime Uptime is a measure of system reliability, expressed as the percentage of time a machine, typically a computer, has been working and available. Uptime is the opposite of downtime. It is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliabi ...

History

Originally introduced in 1976 by Tandem Computers Inc., the line was later owned by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

(from 1997), Hewlett-Packard Company (from 2003) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (since 2015). In 2005, the current product line of HP Integrity "NonStop i" (or TNS/E) servers, based on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Itanium Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computin ...

microprocessors, was introduced. In 2014, the first systems "NonStop X" (or TNS/X) running on the Intel

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

chip were introduced. Sales of the Itanium-based systems ended in July 2020. Early NonStop applications had to be specifically coded for

fault-tolerance Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

. That requirement was removed in 1983 with the introduction of the Transaction Monitoring Facility (TMF), which handles the various aspects of fault tolerance on the system level.

Software

NonStop OS is a

message-based In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its supporting ...

operating system designed for fault tolerance. It works with process pairs and ensures that backup processes on redundant CPUs take over in case of a process or CPU failure. Data integrity is maintained during those takeovers; no transactions or data are lost or corrupted. The operating system as a whole is branded NonStop OS and includes the Guardian layer, which is a low-level component of the operating system and the so-called OSS personality which runs atop this layer, which implements a Unix-like interface for other components of the OS to use. The operating system and application are both designed to support the fault tolerant hardware. The operating system continually monitors the status of all components, switching control as necessary to maintain operations. There are also features designed into the software that allow programs to be written as continuously available programs. That is accomplished using a pair of processes where one process performs all the primary processing and the other serves as a "hot backup", receiving updates to data whenever the primary reaches a critical point in processing. Should the primary stop, the backup steps in to resume execution using the current transaction. The systems support

relational database management system A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

s like

NonStop SQL NonStop SQL is a commercial relational database management system that is designed for fault tolerance and scalability, currently offered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The latest version is SQL/MX 3.4. The product was originally developed by Tan ...

and hierarchical databases such as

Enscribe Enscribe is the native hierarchical database A hierarchical database model is a data model in which the data are organized into a tree-like structure. The data are stored as records which are connected to one another through links. A record is a c ...

Hardware

The HPE Integrity NonStop computers are a line of

fault-tolerant Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

, message-based server computers based on the

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same arc ...

processor platform, and optimized for transaction processing. Average availability levels of 99.999% have been observed. NonStop systems feature a

massively parallel processing Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of t ...

(MPP) architecture and provide linear scalability. Each CPU runs its own copy of the OS, and systems can be expanded up to over 4000 CPUs. This is a

shared-nothing architecture A shared-nothing architecture (SN) is a distributed computing architecture in which each update request is satisfied by a single node (processor/memory/storage unit) in a computer cluster. The intent is to eliminate contention among nodes. Nodes do ...

— a "share nothing" arrangement also known as loosely coupled multiprocessing, and no "diminishing returns" occur as more processors are added (see

Amdahl's law In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula which gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved. It states tha ...

). Due to the integrated hardware/software stack and a

single system image In distributed computing, a single system image (SSI) cluster is a cluster of machines that appears to be one single system. The concept is often considered synonymous with that of a distributed operating system, but a single image may be presented ...

for even the largest configurations, system management requirements for NonStop systems are rather low. In most deployments there is just a single production server, not a complex

server farm A server farm or server cluster is a collection of Server (computing), computer servers, usually maintained by an organization to supply server functionality far beyond the capability of a single machine. They often consist of thousands of compu ...

. Most customers also have a backup server in a remote location for

disaster recovery Disaster recovery is the process of maintaining or reestablishing vital infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster, such as a storm or battle.It employs policies, tools, and procedures. Disaster recovery focuses on t ...

. There are standard products to keep the data of the production and the backup server in sync, for example, HPE's Remote Database Facility (RDF), hence there is fast takeover and little to no data loss also in a disaster situation with the production server being disabled or destroyed. HP also developed a

data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for Business reporting, reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central Repos ...

and

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical pr ...

server line, HP Neoview, based on the NonStop line. It acted as a

database server A database server is a server which uses a database application that provides database services to other computer programs or to computers, as defined by the client–server model. Database management systems (DBMSs) frequently provide database-s ...

, providing NonStop OS and

, but lacked the

transaction processing Transaction processing is information processing in computer science that is divided into individual, indivisible operations called ''transactions''. Each transaction must succeed or fail as a complete unit; it can never be only partially comple ...

functionality of the original NonStop systems. The line was

retired Retirement is the withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from one's active working life. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours or workload. Many people choose to retire when they are elderly or incapable of doing their j ...

, and no longer

marketed Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

, as of January 24, 2011.Morgan, Timothy Prickett
The Register "HP euthanizes Neoview data warehouse iron: Itanium death"
''The Register'', Hardware, 24 January 2011

References

Sources

*Siewiorek, Daniel P.;

Swarz, Robert S. Robert S. Swarz is the former co-director of the Systems Engineering Practice Office of MITRE Corporation and currently Professor of Practice in the systems engineering program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he has been teaching for over ...

(1998). ''Reliable Computer Systems'', A K Peters, Ltd., . pp. 586–625. *Horst, R.W. (February 1995). "TNet: a reliable system area network". ''

IEEE Micro ''IEEE Micro'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the IEEE Computer Society covering small systems and semiconductor chips, including integrated circuit processes and practices, project management, development tools and infrastruc ...

''. *Horst, Robert W.; Harris, Richard L.; Jardine, Robert L. (1990). "Multiple instruction issue in the NonStop Cyclone processor". ''Proceedings of the 17th Annual

International Symposium on Computer Architecture The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) is an annual academic conference on computer architecture, generally viewed as the top-tier in the field. Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Archi ...

''. pp. 216–226. *Bernick, D. (2005). "NonStop advanced architecture". ''Proceedings of the 2005

International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (or DSN) is an annual conference on topics related to dependable computer systems and reliable networks. It typically features a number of coordinated tracks, including the main paper ...

''. *Kim, Won (March 1984). "Highly available systems for database applications". ''ACM Computing Surveys''.

External links