Feature-wise, the most valuable one is the fact that it has 100 hundred percent uptime every year. Secondly, it is stable. When working, it is fairly stable, and performance is very good.

There are no specific features that stand out, it was just a migration path.

Availability (AL4) is key. We are a 24/7 shop and we have customers all over the world who require 24/7 transaction access. They need to pay, process, or make transactions for whatever service they need. The HPE NonStop solution is rated with the highest level of availability in the industry.

Fault tolerance is the heart of what a NonStop is. The high availability of NonStop systems comes from close cooperation between the hardware and software. Every component in an HPE NonStop server is duplicated. If one component fails, there is instantaneous failover to a backup. This includes not only hardware components, such as processors, memory, I/O channels, and power supplies; but also all software components, such as system and application processes. As a consequence, a NonStop server is self-healing in the presence of any single fault and many multiple faults. If a component fails, no one notices except for the IT staff that must correct the fault.

Scalability is important to me. I might need a performance boost at certain times of the year, especially around the Christmas period. In a company I previously worked for, we payed particular attention to the number of POS and ATM transactions around the Christmas period because this was known to be the busiest period of the year. It would have been nice not to have to worry about the transaction rate and CPU/DISK performance, but to simply turn on a CPU core for that particular time of year. Since upgrading the hardware, this worry is a thing of the past.

Security is always important, and the NonStop is no different. Many security layers make it very difficult for hackers to access information you don’t own or don’t need to see, even if you know what you are doing.

• Rock solid reliablity
• 99.9% uptime
• Fault-tolerant transaction processing

They've been very reliable since we started using them in 1978, but we're going to replace them in a few years.

The most valuable features for us are the security, availability, and hardware support.

• Protection against single failure. This makes it an ideal product for critical applications as found in banking (ATM control, EFT, web based banking etc), telecoms (administrative mobile phone support, switches), and any business where high availability is required.
• Linear expandability. HP NonStop is probably the only solution in the market that offers this really. Double the amount of CPU's, and double the amount of transactions can be processed. Double the machines link them at highspeed, and a double amount of transactions can be processed. This makes it ideal in fast growing markets like we had with EFT/ATM's and mobile telephony.
• Upward software compatibilty. Upgrading to a new operating system version means, in the worst case, recompilation of user software. Normally the software will function without applying any changes.
• Stability. The protection against single failure requires a very stable product, both hardware and software.

• Fault-Tolerance
• Availability
• Performance

• Reliability which is important because we’re a bank and we want 100% uptime. So we need a system that doesn’t fail.
• Scalability is important because when the system load increases we want to be able to add power without downtime.

• Fault tolerance 
• 99.9999999% up-time