Today?s applications are being built in new ways. The advent of service-oriented architectures, modern networking protocols and industry-standard components at all levels open seemingly endless possibilities for new applications and services.

But these new possibilities carry new challenges as well, especially in the area of highperformance, mission-critical, transactional applications, often involving financial and other sensitive data which carries security and auditability requirements. This talk will focus on the particular challenges for servers and how these challenges are being addressed. The NonStop Enterprise Division of HP (formerly Tandem Computers) has built massively parallel, hardware and software fault-tolerant servers since 1975. These servers power many of the most challenging transaction processing environments that exist, including major stock exchanges, funds transfer applications, credit and debit card applications, E911 applications, major telephony and instant messaging applications, and integrated hospital applications. The system is based on a message-oriented architecture and thus bears many similarities internally to the architectural principals being espoused for today?s service-oriented architectures.

HP is bringing to market a new generation of Integrity NonStop Servers, based on an innovative design using Intel Itanium 2 processors and leveraging many other industry standards. This talk will describe how the new generation of servers can accomplish even higher levels of availability than current systems while at the same time leveraging industry standards and meeting other extreme requirements. The talk will also touch on the lessons learned over the years when dealing with mission-critical applications and how those lessons apply to today?s distributed, service-oriented architectures. The underlying message is that careful use of encapsulation, limiting the use of distributed algorithms to carefully controlled situations, and overall design rigor are required even more than ever.