<font size=-1>MISSION-CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS</font>
MISSION-CRITICAL OBSERVATIONSKen Deats, Associate EditorIn a related April 13th announcement, HP expanded its mission-critical services by introducing new technologies into its High-Availability Observatory (HAO). Introduced in April 1998 as a way of gathering configuration and tracking data as well as perform remote diagnostics, HAO has been redefined to help increase system availability.
With the current HAO architecture, a support node resides at the customer site that consists of a workstation and Cisco router inside the customer firewall. On that workstation sits collection tools, diagnostic tools and prevention tools. To that has now been added an automatic information transfer mechanism via a secure ISDN line to one of three HP Mission Critical Support Centers located in Atlanta, Brussels and Tokyo.
On HP’s side, the service now includes: a Configuration Analyzer that identifies missing Y2K compliance, security and recalled and out-of-date patches and bad firmware; Automatic Notification to HP support engineers to implement solutions; and Network Tools that store and track network topologies and network changes. HAO is offered as part of the Mission Critical Services support plan.