HP's David Greene said that Horizontal Growth is well, an outgrowth of HP's work with Quest, several customers and Shareplex over the last few years. In this solution a single application runs across multiple HP 3000s. "Theoretically you can get exponential performance growth, because you just keep tacking on new systems to your clusters," Greene said.
HP is willing to admit that not all applications are suited for clustering."We're trying to define guidelines that will tell us which applications will benefit from horizontal growth," Greene said. Some of the larger customers using Smith-Gardner & Associates' MACS II direct marketing software are good prospects for such a benefit, he added. "They're simply growing faster than any hardware plans could accommodate. By doing more of a horizonal growth approach, it's possible to give them the longer term performance growth path they're looking for."
Greene said the set of Horizontal Growth customers is small now, but they're the sites that know only HP can solve their performance problems. Shareplex and NetBase are by nature more complex solutions than the one-system-per-application systems. But several database management suppliers, such as Adager and Bradmark, have been selling software that's designed to manage shared databases automatically. Clustering has been exploited to great success in the Digital environments for many years ‹ and HP's largest 3000 customers have been investigating it since the late 1980s. Now that HP's fastest processors have been designated outside of the customers' immediate requirements, HP seems to be willing to step up its efforts in the technology.