The HPE Corner

Last month we predicted that there would be a crowd attending the NonStop Technical Boot Camp in San Jose and as it turned out, we were not disappointed. The list of attendees passed the 400 mark and with a number of promotional (i.e. free) registrations plus additional volunteers helping out the final numbers, when tallied up, looked more like 450! With each year since the community gathered for these Boot Camp events, the numbers have risen so expectations now will be high for just how many will turn out for next year’s event which will be held up in Burlingame and close by San Francisco.

Perhaps more important than the size of the crowd, was the quality! As we took note of the names on the badges hanging from lanyards around the necks of the attendees, it was clear that the NonStop user community was well represented. It has been traditionally an event focused on systems managers and developers, there was a healthy sprinkling of more senior folks and this is something all of us will need to pay attention to in the coming year – for Boot Camp to continue to grow, we do need to build programs that attract senior managers. While the tradition of being focused more on technology products and services, it is also imperative that we take the message of Boot Camp to business managers as well, as the world of NonStop is changing dramatically with NonStop meeting many more business challenges than many had thought possible just a short time ago.

In this column last month we singled out vNonStop, the work being done with NonStop X to extend the interconnect fabric to include Linux along with NonStop (via NSADI) and SQL/MX as key areas that would be receiving considerable attention from HPE. These expectations proved to be true but the NonStop community wasn’t quite as prepared as it might have been to see vNonStop running on a desktop configuration of commodity x86 servers where the interconnect fabric was Converged Ethernet supported by RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). With very deft posturing by those from HPE demonstrating this setup to ensure that it was being properly positioned as a promotional configuration, almost all the attendees recognized how valuable a development and test configuration it may prove to be within their companies. We will now just have to wait and see how HPE prices such systems but if they get it right, there may very well be a major uptick in interest in NonStop.

However, perhaps it is the work being done to ensure NonStop SQL/MX includes significant functionality that is compatible with Oracle SQL databases that holds the even bigger key to future success for NonStop. License and maintenance fees have put a sizeable financial burden on many CIOs and if there is a better way to support SQL, then NonStop may provide “the out” many of these CIOs have been looking for. With HPE’s own IT committed to NonStop SQL/MX on the basis of a DBaaS offering, many CIOs will find this most recent development by the NonStop team a compelling reason to begin looking at alternatives to Oracle and there will be very few within the NonStop community that decry this push by HPE into a brand new marketplace for NonStop. All we need to do now is to promote this capability and that may very well come down to us all becoming a lot more vocal and that’s a challenge I knowthat the NonStop community rarely backs away from – and for good cause. Yes, we can all agree that as of today, NonStop Rocks and make sure when posting to your twitter account you always include #NonStopRocks!