Time to join the 2% Club

Life is so strange when you don’t know
How can you tell where you’re going to?
Destination unknown (Missing Persons)

How many times have we ventured into an amusement park or simply caught a flight to our favorite destination. At these times many things have to come together at the right time to turn plans into reality. Whether it’s about timing, whether it’s in order to secure an upgrade or to ensure the destination is accessible, for most people it’s a time where anxieties mix with excitement, mix with just a little uneasiness and perhaps downright panic. It’s the destination after all we keep telling ourselves.

For the HPE NonStop community who have always viewed the destination as the goal of any journey into NonStop, selecting the right mix of software is where anxieties first become real. The application or solution has already been selected and indeed, in most instances, was the driving influence propelling forward the customer’s decision to go with NonStop.

The cast of supporting infrastructure, middleware, utilities and more can oftentimes seem daunting. And even when decisions have been taken, further along in the process perhaps as late as years into production deployment, second guessing begins. What if we had elected to go with this or that; would we have gained functional or cost advantages?

Introducing a new frequent flyer program, courtesy of NTI

This old airport’s got me down
You can’t jump a jet plane
Like you can a freight train
Early Morning Rain (Lightfoot)

Welcome to your journey! Get your ticket punched here! The NonStop community is always looking out for opportunities to upgrade their suite of NonStop infrastructure products. Whether an incumbent vendor is slow to respond to NonStop system deliveries or offers inferior support services, NTI is looking to upgrade your experience. Should you be struggling to move up to the upper echelons, NTI is opening the door to you.

Become a member of the NTI’s 2% Club. Enjoy a superior experience even as the program includes new destinations previously unserved by other NonStop vendors. Unhappy with what you have and would like to move away from destinations no longer attracting travelers or simply wanting to leave journeys that never end, NTI has the solution. DRNet®/Unified is not simply another product. Like all good expanded customer experience programs, NTI provides considerable perks.

The opportunity to upgrade your level of service to a superior class with NTI comes as a welcome change for the NonStop customer. In so doing, the “special sauce” of DRNet®/Unified, featuring the industry’s first special sauce reduction, is offered to all those who transfer from older programs. A special sauce that features opportunities to replicate to all destinations shown on the departure boards. While the chefs at NTI have been coy about the ingredients, what is hard to ignore is just how this reduction has been focused on costs, whereby it offers those transferring to NTI extensive price breaks.

To Kafka and back, the return trip option from NTI

Reading departure signs in some big airport
Reminds me of the places I’ve been
Changes in Latitudes (Buffett)

Nothing screams modern more strongly than the open-source data streaming offering, Apache Kafka. A way to message across the enterprise in the days when being connected has become paramount. NonStop support for Kafka allows NonStop applications to live and thrive in the real world of hybrid IT. NonStop support for Kafka requires more than slideware and promises. To be effective it needs one more attribute; you can produce for Kafka but you also need to consume.

There are privileges when you transfer your travel preferences to NTI and join the 2% Club that is, for the very first time, the availability of a return ticket. Unique to NTI is the option to deploy DRNet®/Kafka in support of return travel. When you look up at an airport destination board and you recall where you have been you will also notice how very few cities only accept inbound travelers. They almost always provide travelers a path back home.

Kafka is not just an open-source solution as it is fast becoming the preeminent way in which to stream data to time-series databases, including Prometheus, Amazon Timestream, Apache Druid and more, where it can then feed analytics and AI solutions. What would be the point of taking a trip to Prometheus, finding out something relevant and then not being able to share with the NonStop application?  Doesn’t matter how nice the departure lounge happens to be or the quality of the inflight service if you simply are taking a one-way trip.

The presence of a travel agent, experience delivered by NTI

Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)

The role of a travel agent, whether engaged in the real world or virtually, is to assist with the planning, recommending alternatives and optimizing costs. The route may look attractive and yet, if connection times are slim and overnight stays are required, the desired outcome can be less attractive. There is always going to be something else to be considered and this is the objective of any professional travel agent. Perhaps most important of all, when a travel agent is found and meets the goals set for them, over time a relationship is created whereby the needs of the traveler become well known and the plans and recommendations simplified. Travel agents differentiate themselves by the level of service provided.

For the NonStop customer, the creation of the 2% Club is more than just a handful of NonStop customers, even as the number is just a reminder that it takes an effort to do due diligence, call in a new supplier, to change course, and to set out on a different path. Just as United’s 1K programs entail travelling much further than 1,000 miles, the 2% Club will take you much further. It’s the new brand or label of NTI that recognizes those NonStop customers who value all that NTI can offer. The very modern world of Hybrid IT, where open-source and industry-standard offerings prevail has to be reckoned with and to become an active participant, embracing these NTI offerings is required.

You may be among the NonStop customers concerned with the vendor you have engaged for data replication. Perhaps your chosen vendor remains antagonistic towards the NonStop platform proving slow to respond to service requests. Perhaps your chosen vendor is focused more on the past and continues to update features no longer relevant for the majority of NonStop customers. It matters little when it comes to joining the 2% Club with NTI.

Today, NTI views communications, data movement through replication and access to streaming platforms capable of processing the amount of data created on NonStop is being instrumental to the long-term presence of NonStop within the modern enterprise. NTI is your travel agent in this regard. It knows about the special sauce and the cost saving this represents. NTI will support your enrolment in the 2% Club where service levels are elevated to where direct contact with the NTI team is encouraged. Yes, welcome to the start of the journey you know you need to undertake. Isn’t it time to reach out to the NTI’s sales team to leave the path you have been going down?