The Nonstop community feasting at local and global RUG gatherings.

The Nonstop community feasting
at local and global RUG gatherings.

It goes without saying that at this time of year, considerable attention is being directed at what is taking place, worldwide, at Nonstop user-focused events. Just by the number of photos posted on social media channels, there’s no denying that the Nonstop customer is being well-served with news coming out of the Nonstop team. Nonstop executives and senior managers have been throwing their bodies into extraordinary travel itineraries and in so doing, are sending a positive message to all attendees that their support of Nonstop is much appreciated.

From Mexico City to Melbourne to Munich – apparently, if your city starts with a capital M, you’re likely to be one of the sites – the numbers are telling the story of support for Nonstop. This became clear in my most recent posts to Real Time View columns in the previous issue of Nonstop Insider as well as in the latest issue of The Connection, as follows:

From Nonstop Insider (photo updated) –

Karen Ramirez, Director, Nonstop North America Sales,
on stage at N2TUG (Dallas)

Under the current HPE regime, Nonstop will not be making a dramatic comeback but for the customers fully vested in Nonstop, there remains no better solution available today. Not a mainframe, not a cloud and certainly not a mashup of x86 boxes. Yes, Nonstop lives on, prospering in its own way, and for that, we all are cheering for the home side as certainly we are still scoring goals. As a community we are still on the playing field. And yes, from the attendance across all the regions, we still have a solid cheer-squad willing us on to even greater success with the industry’s only systems that never fail!

From The Connection –

Casey Taylor, VP & GM, HPE Nonstop,
on stage at E-GTUG (Munich)

It came as no surprise then when Casey Taylor, VP & GM HPE Nonstop, took to the stage for her keynote presentation that featured the word resilience. Together with fault tolerance, naturally enough. As Margo and I can vouch for, resilience today is clearly “more critical than ever.” When you consider the uptick of interest in all things AI – featured often across many of the vendor sessions – having a platform that is resilient will become even more critical in the coming months. To see the elevated interest in AI among the attendance shouldn’t have come as a shock to any of us following industry trends but then again, it was a surprise to see as many Nonstop customers expressing an interest in the topic.

Having attended E-GTUG and then a short time after, N2TUG, it was clear to Margo and me that not only does Nonstop continues to remain the better solution along with the uptick of interest in all things AI as these contentions coincide with what we are hearing from the Nonstop vendor community. As the presence of AI grows within enterprises deploying Nonstop, dependence on the access to Nonstop mission critical data from popular chatbots only delivers the results when the mission critical data is located on a fault tolerant server – can you hear the mic drop? But yes, in all seriousness, there shouldn’t be any barriers to enabling such access when enterprise decision making is at stake. No manager wants to be fooled by hallucinations arising out of incomplete data when the most critical data is residing right in front of them. On Nonstop.

Even along Munich sidewalks, the message was clear.
“Go Unstoppable!”

Fault tolerance is more critical than ever. It is encouraging to see how fault tolerance is once again entering the vocabulary of HPE executives. For the longest time I was concerned over its absence in marketing collateral. The reference by IDC to Nonstop being labelled as Availability Level 4 (AL4), along with IBM and yes, Oracle. As IDC reports –

These specific vendor platforms include:

HPE Expansion: IDC has updated its analysis of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), classifying newer architectures like the Compute Scale-Up Server 3200 and the Compute Scale-Up Server 3250 in the AL4 category, joining longstanding systems like HPE Nonstop and Superdome Flex.

Market Leaders: The dominant players on IDC’s AL4 lists remain IBM (primarily with IBM Z and Power Systems E980) and Oracle (with its Exadata Database Machine) alongside HPE.

Earlier IDC had called out HPE with further references to Nonstop in a 2020 update:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE): Recognized for its extreme high-availability, fault-tolerant infrastructure. Key platforms include the HPE Superdome (Superdome Flex) series, HPE Integrity NonStop, and the Compute Scale-up Server series (like the 3250).

Most recent of all was an IDC update written by Chris Drake, December 2025, sponsored by HPE, where Nonstop remains one system atop AL4:

Thanks to its distinct design features and platform capabilities, HPE Nonstop is a
leading offering in the market for 100% fault-tolerant compute solutions, defined by
IDC as Availability Level 4 (AL4) server platforms. HPE Nonstop is one of the few
compute platforms that can ensure the continuous availability and zero downtime
required by mission-critical and life-critical workloads. This sets it apart from symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) server systems and most virtualized, scale-out cloud platforms,
which are committed to high availability, rather than 100% fault tolerance, and are
designed for workloads that require high performance but can tolerate some
downtime for maintenance or failure recovery.

Whereas Casey Taylor highlighted just the critical nature of Nonstop fault tolerance, for IDC recognizing Nonstop for its “extreme high-availability, fault-tolerant infrastructure” shouldn’t be lost on anyone. Not the least, among the Nonstop community. At events worldwide, this theme was emphasized more aggressively than we have seen in previous years. Even as IDC broadens the participation (of competitive vendors) by lowering the standard to cater for those who, customer by customer, work to provide comparative levels of software stack integration, these efforts should be viewed as fragile (and fully dependent on the implementing staff) and not an out-of-the-box offering that is available with Nonstop.

This has always been a pet peeve of senior members of the Nonstop community. It’s as if the availability attribute was being discounted even called legacy. Forgotten by almost all new entrants into providing technology solutions. Being witness to such renewed enthusiasm among Nonstop team members is not only encouraging but sounds a loud, clarion-call to all of us. As we leave Nonstop events, we become the champions of this message and the hope among all of us is that this message never losses appeal. Even among the most jaded of IT executives. It’s a message that with the coming of AI, can only cement the presence of Nonstop in enterprises worldwide!

To read the latest IDC white paper, follow this rather easy-to-follow link:
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/nonstop-servers.html?utm_campaign=FY26_CM_GB_GD_AMS_NA_Protect_Critical_Workloads&utm_medium=PS&utm_source=GG&utm_content=521194286&plid=PSF26-00002147&ef_id=CjwKCAjwt7XQBhBkEiwAtStpp5FHcH0eZ5oQKa3lX3DAQMLmGLxUOgLCYJvEG0VikC_k7ztktvZGqhoCDwgQAvD_BwE:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!13472!3!799086467195!p!!g!!hpe%20nonstop!23601856729!193089831319&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23601856729&gbraid=0AAAAACRP5IDk4WVzRVzs23ekMsTgd6Rk2&gclid=CjwKCAjwt7XQBhBkEiwAtStpp5FHcH0eZ5oQKa3lX3DAQMLmGLxUOgLCYJvEG0VikC_k7ztktvZGqhoCDwgQAvD_BwE