Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
A view into the world of NonStop – one HPE NonStop sales team member’s insights …
HPE
Dan
Memories of conversations Steve Kubick, HPE Account Executive, had with his father a long time ago were triggered inadvertently and the memory that returned was of a Java Lamp. If you missed Steve’s latest video about NonStop I will leave it to him to explain what a Java Lamp happens to be, but suffice to say, it has a lot to do with coffee, expresso shots, heavy cream and the resultant chaotic interaction of all three when poured into a cup. A kind of lava lamp but when properly mixed, as Steve tells the story, “it can be mesmerizing to the point where you don’t want to drink it!”
As we come to the last days of 2020, we are all witnesses to a turbulent time in the history of the planet. A global pandemic has triggered as many chaotic responses as the swirls awash in his Java Lamp and try as we might, we are likely to be mired in thoughts that this chaos will continue for some time even with the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines, which hopefully, will put a positive dent into the progress this dreadful coronavirus has been enjoying for much of the year.
The topic of Steve’s video draws our attention to chaos and as computer professionals, Steve admits, “we do not like chaos; with chaos usually there comes downtime and a lack of control.” More to the point and something the NonStop community can readily identify with, “When you are working on a NonStop system providing seven nines of availability for an application, any lack of control is well, not appreciated.”
But here’s the point that Steve moves on to make and then use to anchor the rest of his video, “When it comes to chaos and lack of control, this is exactly what has happened when the world went from scale-up to scale-out architectures. They moved the resiliency from the infrastructure to the application.” This latest video, Self-Induced Chaos, as Steve has titled the clip, is now accessible on YouTube and is well worth the time viewing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhU6JVwyrsw&feature=youtu.be
When it comes to NonStop systems, their applications are resilient and with the ability courtesy of the NonStop operating system, can automatically scale-out, naturally. “The NonStop operating system does so in a way that the application never knows something just happened.” Adding more resources as traffic volumes climb? Better still, no need to plan for an outage to accommodate adding resources?
“The NonStop operating system monitors the response times of your application processes and automatically starts up more instances of the processes distributing them throughout the system, leveraging CPUs that might have only just been added to the system. Said Steve, “For this to happen the application programmer doesn’t have to do anything at all. With NonStop, you can scale out an application and maintain seven nines of availability with no additional lines of application code.” In these times, consider this a simple lesson as to why NonStop remains as relevant today as it was four decades ago!
Finally, as Steve explains in the video, this is unique to NonStop even as it is among the most desirable system attribute that more and more vendors are trying to duplicate. “It begs the question,” said Steve, “why would you ever need a capability like this? Something that can grow to 24,000 cores while still operating under a single instance of the NonStop operating system.” But then maybe the question needs to be turned around and expressed from the viewpoint of NonStop. “If such a massive scale-out, possible with NonStop, isn’t a requirement today (in as chaotic a world as we find ourselves in), why has the entire IT industry been sprinting for the last decade to catch up?” Worth watching the video, I suspect, as you will hear more of this from Steve.
Should the embedded video not take you to YouTube, then cut and paste the url below into your browser:
And of course Steve would like you to connect with him on LinkedIn –
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-kubick-0463783/
