A view into the world of NonStop – one HPE NonStop sales team member’s insights …

NonStop Insider

While it is very much the case that conversations continue around the topic of availability, more recently scalability has taken center stage. Actually, the ability to scale-out without the end user being aware that anything has changed! During this global pandemic there are numerous instances where applications are called upon to handle unexpected increases in transaction volume and suddenly, the system grinds to a halt.

This is a situation that many in the industry are calling a brownout and are grouping these within the category of unplanned downtime and for good reason – imagine your reaction if response times suddenly blew out to 30 minutes or more. Does that even count anymore as uptime and how will IT react knowing, as they most certainly do, that agreed-upon SLAs have been violated? No matter how you cut it, being called upon to upgrade your systems, your network bandwidth and even your storage, all on a moment’s notice, will take many systems offline in a heartbeat. But not NonStop, where scalability is as much a fundamental as is availability and data integrity.

In his latest video posted to YouTube, HPE Enterprise Account Executive Steve Kubick outlines one such scenario that would frighten any IT executive. However, here’s the catch – the picture painted by Steve actually happened. The scenario? The NonStop user’s business team advises IT that they need to handle twenty times normal volume of transactions and can they accommodate without any degradation in response time or taking any downtime to do an upgrade. And oh, by the way, they have just three weeks to do all of this.

News about this potential brownout didn’t just come from just any business team member but followed directly after the CEO received a call from the Federal Treasurer. New legislation had just been passed that would be flooding the market with cash and naturally enough, the whole country would try to logon and check their balances once news broke of this imminent cash injection into the economy. Sound familiar?

What transpired really cannot be thought of as being miraculous but for any IT professional how NonStop allowed this IT organization to increase capacity in terms of both number of processors as well as disk storage came close! The upgrade to the disks came about because the newer disks available for NonStop from HPE could better handle the expected I/O throughput rates that an increase of twenty times normal volumes would generate.

If you have as yet not seen the video then perhaps now is a good time to check his video When your boss is on the Secretary of Treasury speed dial –

If you would like to play Steve’s short video and the hyperlink above didn’t take you there, you can cut and paste the following link to YouTube into your favorite browser –