BITUG virtual Little SIG – 80 Attendees ZOOM in on NonStop!

Even as hopes continue to grow that shortly there will be a return to in-person events, for now the NonStop community is settling for virtual events. This does not come as a surprise to the community as personal safety remains a priority. However, against this background, it was really good to see that approximately 80 attendees logged into this year’s BITUG Little SIG.

The NonStop community has always been about networking and about sharing success enjoyed through deploying solutions on the latest NonStop systems. And while there isn’t a substitute for those conversations around coffee or debates over adult beverages, it still was very encouraging to the BITUG committee to see the community being prepared to sit behind their screens on Zoom calls that lasted for the better part of the day.

“We used Zoom for the Little SIG and had promoted this manner of engagement,” said BITUG Treasurer, Collin Yates, “and it worked for us. We even managed to create a couple of breakout ‘Zoom rooms’ so that we could run a couple of vendor presentations simultaneously, allowing attendees to choose which subject matter presentation interested them.”

The recent news about GreenLake, NonStop and Lusis was covered as well and this was well received by the community. It is the HPE NonStop team’s first success working with a partner in support of the GreenLake – A Cloud-Native Platform To Run Multiple Workloads – and being able to have a payments solution participating in GreenLake interested many of the attendees.

“We also ran a plenary session on how to build a Virtual NonStop on a show-string budget,” said Yates. “This was very well received and I think a lot of people were unaware that with the VMware deployment of vNS in a non-super, fault tolerant, way (still able to have multiple CPU’s and Mirrored disks etc.) that you could then build a vNS system on a couple of used Gen DL380 Servers with a couple of inexpensive Intel 10-core processors for around £10-£15,000 (not including NonStop software)!”

Helping with the spirit of networking, even virtually, lunch was sponsored by comForte via an Uber Eats voucher. The first 60 registered attendees were able to order a nice lunch to be delivered during the break. After lunch our friends at HPE provided an update on the NonStop Product roadmaps – something that always interests the NonStop community – sharing with all attendees the latest and greatest treats HPE Product Management is releasing.

These sessions were recorded with the videos now available on the BITUG YouTube Channel  –

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2ExsGt8guACbCI6_LrIrdw

“BITUG – and sure like many other RUG’s – is hoping to hold an in-person BIG SIG in London in December,” said Yates. “So stay tuned! More news to follow, shortly! And to all those who did participate on the Zoom call, the BITUG committee wants to extend our thanks to you all for finding the time to be with us in these somewhat awkward but necessary conditions.”