2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
DataExpress – enjoying the turnout of customers at recent NonStop user events!
DataExpress
DanWhereas the publication of the previous issue of NonStop Insider coincided with eBITUG, this issue will be timed to come out following two very important events. Our local NonStop community, here in Dallas, will have attended the most recent N2TUG event and those HPE customers who attended HPE’s big tent marketing event, 2017 HPE Discover, will have returned to their offices. And what impression did HPE make on such a large audience?
While we will leave it to others to comment more formally on all that transpired at HPE Discover 2017, as far as the N2TUG event is concerned, we need to firstly thank the volunteers who helped contribute to a successful event and then secondly, we must thank HPE for ensuring a solid turn out from the HPE team. Seeing HPE NonStop head of Product Management, Karen Copeland, participating is very encouraging, as were the reports from the DataExpress folk who attended that there were numerous members of the sales and support teams also present.
The business of DataExpress is split between the support of NonStop systems and Open platforms. For the longest time these systems were separated by users acceptance as well as technology – NonStop and Open were just different marketplaces for DataExpress. While DataExpress for Open Platforms has always been able to supplement DataExpress for NonStop, what we are hearing today coming out of the NonStop customer events is how this gulf between the NonStop and Open System platforms is being rapidly bridged. Whether it’s with shared fabrics in hyperconverged packages with NonStop and Linux supporting a common API, in this case, the just released NSADI, or where NonStop is running fully virtualized in an Open environment such as OpenStack, the world is definitely changing.
The marketplace has yet to respond to these changes from the HPE NonStop team. While it is encouraging to hear the updates coming from NonStop customers as well as from HPE itself (about the number of users migrating to the new NonStop X systems), it’s still very early days for Hybrid IT and the virtualization of NonStop. Hearing that the HPE NonStop team is seeing a different model for virtualization emerge will be something we will be watching very carefully.
At first HPE thought that Virtualized NonStop may only find acceptance among developers and those testing new applications, but in some verticals, most notably Telco, and more recently Retail, discussion around the option to run complete solutions on Virtualized platforms is happening very quickly. Having someone take responsibility and manage all of IT is not something new or even as disruptive as some parties claim – it’s just another swing of the pendulum as it arcs back from distributed computing to centralized computing. Albeit, this time, with the novel approach of software-defined everything.
From the perspective of DataExpress, we can just as easily run on-premise as we can as a service deployed within a cloud. It will most likely be out of a private cloud initially – just ask us about this and we will be happy to provide you with more information. However, we are looking to find out more about the plans of NonStop users and hearing the presentations at recent customer events, like the one in Dallas, are good places to find out more about what our customers and prospects will likely do. And for this reason we will continue to participate whenever possible in user group events where NonStop has a major presence.