DataExpress – exploring all the options for running on NonStop at 2017 NonStop Technical Boot Camp, San Francisco

The expectation from DataExpress is that with this issue of NonStop Insider there will be a lot of coverage following the conclusion of a very successful NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC). As always it was only natural for DataExpress to participate in this event and Susie Raye’s  participation is already providing valuable feedback. As in the past,  much has changed for NonStop and there are even more changes on the way, so much so that at times it’s a little overwhelming but participating means we are never too far behind any breaking news.

From what we witnessed there was a very good turn out from the NonStop user base – more customers than we have seen before. What surprised us was the international presence we were told about – contingents from Scandinavia, Holland and Asia. While we have an established base in the U.S. we are always looking to grow and global growth potential is something we cannot ignore. Over the past few months we have addressed the topic of partnerships and the value we see these partnerships providing a company like DataExpress, and to this end we selected comForte. Already we are beginning to see the benefits from this partnership and we anticipate closing a couple of deals shortly – with prospects we may otherwise not have been able to reach.

In the latest post to the DataExpress News / Blog, NonStop Technical Boot Camp – Looking back at what impressed DataExpress you will find a number of observations that Susie made. “At DataExpress, we particularly liked what we heard coming from comForte about their SecurDPS product,” said Susie. So much so in fact that it sounds like something DXOP could use for tokenization – a distinct possibility given how we see the topic of tokenization coming towards us from our clients.” However, being around the comForte sales team had further benefits for Susie as she says, “I spent a lot of time with comForte sales at TBC which always helps with sales opportunities.” And in the process of spending time with comForte, Susie also remarked that she “did learn about other products our DataExpress customers are using and that is always helpful information to have.”

One other important topic for us is the amount of attention the NonStop development team is giving to virtualization. We heard that the work done to ensure NonStop applications run on virtual machines provisioned on top of the OpenStack KVM hypervisor has been successful and that there are NonStop prospects already testing this option. However, perhaps even more importantly for the big financial institutions we work with, is the news that the NonStop team is well advanced in bringing virtualized NonStop to the VMware hypervisor. While we know that there is interest in OpenStack, the commercial world we live in has more interest in products like VMware so it should be very interesting to see what our customers do with a virtualized NonStop workload on a commercially available hypervisor. However, one item did stand out for Susie and it really didn’t come as a surprise – it isn’t easy putting together a virtualized system and have it behave as a traditional NonStop system.

With as much emphasis as there is coming from NonStop customers to simply have a system where they can test and pretty much just “kick the tires” there has been a recognized need for HPE to deliver a base-level of hardware that comes as a package complete with an underlying Linux distribution with kernel-level support for virtual machines. In providing yet another product in the NonStop product line, the Converged Virtualized NonStop system, (with either one or two core processors), represents a real entry-level system appropriate for the purpose of simply testing and indeed learning NonStop as a virtualized workload.

As Susie told us, “I do see interest in the new Virtualized Converged Nonstop especially now as it eliminates the issues of setting up a virtual system. And it all comes from the HPE NonStop team so no other licensing is involved either with Red Hat or VMware.” As Susie sees it, “virtual nonstop, as the Dev / Test platform of the future, not only for vendors but for customers Dev / Test sites as well, certainly will hold appeal for many including some of our own DataExpress customers, of course depending on the price point.” Yes, so much has changed and indeed continues to change that it takes events like TBC to simply stay on top of what the NonStop team are developing so from that perspective, this latest iteration of what continues to remind us all of ITUG Summits past proved well-worth attending.

If you attended TBC and as yet you are not familiar with DataExpress and the value it provides when it comes to securely managing the automated transfer of files, then we are only too happy to give you even more insight into the true value proposition of DataExpress whether you needs are to run DataExpress on a traditional NonStop system or as part of NonStop ecosystem that is planned to be run as one more virtualized workload.

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