DataExpress – from heterogeneous to hybrid

In an excellent article HPE NonStop takes new strides in its journey through the cloud, by Prashanth Kamath U, Sr. Product Manager – NonStop Enterprise Division, published in the March – April 2018 issue of The Connection magazine, one explanation about the benefits of virtualization stands out. “Setting up a cloud environment only for deploying virtualized NonStop (vNS) systems is justified if scale permits i.e. you are building the infrastructure to host several vNS systems in the cloud,” wrote Prashanth. But perhaps more relevant for the NonStop community may be what follows, as Prashanth goes on to add, “Or, if you have a longer term vision to bring in more workloads currently running on other platforms (e.g. Linux, Windows) over to vNS in your private cloud.

But why go that far? While this may encourage NonStop users to promote the NonStop systems above other systems, being able to run a mix of vNS with Linux from within the same fully virtualized cloud also has considerable upside without entertaining the naysayers from the rest of IT. In fact, there are many justifiable reasons why some solutions running on NonStop today may benefit from having processes running on NonStop AND Linux, where those processes have been optimized to capitalize on the strengths of both. This is a circumstance that isn’t foreign to the DataExpress team as having both DataExpress NonStop (DXNS) and DataExpress Open Platform (DXOP) it is not unrealistic to expect that future configurations of DataExpress will run with processes split in this fashion.

“The need to move data will continue to increase exponentially, whether to the cloud or other users,” said Billy Whittington, DataExpress CEO, in a separate article also appearing in the March – April 2018 issue of The Connection, Data is King: What NonStop Mission-Critical Applications Can Learn from Formula 1. “DataExpress is now available for open platforms; and with hybrid IT continuing to make deeper inroads into the psyches of CIOs, DataExpress should prove a natural when it comes to having a supported product move your data.” From heterogeneous deployments within the data center, the path forwards into clouds is relatively straight forward and a path where recent work being undertaken by DataExpress to better engineer DXOP for future hybrid IT deployments is proving timely.

In the most recent post to the DataExpress web site, DataExpress – the heterogeneous and hybrid worlds are driving changes that are at the very heart of DataExpress! “Only with the changes we are now making, will we be able to build a better front-end to DXNS from DXOP – in essence, positioning DXOP as an externalized secure gateway in the DMZ for DXNS. And this is something we are already seeing our customers showing interest in obtaining from us,” added Whittington. “This upcoming release of DXOP in many ways will be more versatile than what we have today with DXNS. That isn’t surprising to find when you talk to developers – find a module (you need) and just plug it in – such a level of modularity just isn’t available to DataExpress in the world of NonStop. But here’s the thing, with the combination of DXNS and DXOP, as we are now architecting it, there isn’t anything new that could come to market that we cannot accommodate with DataExpress!”

DXOP is being subject to essentially open heart surgery as its internal engine is completely overhauled in response to what DataExpress is anticipating customers will be needing as a result of clouds, virtualization and hybrid IT. “While we can’t point a finger at any one user asking us to pull the covers apart to work on the engine,” said Whittington. “it really is the right time to undertake this work which is very much our own initiative because while we can handle great throughput today, we are wanting to stay ahead of the curve and we see the demand to move even more data, using the most secure encryption available, becoming ever more prevalent across the entire IT landscape.”

For more on what Whittington and the team at DataExpress have to say about the latest release of DXOP – make sure you check out the post of March 29, 2018 to the DataExpress web page, NEWS BLOG. And if you would like to know about DXNS working with DXOP then just reach out to us or to our partners at comforte.

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