DataExpress – Watching for early signs of additional ways to consume DataExpress!

In the articles published in the previous two issues of NonStop Insider, travel was very much the heavily featured topic. Not surprising, really, as there were a lot of user events taking place – some held locally, with mainly a regional participation, while other events were much bigger, attracting more global attention. For 2019 to date no event was bigger than the gathering of the NonStop community for the European Technical Boot Camp (ETBC), hosted by BITUG, and we have been hearing about just how many members of the community made it to Edinburgh for the occasion. While your DataExpress senior management were not present for ETBC, we still were favored with the presence of Richard Buckle who took advantage of the occasion to reference DataExpress and who followed-up with a number of interested parties that approached him following his plenary session, Day 1 of the event.

HPE did a good job of updating the NonStop community with both high-level strategic information provided by Neil Davis, Director HPE NonStop Enterprise Division, and byTeresa Sorg, Director HPE NonStop Engineering. While Teresa represented all of NonStop R&D, Neil looks after NonStop Sales, and together they covered all the bases. According to Richard, the big story continues to be the implementation of NonStop X systems, the ongoing promotion of the new virtualized NonStop and the NS2 that is now shipping, as well as the progress HPE’s own IT is making deploying NonStop in support of its own business operations. Very clearly, Oracle is on the out with the HPE management and this clearly is good news for NonStop.

Migrations and modernization continue to be a theme of HPE as well and this includes the NonStop team – the addition of more vendors to their growing list of partners supporting migrations and modernization as part of a new NonStop Services Partners program is in line with updated goals of ensuring HPE has access to 1,000 qualified NonStop consultants – a situation we believe will be extremely beneficial for the NonStop community in general. Of course, here at DataExpress we are watching for signs of interest in virtualized NonStop (vNS), as on paper this looks like a good option for bringing new customers to NonStop.

HPE continues to embrace a services model within its IT organization, where NonStop as a Service (NSaaS) together with NonStop SQL is being delivered as Database as a Service (DBaaS). They would like to see the NonStop community consider doing something similar, however to date we are still waiting for news about accepting this model of a new NonStop from the users themselves. “For now, it’s very quiet in regards to NSaaS,” said DataExpress CEO, Billy Whittington. “There are security ramifications among the DataExpress user community that may be difficult to overcome at this time.” This consideration shouldn’t be underestimated as it has been concerns over security as well as where data and files ultimately end up (from a sovereignty perspective), that tops the list of issues that are driving consideration of private cloud deployments rather than turning to any public cloud provider.

And yet, added Whittington, “DataExpress as it stands right now, can be offered on the basis of Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) but that would be for new opportunities as best as we can envision for now. Of course, there are other members of the NonStop vendor community who are pursuing their own cloud deployments in support of NSaaS, but for now it really is a case of watching for customer requirements to arise before DataExpress takes any further measures to support an IaaS model for DataExpress. On the other hand, if there are NonStop customers reading this and would like to know more about what is possible today with DataExpress we would welcome an opportunity to talk with them about how best they would like to consume DataExpress in future projects.”

In those prior two articles published in NonStop Insider we wrote of comparisons to travelling by car and then by plane and of how much of the infrastructure in place to support airplane and automobile travel has analogies with what we provide in DataExpress. The convenience, the automation, the security and the oversight of all file movements as they occur. And the reality is that there are periods of extreme focus on ensuring all the files get to where they are needed even when there may be tens of thousands of files to be moved. With this scenario, DataExpress may only be a requirement for a few hours each night and it is with this in mind, that we will be monitoring the NonStop community for early signs that consuming DataExpress differently might be beneficial to them – everyone needs to move a file or two at some point; wouldn’t you like to not have to worry about forgetting to meet your commitments?

Perhaps we shouldn’t limit conversations just to comparisons with airplanes and automobiles. Instead, maybe another image to consider is television streaming services – when we want to view a show, we want to do so right now! We don’t want to wait and we don’t want to see just a part of the program. Then again, maybe you have your own ideas about how best to describe this operation more pertinent to your own enterprise needs but no matter how you view such movement of files and data, we would be only too happy to discuss how DataExpress best meets the business needs you may have today!