End of Year update on all things NonStop, North America

My NonStop team consists of 25 Sales, Pre-Sales, Architects, Master and Distinguished Technologists covering North America.  Looking back on 2023, it was a surprisingly good year with some great stories.  My team is assisted by our NonStop HPE Services Team, the GNSC, and our remarkable NonStop partners. I’m not sure where we’d be without them.

One of the highlights of the year was a replacement plan devised by Mark Flanigan.  He developed a presentation and financial plan which showed that if three senior NonStop employees went part-time it would fund two mid-career hires.  He was expecting pushback from Human Resources but was surprised and delighted to find they were very enthusiastic about the idea and in fact increased the headcount to 3 people.  This solves an issue we, and most of our customers have, which is an aging workforce.  The part-time option allows us to keep our senior people longer and use them to mentor the new hires.  Truly a win for our senior employees who keep benefits and salary (reduced).  A win for HPE in that we have a strong mentor team and retain knowledge.  A win for the new hires that can reap the benefits in mentoring with very seasoned individuals.

Everyone should be aware of our announcement concerning NonStop in the public cloud.  Currently we are offering Proof of Concepts for Azure and GCP.  Currently Amazon cannot support our dual mesh RoCE fabric.  This of course will change as we migrate from RoCE to an Ethernet based fabric.  However, a NonStop development environment running NSDEE (Eclipse) in AWS was recently announced.  So public cloud support moves forward as we re-engineer our fabric and create an abstraction layer to support many hypervisors.

We are recommending Greenlake solutions – the cloud that comes to you.  Greenlake is a major HPE strategy and NonStop has been a part of it since the onset.  Our model, up to now, has been a full consumption model – that is there wasn’t any variability in the cost per month.  All cores were locked and NonStop systems were charged for all cores each month.  Recently we have added a variability option – the ability to turn on and off cores.  This will allow some flexibility in adding power as needed and variability in the monthly costs for a NonStop Greenlake solution.  We recently had a large Greenlake win against a public cloud threat.  The customer’s existing NonStop applications were running on older itanium based systems. To keep up with business growth, the customer needed to evolve their business to adapt to the current expectations of low latency and “always on”.  Enter a large Public Cloud who assured the customer that they could migrate the existing applications onto their cloud and be in production in 3 months with better availability, security and modernization.  The customer was certainly interested in the possibility of a 3-month solution. On closer analysis the Cloud Provider conceded that the effort was more along the lines of a 36-month effort and they also recognized that they could not meet the stringent SLA requirements. HPE NonStop successfully met the “always-on” performance service level agreements (SLAs) since they had already been meeting them over the past 10 years.  The customer upgraded to the HPE NonStop NS8X Systems. Moreover, HPE’s NonStop account team furnished a customer reference with a similar technology transition, resulting in a remarkable 25% performance boost giving the customer a large degree of confidence all under the Greenlake umbrella providing them with a cloud experience, without migrating to the cloud.  Under Greenlake the customer also took advantage of NonStop managed services to have the system managed for them.

We and our partners are working on solutions for combatting a ransomware attack.  All of these developing solutions are guided by the NIST digital resiliency framework of: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover.  In a payments solution we are architecting an air-gapped, people-gapped backup system that can be up in less than an hour after an attack.  We’ll be having some announcements in 2024.

There will be continued focus on our aaS offerings.  We have our payment solution with our partner Lusis and our manufacturing solution with our partner abat+.  We’ll have more focus on them in 2024.

HPE announced the end of support for HP-UX which should open some potential application migrations to NonStop.  We’ve identified some existing NonStop customers who also have HP-UX applications.  A migration to NonStop will increase the availability and scalability of the application.  Any customers who have UNIX applications are encouraged to reach out to their sales rep or SA for a migration evaluation.

We have and are continuing to investigate integration with HPE AI systems for banking and manufacturing.

2023 was a very successful year for NonStop and we are looking forward to a strong 2024.