ETI-NET – meeting with the global HPE NonStop community!

After forty plus years, the NonStop community is still demonstrating a fondness for all things NonStop. The world has rapidly evolved to where nearly almost all applications that interact directly with end users are considered mission critical. Once reserved for use when describing those key applications upon which an enterprise depended to remain in business, in the cut-throat world of ecommerce with mobile consumers mission critical is more often than not used to describe any application set up to be accessed 24 X 7. It may only prove inconvenient to an end-user but with competitors offering similar products only a click away even a minor inconvenience may lead to the loss of a much-prized “big spending” consumer.

For the NonStop community, availability has always been a major source of pride for all those involved with developing and deploying mission critical applications. With a rich choice of solutions available to better ensure availability of NonStop, no matter whether it’s a local calamity or a regional natural disaster, there are plenty of ways NonStop users can explore to ensure that no outages are ever exposed to an end-user. Applications can be configured to run uninterrupted as recovery sites kick-in even as data can be backed up in accordance with enterprise and legal mandates. And across the globe, there are today hundreds of the world’s largest companies relying on ETI-NET to back-up their critical data. ETI-NET’s BackBox has emerged as the premier solution that satisfies all of the NonStop community’s needs to retain data for the many purposes an enterprise may have for data long term.

“We have been an HPE NonStop partner for many years and HPE customers deploying NonStop systems and in need of backup capabilities have been able to acquire BackBox directly from the NonStop price book,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “Today, we have BackBox offerings validated for deployment on the more traditional NonStop X systems as well as vBackBox (vBB) for the new virtualized NonStop (vNS) product lines.” As ETI-NET plans for the remainder of 2019 it’s very clear that the move to NonStop X systems employing the Intel x86 architecture is gathering momentum as HPE marketing makes it obvious to the NonStop community that after forty plus years, NonStop has turned to industry-standard hardware as part of its gradual transformation to become a software-only product offering.

“There are many challenges ahead of the community,” added Tétreault, “not the least being able to access skilled resources everywhere HPE generates business for NonStop.” The priority for ETI-NET for 2019 is the planning, preparation, and delivery of BackBox and vBackBox training material for the NonStop Solutions Architects (SAs) working directly with the NonStop community. Furthermore, given how the popularity of NonStop user events and meetings has grown, ETI-NET is being presented with a forum whereby it can provide in-depth training for those NonStop users who may have missed out on updates from their SAs. “We will be at ETBC (the European User Event, sponsored by BITUG) in Edinburgh where we will be providing more information on BackBox and vBackBox, including updates on recent migrations to NonStop X systems,” added Tétreault. Recognizing that the HPE NonStop team continues to add more NonStop SAs, together with the constant increase of new customers many of whom are coming from regions outside of North America, “we are planning an even greater in-depth training session for the next NonStop Technical Bootcamp (TBC) planned to be held, November 3 – 6, 2019, at the Hyatt San Francisco Airport – the site of previous TBCs and now a popular venue for the NonStop community.”

To further extend our global reach into the HPE team of SAs, we are now planning to do web training for these HPE field folks even as we expect to see further take-up of vNS in the near future. The move to running NonStop within virtual machines has generated a lot of interest across the NonStop community, and it will be something ETI-NET is watching closely to see what additional requirements for Backup are produced and should you have any questions about BackBox and vBackBox support for your enterprise, then by all means approach us whenever you see us at any event this year or just call us, as we would be only too happy to talk to you about any of your backup requirements.

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com (514) 663-0501