HPE NonStop Corner – one partner’s perspective

For HPE and all of the HPE NonStop team this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp – the NonStop All-Digital Experience – was the event of the year. It showcased many new programs, products and even new ways to deploy NonStop. For the first time we heard directly from a user that had successfully put into production virtualized NonStop. We also heard for the first time about dreams for the future of NonStop; in relation to NonStop participating in GreenLake, it was all about the future coming in waves. If you missed that presentation then you will just have to check in with Karen Copeland, Manager NonStop Product Management, or return to Whova to replay her sessions, TBC20-022 HPE GreenLake and NonStop. (You can view any session you’d like if you Visit the On-Demand Library now.)

However, the participation by NonStop across the greater HPE couldn’t be better explained than what we heard from many members of the NonStop team. This was highlighted in the opening presentations that featured Jeff Kyle, VP & GM, HPE Mission Critical Solutions. For some time now Jeff, who has a solid background in all things NonStop, has been a visible presence at many NonStop events but it was good to hear him talking about how HPE NonStop “powers the world around us!” As a community, NonStop partners and customers are well aware of the presence NonStop has in key market places but it’s good to hear the senior management being as proactive as they were at this event, about the role NonStop plays now and will play in the future.

What was particularly newsworthy was the energy that was on display when the head of High Performance Computing / Mission Critical Computing, HPE Snr. VP and GM, Peter Ungaro, formerly opened this year’s event. “I couldn’t be more excited to be leading this business and to have NonStop as part of that,” said Ungaro. “At HPE our primary goal is to be a world-leading edge-to-cloud, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company.” Ungaro then made it a point to tell the NonStop community that, “Every customer that I talk to around the world is just dealing with a massive growth of data. For NonStop customers, a lot of that is driven by more and more transactions which gives us more information to analyze and get insights from.”

When you consider all that is implied by a commitment from a major vendor to delivering world-leading edge-to-cloud PaaS you cannot escape thinking of how NonStop fits into this model. How will the major attributes of NonStop – its availability and just as importantly, its scalability – add value to both the cloud and the edge? How does HPE envision the role of NonStop in future enterprise technology deployments. As we enter the age of insight, will the data and transaction activity on NonStop make a meaningful contribution to the enterprise today and tomorrow and will observations like that made by Ungaro really translate into greater opportunities for NonStop?

In his presentation, Artificial Intelligent Driven Enterprise (AIDE), HPE Master Technologist, Justin Simonds, gave us considerable food for thought when addressing these questions. In his introduction Simonds quoted IDC when they reported that there is an, “Expectation that nearly thirty percent of the world’s data and transactions will need real time processing.” As a place to start any discussion on the future role of NonStop, this is a good statistic to have at hand. Simonds also talked about data-hungry, immersive apps producing three-dimensional images and creating new experiences were partly driving this need for real time processing.

The reality that NonStop now belongs to the HPE High Performance Computing and Mission Critical Systems organization headed by Ungaro has many familiar with NonStop beginning to wonder about a possible future that pulls together product lines like NonStop with other products from within the organization, including the Apollo line of high-performance servers. The combination of real time processing of data and transactions and machine learning / artificial intelligence (ML / AI) holds a tantalizing promise for the future of NonStop within HPE. While it is still the fodder for increasing speculation, it was left to Simonds presentation to fill in the blanks and describe one outcome that might appear from this organization Ungaro oversees.

“A combined solution of real-time and high-performance computing brings together operations planning and customer services by integrating data and applications across business functions,” said Simonds. “Really, HPE’s commitment to NonStop and also to the Apollo Cray business solutions,” continued Simonds, leads to a discussion on future system architectures that he began describing in the presentation. “This proposed architecture of AI-driven enterprise solutions really offers an architecture that can bridge application demands in real time. And HPE is the only vendor that can deliver such a solution given the unique NonStop and HPE Cray platforms.”

Whether the architecture Simonds describes comes about or not, the most important message coming from HPE is that at the highest executive level, there is enthusiasm about the future of NonStop and that this same executive is responsible for the future of both high-performance and mission-critical computing. It’s tempting to say that products like Apollo and NonStop working together can alter the trajectory of NonStop but then again, who’s to argue with the premise that these paths need to cross at some point. In the virtual world that is hybrid and where the cloud like experience is becoming more commonplace, entertaining the possibility of such a future for HPE isn’t beyond the realm of reality – a simple request from a major HPE customer and the pieces may all fall into place.

This too is how the excitement from coming together as a community is created. And it continues to be exciting times for the NonStop community. It is almost as if the much ballyhooed cloud-only messages coming from some vendors are totally missing the point. For those who may think that the message coming from HPE about HPE becoming a world-leading edge to cloud PaaS company is simply that, messaging, then perhaps it’s time to revisit many of the presentations given at this year’s NonStop TBC. HPE is executing to a plan, and that plan includes NonStop. If you are still uncertain I am sure Peter Ungaro would be only too happy to lay it all out for you as it is within his organization that we are seeing innovation driving the greatest change!

You can always reach me via email at:
Richard@pyalla-technologies.com

All opinions and observations expressed here

are those of Pyalla Technologies, LLC,

and unless otherwise expressly identified,
are not provided by HPE employees.