HPE RUG events worldwide, 2018 – November Update

November is always a busy time of year for HPE and the HPE user communities. This is particularly the case with the annual NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) continuing to pull a crowd. This year, once again, more than 400 registered attendees showed up in Burlingame to hear the latest from the HPE NonStop team and once again, the NonStop team dominated the agenda with some 50 sessions delivered. When it came to the topics covered by the NonStop team these have been covered in the many posts and commentaries that followed the event’s conclusion, with even more discussions taking place in December as a number of RUGs have scheduled events that include further analysis of these topics, but suffice to say, it was all good news.

Perhaps news concerning the end of sales for the NonStop i family of systems surprised some members of the NonStop community, but for most this was expected. Even with  the end now in sight for the NonStop i family of systems (together with the J-Series OS), NonStop users will be able to place orders for both the 2300 / 2400 racks through to October 2019 while orders for the more powerful 56000 blades will be accepted through to July 2020. Support of course will continue well past these dates as is the practice of HPE and the NonStop team. All of which is to say, get to L-Series as fast as you possibly can, whether this is to NonStop X systems, the new NS2 or vNonStop. The die has been cast, as they say, and the NonStop community now has been given a clear direction to follow.

TBC wasn’t the only HPE big tent event of November. In Madrid, HPE Discover 2018 proved to be a major drawcard. A repetition of the similar branded event held in July in Las Vegas, there was still room to flesh out the presentations with more substance as HPE continued to make progress on a number of fronts in the six months that have passed. Perhaps the biggest addition to the vision was the elevation in importance of data. The vision has been centered on the edge and the cloud in the past but now it’s been relabeled; a vision that now has HPE supporting Edge-centric, Cloud-enabled, Data-drive enterprises of the future.

Perhaps the NonStop community hasn’t kept up with all the executive changes of late, as not only do we have a President, Hybrid IT (and Chief Sales Officer) in Phil Davis but a President, Intelligent Edge (and founder, Aruba) in Keerti Melkote, which now begs the question: Will there be a president announced for data? Will we see “storage” morph into “data” as hardware takes a back seat to software even as analytics, AI, etc. (together with the announced acquisition of BlueData) grab more of the headlines – will a President of Data (and perhaps AI), be coming from within their ranks? Whether anything develops out of these observations we will likely hear more about this at our local RUG meetings as the next big-tent marketing events will not restart until the summer of 2019 with HPE Discover 2019, Las Vegas, in June, 2019.

Looking closer to home and at what is now scheduled, by the time you read this update some of the RUG events posted will have happened. However, this is again a good time to thank all the volunteers who helped out at RUG events through the year. A special thanks to the members of the NonStop user community who stepped in to help at many regions as did NonStop vendors without whose financial help some of these events just might not have happened. And of course a special thanks to HPE and to the field teams who were visible at these events wherever they were held around the planet. We are a community after all with multiple stakeholders and it’s encouraging to see the community working together to ensure each and every community member continues to be well-informed about all things HPE and all things NonStop.

This list isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but if you have the opportunity to join in what clearly may be a festive occasion for some then, by all means, take time to join your fellow community members even as you can really celebrate the ending of one very dramatic year for NonStop:

Dec 4 – MATUG

Dec 4 – BITUG (Little SIG)

Dec 6 – OzTUG Christmas (Melbourne)

Dec 12 – OzTUG Christmas (Sydney)

Dec 13 – DUST