Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
Innovation or Stagnation
By Glenn Garrahan, Director HPE Business, Tributary Systems
Tributary Systems
Dan
Lack of Innovation leads to Stagnation; Stagnation leads to Elimination………
Way back in 1953, a new American sports car was introduced by General Motors, the Corvette. That inaugural model had a 235 cubic inch inline six cylinder engine rated at 150 gross horsepower (about 110 SAE net horsepower on today’s rating system), and a two speed Powerglide automatic transmission. It would accelerate from a dead stop to sixty miles an hour in about 11.5 seconds-pretty heady stuff for 1953!
Now flash forward to 2018. The current Corvette Z06 has a 650 horsepower supercharged 6.2 liter (378 cubic inch) V-8 that can propel the car from 0 to 60 mph in 3 seconds flat, that’s exceptional performance. Not to mention extreme improvements in handling, braking, safety and reliability. It even has a 10 speed automatic transmission and air conditioning! So by continual innovation, General Motors has been able to maintain the Corvette as America’s premier sports car.
But imagine for a moment that once GM introduced the 1953 model they never changed it, no innovation, just stagnation. It’s obvious that after a few years, probably only 2 or 3, the Corvette would have been eliminated forever.
Consider also that approximately 20% of the 1995 Fortune 500 companies no longer exist. Why? Partly or mostly lack of innovation, no doubt.
What about NonStop?
For over 40 years, first as Tandem, then Compaq, HP, and of course HPE, innovation has been constant at NonStop. The respect for the NonStop platform within HPE is very clear; two years ago NonStop X and the L-Series software was introduced, a year ago the Virtual NonStop, and last year the Virtual-Converged NonStop. And, all the while HPE continues to maintain and update the J-Series software as well. The Virtual-Converged system necessarily bridges the gap between the NonStop X fully converged servers and the purely virtual NonStop (hardware agnostic) product.
Let’s go back to the Corvette analogy for a moment. As the car evolved, performance, safety, and reliability became orders of magnitude better than the first model. That’s true of NonStop also, continual evolution has resulted in vastly improved performance, reliability and while in automobiles safety means occupant protection, here it can be thought of as data integrity and protection. NonStop innovation also means making tough decisions like abandoning the Intel Itanium architecture with Poulson, there will be no Kittson follow-on. But x86 dominates the high-end compute-intensive server and cloud computing market segments, where NonStop excels.
Where the rubber meets the road then is how the marketplace views the NonStop product line. Clearly, diluting the development effort with a Kittson based converged server, while perhaps evolutionary, would be only a short term option as Intel has announced that the 9700 series (Kittson) will be the last Itanium chips produced. Innovation demands a long term and open strategy, the x86 provides that.
And 2018 should be the year that the NonStop X product line hits its stride. The supply of new Poulson based J-Series severs is dwindling, and the existing customer base seems ready to accept NonStop X as a viable replacement, especially now that most of the 3rd party applications have been ported to the new platform. Initially most customers will probably opt for the converged system, this is the current paradigm; maintaining the current customer base and applications is vital.
A more difficult challenge is increasing the customer base with truly new customers who’ve never employed NonStop in their environments, and perhaps the most challenging, bringing back former NonStop customers who previously abandoned the platform. With the innovative three tier deployment of L-Series, converged, virtual-converged, and purely virtual, NonStop has customer requirements covered, making it simple for any customer’s requirements to be met.
Product innovation is the key factor that will push NonStop into the second quarter of the 21st century, and the 50th anniversary. And innovation will come not only from HPE, but by a well-developed, long-standing and loyal group of 3rd party suppliers, like Tributary Systems.
New products like the Virtual-Converged NonStop and Tributary Systems’ new, low cost, highly secure and highly scalable data backup, archival, and DR product. Employing IBM’s Cloud Object Storage with Erasure Coding, this solution will eliminate the need for NonStop “silos” while solving all the critical issues associated with public clouds – transparency, security and escalating costs with “puts” and “gets”.
That’s our take this month, and here we are in 2018, with NonStop innovation and a reinvigorated economy, this is bound to be a pivotal year for our preferred platform. One thing is sure, change is inevitable, but NonStop will be part of it………..
