Multidimensional scalability, syndromic surveillance, NonStop on the edge, and much more. See you at this year’s virtual TBC!

I recall, dimly, the first time Richard and I met; I had picked him up at headquarters in Cupertino and we were driving up to San Francisco to see a customer.  That was back in the Tandem days and all was well with the world.  Working for Tandem, even though Tandem had IPOed was definitely like working for a startup.  Revenue seemed to double every year.  There were new and exciting products that were cutting edge.  We had some new and amazing manageability products.  We even looked like a PU-5 system in a SNAX network, unheard of outside IBM.

We started winning all sorts of benchmarks: Kaiser, California DMV and one with which I was very involved – Security Pacific Bank.  It was the first time we hit 1,000 TPS!  The benchmark system was a 40 processor Cyclone.  We won and they were supposed to start phasing Tandem in as their preferred banking platform when Bank of America bought them.  Who knows how things might have changed if Tandem had fully displaced IBM at Security Pacific?  We’ll never know.

Mentioning the Cyclone reminded me of the fateful Cyclone announcement which coincided with the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  I had just flown back to Los Angeles from San Jose that day after the announcement.  Management thought it would be good to set up a war room of tech specialists in Cupertino to help customers affected by the quake.  I caught the next flight back and the region support staff was occupying a large conference room when the first of many aftershocks hit and we wondered if the war room was really such a good idea.

The good news was the aftershocks were aftershocks and started subsiding.  The even better news was that NonStop really didn’t have any outages so we never had any calls into the war room.  At one of the banks in San Francisco a Tandem system had fallen over on its side but was still running fine.  There were some amazing people at Tandem and it was always an honor to have been associated with such a remarkable group.

It has been a real pleasure maintaining a relationship with Richard over these many years as he went from Product Manager to Partner to biggest NonStop blogger ever!  I greatly enjoy discussing past, present and future with Richard and when the stars align, also with Margo.  If you have some time and the opportunity you should sit down with a good drink and have Margo tell you about her background.  It is nothing short of astounding.  I recommend a dinner with Richard and Margo very highly along with a bottle of appropriately aged Silver Oak.

Richard wanted me to discuss the upcoming bootcamp or at least what the heck I was doing.  I have three talks lined up a 30 minute, 45 minute and a full 60 minute talk.  For those that track my ‘Trends & Wins’ column in Connection you may recall one I did on Scalability.  This is that article turned into a PowerPoint.  I discuss multidimensional scalability that is available on NonStop and then discuss the Covid-19 customer event concerning the processing and delivery of United States unemployment checks.

Speaking of Covid-19 I do have a Healthcare talk which is entitled ‘Helping to fight Covid-19’.  For those that may have attended HPE Discover, this is an expanded talk to the one I gave there.  It talks about syndromic surveillance and our partner Crossflo and expands a bit on the concept of Health Information Exchanges.  The title is a bit misleading since the point of syndromic surveillance is to catch a disease before it becomes an epidemic and we know that Covid-19 is a cat already out of the bag.  Still it was a talk that was well received at Discover so a simple matter to expand it a bit for TBC.

Finally I have a talk on what I’m calling the Artificial Intelligent Driven Enterprise or AIDE.  As many of your readers know, Keith Moore managed to get NonStop booted on the HPE Edgeline systems (NonStop running on them is not an available product).  It did show NonStop on the edge and Keith and I have had discussions on the merger of some of the HPE AI systems and NonStop.  We do transactional and have a slick RDBMS whereas they do incredible number crunching with lightening GPU based systems.  The idea is the combination running an enterprise with a continuous development/continuous integration of AI business models.  For those that may remember ZLE (Zero-Latency Enterprise) – it’s sort of that with some AI thrown in.  How bad could that be?

Notwithstanding my stuff, it looks like there will be some great talks at this year’s TBC.  Additionally, as you know, the next generation system will be announced by Mark Pollans.  I’d say don’t miss that talk.  All the talks by the product managers look very good and anything by the ATC folks and development are sure to be interesting.  With this TBC being both virtual and free, signups are way up.  We also have a follow-on, free education day.  For customers who have people in their companies that may want to learn about NonStop there is a one day ‘Concepts and Facilities’ class on the 19^th.  For those who just want to learn some of the new stuff there is training on vNonStop.  So this really looks to be a blowout event this year.  I know we’ll all miss the dinners, drinks and partner give-aways but it still looks like a very exciting event.  I’m glad to be a small part of it.