NonStop as a Service? We’ve been doing it for years!

Turn-Key NonStop? What the heck is that?!?

Well over the last few years, TCM has endeavoured to expand the depth of the services we provide our Customers. The starting point for any consideration of improving these services and/or how we provide them is the question: “What can we do to add real value to our Customers?”. When you listen to your Customers, they will often answer these questions for you, and normally without provocation. We keep in close contact with our Customers, holding monthly review meetings and other more casual interactions. What we noticed through these conversations was a common theme emerging with certain Customers, an oh-so human dichotomy of: we love running NonStop; we don’t always love having NonStop. In other words, they experienced joy through the NonStop’s performance and reliability, but suffered pain through perceived complications of managing the overall platform, i.e. it’s difficulty or complexity.

Why? Because NonStop is complex –  a product of this nature cannot remain atop the mountain of mission-critical servers that have emerged since the late 80’s without having something special up it’s sleeve. Indeed this ‘pain’ some Users refer to is partly borne from the same thing that gives NonStop its lofty position above the competition – it is very near irreplicable and requires a completely different set of skills as compared to other more generic platforms.

For many Users, accepting the uniqueness of the NonStop platform means accepting a number of unknowns; unknowns that are not associated with the rest of the field. This can place senior IT professionals in a difficult position, being responsible for managing a ‘thing’ that they have a limited understanding of. And this lack of understanding is not a criticism, it simply comes with the territory. If you have never encountered NonStop before, (as we all know) it’s not as simple as a quick ‘google’ or a couple of evening classes. NonStop is a specialist matter, served by a community of highly experienced, dedicated professionals who it would be fair to say have been round the block more than once, been there, done that and have an entire suitcase of t-shirts, not to mention collected the odd $200 for passing ‘Go’. Simply put, NonStoppers know their sh-…kit. So it stands to reason someone relatively new to the wonderful word of NonStop may feel a little disoriented, even fearful, of this mighty beast.

And that’s where we come in: TCM – The Beast Tamers. Or as we prefer to put it: The NonStop Experts.

Coming from the privileged position of knowing NonStop inside and out, we find it very easy to simplify a NonStop solution and remove any nagging doubts, whether this be through our regular service reviews or customised monthly reports, to modifying certain internal processes to align more closely with the status quo, i.e. showing that NonStop can look and feel just like every other server in the datacenter. More than anything, we are on hand and there for our Customers. Recently however, we have taken steps to go beyond just managing our Customer’s solution, to actually owning it.

This is what we refer to as our Turn-Key NonStop (TKNS) Solution.

With TKNS, we take on the entire ownership of NonStop, including the hardware, the licenses, the hosting, the management, the operations, the maintenance, all products and tools, right down to giving the server an occasional buff and polish. We get away from talking about the NonStop as a platform and focus on the more important angle, which is an optimised environment for our Customers’ applications. Thus Customers only see the performance and reliability, and where before there may have been concerns over the various tenants of managing the NonStop, now they have one single supplier, one single cost. It’s bliss – I’m sure is what they say. 🙂

Ok, so there is a difference between NSaaS and our version of TKNS, and we completely acknowledge that, but how much of difference is there to the end user? Surely the value of NSaaS is the ability to provide this all-upside promise of availability, with little to know management effort? Well that’s what we provide with TKNS, it’s just the underlying mechanisms that are a little different. Of course, as the developments within NonStop start to filter into practice we are going to see increasingly exciting and innovative means of deploying and operating NonStops. NSaaS in it’s true and proper form, Virtualized NonStop, DBaaS, these all offer a wondrous array of possibilities allowing large organisations to more efficiently arrange and run their critical services, including the very valuable potential of variable demand, but also perhaps opening the door to smaller-scale Customers looking to benefit from the performance, reliability and availability that NonStop brings to the table.

As these new additions to the NonStop model find their feet, we will continue to offer our Customers our version of NSaaS, with the ultimate aim, as always, to make NonStop easier and keep developing new offerings to maintain our position as the go-to experts in the field.

We look forward to hearing more from all of our Customers and Partners, current and future, and hope to see some familiar faces at the upcoming NonStop events in Europe, including BITUG, GTUG and VNUG, not to mention TBC towards the end of the year.

See you all there!

TCM | The NonStop Experts | www.tcm.uk.com | nonstop@tcm.uk.com