Paragon – it’s all about tying up loose ends testing NonStop applications!

The NonStop community has become aware that there is a new sense of urgency being exhibited by the HPE NonStop development team. The Team is under the leadership of newly promoted NonStop R&D VP, Andy Bergholz, who shows no signs of easing up on the gas pedal as he makes sure that there are  reasons to keep buying NonStop systems and that the products in the NonStop product portfolio remain strong and viable. When it comes to the payments industry where reliance on NonStop systems has been so important for so long, there is a growing awareness that NonStop systems are becoming a little more complex and that meeting new aggressive price points has meant that NonStop has been stepping into new areas of technology, some of which would have been alien to even the staunchest of NonStop advocates only a short time ago.

Last month Paragon travelled to the NonStop Technical Boot Camp event held in San Francisco at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. The venue certainly attracted a large audience that included many attendees from overseas with groups from both Europe and Asia most noticeable. While we aren’t sure of the final attendee count, we were there when it passed 400.  For any gathering of the NonStop community these days, 400 is a very big number. Perhaps more importantly, the TBC attracted many senior managers and executives from HPE and they all had to have left impressed with the continuing passion that surrounds Nonstop. For Paragon, this emotion was indeed noticeable, as much as it was encouraging, given how much business Paragon derives from the NonStop community.

The focus of a new post to Paragon’s “The Edge” Blog, Financial Services providers: The need for a culture in tune with the need to transform, was influenced by what transpired at TBC. This can be seen in the opening paragraphs where we say that NonStop is now being recognized as “software” and that this became a theme for the TBC event. In other words, the historically strong umbilical cord that tightly coupled NonStop to proprietary hardware has been forever severed. To add further emphasis to this transformation, NonStop has been reworked to be able to run on virtual machines, as HPE has recognized its potential in the world of clouds and software defined everything. Talking with CEOs from multiple vendor’s companies within the ecosystem of NonStop partners, it is clear that while the shock is subsiding with each announcement from the HPE NonStop team, the magnitude of the task they face to embrace the transformation is significant.

Make sure you check the Paragon web site to read the full post once it has been published. Probably more important for financial institutions looking at where the HPE NonStop team is headed and it’s more than just NonStop as software as it is rapidly is becoming a case of NonStop as a virtualized workload capable of running on any hardware configuration, where there is x86 processors and support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). This represents a degree of complexity not faced by the NonStop community in previous times.  Yes, NonStop has transformed, but this is about more than just the NonStop applications.  It is also about the software running in a virtual machine, atop a hypervisor supported, by an underlying OS. So many layers and so much to test – more importantly, how are users going to ensure everything works to spec and delivers the customer experience financial institutions demand of their payments solutions?

After attending the TBC CEO, Jim Perry, pointed out that “Paragon won’t be able to directly help organizations test things like the internal workings of their processing systems or the software stacks such as we see with the transformed NonStop systems coming from HPE. What we can do, however, is integrate with an enterprise test platform and other specialist test tools in a way that better helps any strategically-thinking organization build and execute an overall testing strategy. We certainly can participate when it comes to our specialist areas around payments networks and ATMs.  We can also help when it comes to stress testing an entire payments processing environment – pre and post transformation.” No enterprise wants to be exposed to loose ends where portions of the solution aren’t subject to adequate testing. And this is an important consideration going forward – testing environments must display a capability to integrate with other testing platforms in the enterprise, otherwise the organization may be exposed to inconsistencies, poor resource usage and ultimately, degradation of the all-important customer experience. All these result in diminished brand value.

If you would like to know more about Paragon and its testing solutions and more importantly for the NonStop community how best to tie together all the pieces you will likely be required to use in the new transformed world of virtualization, then please feel free to contact Paragon directly.

Written by the Paragon Team and we can be reached at:

World Headquarters:
326 Raleigh Street
Holly Springs, NC 27540

Phone: +1-919-567-9890
Email: info@paragonedge.com