2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
Prognosis: looking ahead to 2020 – a big year for NonStop!
IR
DanYou will probably have read a lot about what transpired at the last NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC 2019) and have likely been impressed by the commitment being made by HPE to the NonStop platform. It really is impressive that over a relatively short period of time NonStop has been ported to the Intel x86 architecture and that opened the door to allowing it to run virtualized. The transition to virtualized NonStop (vNS) is being supported on two fronts; HPE is providing its own “package” – the NS2, a Virtualized Converged NonStop X systems, as well as a software-only stack for those who would prefer to run on hardware sourced separately and who are already skilled in all aspects of deploying virtualized infrastructure.
This is really transformational as far as NonStop is concerned and likely to open the doors to new use-case scenarios for NonStop and for those who are part of the NonStop partner ecosystem there will likely be many challenges to be faced. Not the least being the transformation of NonStop from being tied to a physical machine to where NonStop become a collection of virtual machines. For IR, the prospect of potentially being part of the oversight of multiple instances of Prognosis is something that the company is fully aware of – the implications already the subject of considerable “white-boarding”, some of which commenced some time ago, following the initial announcement of vNS.
Looking ahead at what may transpire for NonStop in 2020, perhaps the most intriguing presentation given at TBC 2019 came from HPE Master Technologist Justin Simonds when he addressed the topic of AI. On completing his presentation he proposed an application view of a possible HPE “End to End Data Pipeline” that covered everything from the Edge to the Core in terms of pulling of transactional data created on mission critical systems that then flows from local or fast databases to data warehouses and finally into AI systems. While it was easy to recognize that this was very much a stylized portrayal of many possible ways of participating for software solutions, it was intriguing all the same.
When it comes to monitoring the many data transformations taking place this presentation was an eye opener showing just how involved application monitoring and management solutions like Prognosis would become – do you know where you date resides? If any image comes to mind then it might very well be of a railroad switching yard where trains are arriving, their carriages being rerouted to other trains and where trains leaving the yards are very different to what arrived. In the world of payments, we are already seeing elements of this in practice as data created as a result of a transaction being successfully processed may be routed to one or more destinations where analytics is to be performed.
Where IR has excelled in recent times is digital transformation. In ensuring collaboration can take place across multiple disparate systems and looking at the presentation at the TBC 2019 by Simonds, this came to mind and was the subject of follow-on discussions. If we thought that the current extremities of a NonStop system defined the horizon, the NonStop community is being challenged to think way beyond what it can see today – there is a lot of ground to be covered between the Edge and the Core. With Prognosis, business is already being given the freedom to think well beyond the existing horizon and this is of particular relevance for today’s payments solutions where there are now so many more moving parts!
Should the presence of NonStop evolve to where it is engaged in HPE’s vision for an “End to End Data Pipeline” then it becomes of paramount importance for business to see problems before they happen and to correct these problems essentially before they exist; prevent them from happening! Failure to do so on this scale could produce disastrous results as so many different software elements are involved, diagnosis could prove extremely difficult to resolve. Friction points are clearly evident everywhere you look on this HPE schematic and isn’t it the goal of business to ensure the technology in support of the business remains frictionless?
With Prognosis in place businesses pursuing an Edge to Core deployment that also involves engagement with analytics processors (more often than not, cloud resident), can be assured that their operations team can continue to be proactive and not reactive and this has to be the goal of every business and today, Prognosis delivers even as the first baby-steps towards deploying an “End to End Data Pipeline” are being considered.
Should the topic of how best to monitor and manage such a deployment be of interest to you don’t hesitate to reach out to your local IR contact; they would be only too happy to hear from you.
Written by the IR Team
Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com