Prognosis: the big takeaway from TBC 2019

Participation in mainstay HPE NonStop events has always represented the best way for IR to interact directly with the NonStop community. The presence of the NonStop leadership team opens the doors to numerous discussions – many of them spontaneous and ad-hoc. Catching up with Karen Copeland, Manager HPE NonStop Product Management, is something not to be missed whenever the opportunity presents itself. As for the topic of the conversation taking place as the photo above was snapped well, as much as we would like to tell such interactions always tend to be “in confidence!”

However, what we can cover is that this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) provided IR with an excellent opportunity to interact with the NonStop community. The presence of so many attendees from places way beyond America’s borders was a surprise, but a pleasant one at that – when the first keynote speaker, HPE’s Mission Critical VP & GM Jeff Kyle asked those gathered for his presentation to stand if this year’s event was their first time, there were many who stood. The final count noted that more than 100 attendees were first timers and it’s been a long time since we last recall hearing of numbers like that. From our own conversations with the NonStop community, NonStop migrations away from the proprietary Itanium-based chips to the industry-standard Intel x86 chips is well and truly under way.

With Jeff Kyle kicking off the event, it was left to him to paint a high-level picture of HPE’s plans for NonStop and as his presentation drew to an end, there was a PowerPoint slide produced that covered the NonStop Summary in just a few words – key items underpinning NonStop Fundamentals, Virtualized NonStop and Hybrid IT. All of which was to say that HPE would be continuing to ensure NonStop remained a fault tolerant offering, no matter the platform, traditional or virtual, that HPE will be pulling out all the stops to expand usage of virtualized NonStop (vNS) and that Hybrid IT would include further investments in NonStop SQL even as HPE pursued “integrating with best of breed industry and partner offerings.”

For IR, when it comes to Prognosis it too has benefited from integrating with industry and partner offerings and today, Prognosis provides management and monitoring services in association with ACI Worldwide to some of the largest financial services providers in the world. IR’s Prognosis solution empowers business teams with real-time visibility and alerting into BIN ranges, issuer performance, KPIs/SLAs, per store transactions, interchanges, approvals, declines, timeouts, etc. enabling optimal business decisions for your organization. Banks and retailers continue to rely on Prognosis for insights into the operation and performance of their applications, networks and customer-accessible devices.

Prognosis has been the premier management and monitoring product available on NonStop for almost three decades and for many NonStop vendors has been the yardstick by which they measure their own capabilities. In a world where it’s so easy to be distracted by “it’s almost as good as a Xerox,” NonStop users indeed know where they can turn to get the Xerox of management and monitoring.

However, it is important to note the emphasis that the NonStop team is placing on virtualization and hybrid IT. This has been a major talking point among NonStop customers for the last couple of TBC events, dating back to when former HPE CTO Martin Fink noted that virtualized NonStop was being tested. However, it may not be the product for all NonStop users, but for NonStop vendors contemplating the upside from providing products on the basis of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), there is considerable interest. When you start looking at how many virtual machines may be present across an x86 server farm – VMs running instances of NonStop even as other VMs run CLIMs for storage and communication – the potential for deploying just a single instance of a management and monitoring solution in just a single VM holds appeal.

NonStop customers are weary of additional costs when virtualization is contemplated and it’s not unreasonable to expect NonStop vendors to take a good look at how best to deploy their own products at attractive price points. None of this is lost on IR and it would be equally unreasonable to think that further news will not be forthcoming at future TBC events. If you take it one step further and think of deploying private clouds in hybrid configurations that include traditional NonStop X systems, then an argument can be made that greater optimization will be a consideration for future releases of Prognosis.

Perhaps one PowerPoint slide caught our attention more so than others that were produced for the event; it was one that revisited NSADI – the NonStop Application Direct Interface. Seeing NonStop married to an Apollo High Performance Computer (HPC) featuring multiple Nvidia GPUs truly painted a picture of one possible future for hybrid IT. As both the NonStop and the Apollo have direct access to each other’s memory, intermixing high performance analytics into the world of transaction processing looks to be coming closer to reality. While there are no plans for any immediate IR response it is yet one more confirmation as to why it is so important attending these annual NonStop events.

This year’s event allowed our IR team to interact with many of the attendees and there were many positive outcomes. Events such as this provide a forum for Prognosis to continue demonstrate its leadership role in management and monitoring of your mission critical applications. Should you want to know more about what we are providing today don’t hesitate to reach out to your local IR contact; they will be only too happy to hear from you.

Written by the IR Team

Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com