Pyalla Technologies… changes, clarity and consumption. Are you ready for the new NonStop?

Two months ago I wrote about change and then just last month I wrote about clarity. Very clearly, change is happening fast for NonStop and even more importantly, it is becoming a whole lot clearer what is fueling the changes happening with NonStop. It’s all about supporting an entirely new way to consume NonStop. Without dwelling on the coincidence for too long – does it surprise you that in this third part of a three part commentary, I have touched on change, clarity and now consumption? The three Cs, if you like …

In blog posts and commentaries I have written over the past couple of days there has been a consistency with the story I have been telling and that is, businesses everywhere are waking up to the simple fact that for them, they aren’t in the technology business. Why all the capital investment in technology when it’s constantly changing and why the need for even bigger investments in human resources when the business is about banking or retailing or shipping. We call on the skills of architects when we need to design a new building and bring in the PR company when we take a message to market and we even got away with having in house legal teams opting instead for keeping lawyers on retainers, so why do we need to retain in-house IT personnel when it’s all just part of our infrastructure?

Businesses readily admit that they are prone to making mistakes when it comes to technology and perhaps they don’t embrace technology change as quickly as they should. It’s true that the right technology helps maintain a competitive edge when properly implemented, but even so, the cost of doing it is out or proportion to all of the other investments these business make to remain in business. Or so the old adage goes – yes, we have to change right along with the changes happening with technology. The industrial revolution wasn’t without its pain points and neither is the information revolution. Invest in Blackberry, did we? Invest too in smart eye glasses? Re-wired your building in support of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) comms? No, there are always missteps to be taken, but wouldn’t it be a whole lot better if technology were as readily accessible as a telephone dial tone?

Not the best of analogies I know – who hears a dial tone anymore. But the point remains, technology should be accessible when we need it and in amounts that can meet our business needs. NonStop is on the move and it isn’t just about embracing new protocols and services but rather, it’s headed out the data center doors where it becomes a story about APIs and yes, Apps. It isn’t surprising to read that the attention of industry analysts everywhere is focused on the Edge and the Cloud. This is modern terminology for client / server, mind you, but with a whole new language when it comes to deployment. As a result, the need for a data center may be as much gone as the need for terminals, PCs and the like. People are on the move constantly and business is on the move more often playing catch-up, unfortunately and yes, technology is on the move and it’s truly a case of “outta here!”

Too dramatic? If you happened to have sat in on Randy Meyer, HPE VP & GM, Mission Critical Systems, at GTUG the other week you will have heard him talk openly about new ways to consume NonStop. What is central to his description of how NonStop will be consumed in the future, think accessing a portal, selecting components via apps, having a stack delivered to wherever you have compute power in the form of a container, and then have your computer break it apart and deploy as a guest of your preferred virtual machine. And then, get back to work! Initially this is primarily a model for developers and those in QA testing the work of developers, but eventually this model will find its way into production environments.

There will certainly be a future for NonStop systems delivered to your still-operational data center dock to be unpacked and deployed inside your data center. However, in time, this will become the exception for even the most loyal of NonStop users. There are still a lot of hurdles to be jumped before any of the above comes to fruition but steps are being taken to determine just how this consumption model will be built and already HPE is in Phase 1 of deploying such a model – just ask NonStop ATC lead, Franz Koenig, who painted quite a picture for the NonStop community at GTUG. In a way, it kind of makes you more determined to get to the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp later in the year as I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this approach to delivering NonStop.

Improving the ways to consume NonStop in a world that is virtualized and where you just pay as you compute certainly brings with it many challenges for the NonStop vendor community but the door has been opened and the discussions have started. To their credit, NonStop product management folks will be addressing the NonStop vendor community in July and that too will be a meeting few vendors will want to miss. As for Pyalla Technologies, LLC, we still have HPE Discover, Las Vegas, to attend where hopefully we will hear more about the overall context in which NonStop now finds itself playing a role (and I hope to meet many of you at this premier big-tent marketing event for HPE) but either way, HPE Discover and Partner Technical Symposium, the news on how best to consume NonStop will likely be less about why this model has been embraced and more about when this model will become available and I have to believe that when that time comes, this new NonStop will capture even more market share – who wouldn’t want to be able to leverage the fault tolerance of NonStop essentially for free!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC