Pyalla Technologies …changes, clarity and consumption

The major events are now behind us – the big RUG events like GTUG and yes N2TUG, HPE Discover and more recently, the NonStop Vendor Technical Symposium. With the exception of GTUG we managed to drive to all the events and we are working on a couple more trips to meet with vendors and clients. It’s summer and it’s been the height of vacation time so the roads have been crowded. Yes, infrastructure has certainly been the subject of many of our conversations as we have driven by road construction projects that have led to delays and periods of frustration as we couldn’t quite see over the horizon. For the most part, the infrastructure projects were all related to maintenance as very little additional “bandwidth” seems to have been added even as the volume of traffic continues to climb.

On the other hand, enforcement agencies appear to be closing their eyes to how fast the traffic is moving. Not sure what the guidelines are and it does vary from state to state but we have seen traffic flowing ten and even twenty miles per hour above the posted speed limit signs. However, this isn’t an article about diminished law enforcement or an encouragement to go out there and drive fast but rather an acknowledgment that creativity is in evidence all around the country when it comes to infrastructure. Move everyone faster and you can load up existing channels with many more vehicles … sound familiar? In the world of IT where we operate, much can be said of the work IT does these days and it has a lot to do with working on infrastructure to better accommodate increased workloads even as we continue to look at new options to reduce the costs or simplify the operations.

For the NonStop community, we have witnessed the massive changes occurring with both communications and storage and we see even bigger changes taking place with the processors and operating systems. Solid State Disks (SSDs) are catching on quickly and represent an immediate fix to the “posted speed signs” we encounter on our highways. Put the pedal down and suddenly, with SSDs, everything happens a lot quicker and with the work done by NonStop development, reliability is now at a level where we can depend on these disks a lot more than we might have thought possible only a few years ago. LAN and Fabric speeds have also increased such that today, InfiniBand (IB) is a lot faster than what we have seen in previous generations of NonStop that utilized the proprietary ServerNet fabric. Has anyone clocked the performance of RoCE yet? What has been your experience with virtualized NonStop to date? If this is something you are doing then send me an email as I am most interested in this aspect of NonStop.

Embracing the Intel x86 architecture has certainly paid dividends for HPE and the NonStop team. Apart from the immediate performance benefits (have we even seen as much headroom on our systems as we are seeing today?) there is also a tangible business benefit. Customers’ plans to move away from NonStop are being revisited even as those who moved off NonStop years ago are starting to rethink the value proposition that comes from running on a truly fault tolerant system that performs, can be part of a hybrid, scales out and yes, can now run as a virtualized workload. Talk about options! I have heard from some HPE managers that once strongholds of NonStop that migrated away from NonStop to Linux and Windows clusters are more open now to talking about NonStop than ever before. These will more than likely be the subject of numerous presentations in 2019 I suspect, so for now, it’s more a case of “watch this space!”

There’s been a lot invested in infrastructure and it is ready to handle many more customers. America’s highway infrastructure may be crumbling but the upgrades to NonStop across the board are helping NonStop thrive. The chips have been upgraded as has been the options where to run NonStop – traditional or virtualized – and SQL is now a more potent option capable of taking on workloads previously assigned to Oracle. Database as a Service (DBaaS)? Why not! And there’s more being written today about NonStop support for modern scripting languages like Perl, Python and PHP – so yes, go ahead, recruit your future NonStop developers straight out of college. Want to go fast on NonStop? The boundaries are down and faster times lie ahead and there’s no enforcement agency hiding in the bushes to tell you that you can’t achieve more. And for that, the NonStop community has a lot to be thankful about. #NonStopRocks !!!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC