Pyalla Technologies … For NonStop its success has been due to standing firm!

Polar Vortex! The very name conjures up images in our minds of desperation and chaos, not unlike what we see with tornadoes only much colder. Going even further, ominous black holes also come to mind. Either way, the label isn’t attached to anything positive, that’s for sure. It is as if we are all being given a call to dive under cover; get out of the way else you will be sucked into the abyss. Too extreme? Well, from the weather maps it looks as if parts of North America have returned to the ice age, with suggestions being made that it isn’t a good thing to talk to one another when out doors! Ouch … having lived for two years in Edmonton, Alberta, and spending a couple of days in March where the temperatures dropped to -55F I have no desire to experience such conditions ever again.

Then again, I live in Colorado alongside the Rocky Mountains and today it’s warm enough that green grass remains visible on the golf course alongside the office. “The vortex, a brutal mass of cold air with strong bands of circulating winds, left its normal location near the North Pole and spread southward in recent weeks, bringing arctic weather to the middle of the United States,” said the New York Times. “It’s never been -50 in Chicago so we can’t really say it ‘feels like’ – nobody really knows what that feels like,” (AccuWeather meteorologist Elliot) Abrams said in USA Today.  “But you can get frostbite within four or five minutes.”

The BBC reported that, “Weather officials in the state of Iowa have warned people to ‘avoid taking deep breaths, and to minimize talking’ if they go outside.” Worse still? According to the BBC, “Even beer deliveries in Wisconsin have been hit by the cold, as brewers delay shipments over fears their beverages will freeze in the trucks.” And to think, this is just before the Superbowl where holding a beer is mandatory. In another quote to USA Today, “This is polar air,” said Mike Koch, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis. “That should tell you something.” Fair enough. As yet another commentator remarked to USA Today, “In the old days we just called it winter.”

However, in the drama-filled media marketplace we live in today, we need something more polarizing to say the least and Polar Vortex sounds as sinister as it gets. I can’t ever recall watching a SiFi movie where a reference to a vortex didn’t instantly convey impending doom; a calamitous situation about to unfold. Unfortunately, when it comes to technology there are many times when similar emotions are stirred. Moreover, when it comes to individual product lines, it takes little imagination to see a downward spiral developing. However, for the NonStop community the good news is that as a product line, NonStop has stood firm and has through the decades avoided all attempt to drag it down into the equally as terrifying Legacy Vortex.

This isn’t to say that NonStop hasn’t come close to the edge as there have been occasions when such a prognosis could have been given. NonStop is about to fall into the abyss to become yet another victim of the Legacy Vortex! But no; whatever the reasons, NonStop has found a way to remain relevant to the community of NonStop users dependent on NonStop for the mission critical applications. In the January 27, 2019, post HPE is playing the long game with NonStop and IT is the beneficiary! to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, this continued investment in NonStop by HPE was highlighted even as it notes the role we all must continue to play to ensure the IT world knows the inherent strengths and indeed viability of NonStop today:

“HPE has done much of the heavy lifting needed to bring NonStop back into relevance for CIOs and data center managers, but the onus is still on the majority of the NonStop user community to translate this heavy lifting into meaningful deployments in support of the most critical of mission critical applications that just have to run without any interruption. It’s also a clarion call to the NonStop vendor community to help simplify the tasks of managing NonStop as well as developing new applications on NonStop.” 

The IT world continues to evolve; more and more of the dialogue these days is centered on the separation of functionality between the intelligent Edge and the Digital Core. Perhaps the best way to think about the Core is provided in a September, 2018, post to TechTarget. “The digital core includes next-generation technologies like advanced analytics, IoT, AI, and machine learning that are not generally suited to run on legacy IT infrastructure. Instead, they require flexible, scalable platforms that are integrated in the cloud.” Furthermore, according to TechTarget, “one of the main benefits of the digital core is that it allows organizations to integrate business process and transactional data from back office ERP systems (sic) with massive amounts of structured and unstructured data from various sources. Advanced analytics can then be embedded in the data from the digital core enabling the organization to derive new insights, such as predicting outcomes or proposing new actions. Many of these processes or actions can operate automatically in near real time.”

The good news here is that HPE already has positioned NonStop as part of its own Digital Core marketing – if you missed it, the message was first unveiled by our own Randy Meyer, HPE VP&GM Mission Critical Systems:

Mission Critical Systems product portfolio including NonStop is part of the Digital Core – defined as supporting a mix of traditional IT, private clouds and public clouds. In many ways, the digital core can be viewed as lying between the edge and the cloud, as some would define IT these days, and being able to react to situations developing out on the edge when it just would not be practicle to send vast amounts of data to the core and await a response. All things considered – just another good place to position NonStop and exploit its massive scale-out properties (not forgetting its availability properties, of course). Point is, NonStop continues to evolve to meet current business challenges and with the recent developments in hardware, virtualization and software, NonStop not only is distancing itself from the Legacy Vortex but opening doors to completely new business opportunities.

Future digital cores will contain a mix of scale-up, memory-driven computing alongside scale-out transaction processors. There isn’t a depiction anywhere that I have seen that doesn’t include a box marked transaction processing making up portions of the digital core. With all the changes to NonStop that have been successfully executed by the NonStop team, it’s hard not to be warmed by all that has transpired and to know we can continue to deploy NonStop in support of transaction processing that keep the business running. The new NonStop can deliver new products and services even faster than ever before. Did someone just say warm? The very antithesis of polar, right? As it should be noted by everyone in the NonStop community today that for sure, you guessed it, NonStop is hot!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC