Pyalla Technologies, LLC …Providing articles, commentaries and posts focused on HPE, Mission Critical Systems and NonStop

Here in the northern hemisphere we talk of April showers, May flowers. When it comes to Colorado this rarely holds true as we have come to expect anything, from days of sunshine and 80F temps to extended periods of temperatures below freezing with even more snow falling to the ground as we speak, anything can  happen at this time of year. Last year, snow continued into May but we are hoping for some relief this year given how snow began falling last September, well before the official start of fall.

The unexpected is always with us and for those of us who have been around NonStop for some time we have always been prepared to hear something new. We are already digesting the impact from new NonStop X systems, upgraded as HPE follows the Intel roadmaps. We are beginning to come to terms with virtual NonStop (vNS) although the path to vNS is not for the faint of heart. There are still questions surrounding who exactly we turn to for support of vNS when there are third-party servers and infrastructure involved, as is VMware, in support of the many virtual machines required of NonStop.

Makes the purchase of a converged NonStop system look like a no-brainer, right? And yet, the HPE team has done a lot to make it easier for us to deploy NonStop SQL in a virtual machine and to give us all the upside from deploying a multi-tenant database server that never needs to be taken offline. The new NonStop SQL Cloud Edition will certainly raise eyebrows even as I am sure it will be a major talking point at the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp. Have you seen any of the promotional emails and posts in support of this October 5 – 7 event to be held in Denver?

If you plan to go, please register and get your hotel reservations squared away – looks like there will be a celebratory Monday night reception so plan on arriving midafternoon Monday. As for Margo and me, we have registered and made our hotel reservations. While it will not be held in the Denver Convention center it doesn’t take the presence of a blue bear to distract us from wanting to peer in on all that the NonStop community plans to hear from those closest to the NonStop product roadmaps, now will it?

News from HPE:

While not as dramatic as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, “HPE has established its first-ever AI Ethics Advisory Board. The Board is responsible for ensuring that the use, development and deployment of AI products and solutions by HPE and our customers aligns to our ethical standards.” In the blog post of April 27, 2021, Glenn Leon, Snr VP and Deputy General Counsel – Chief Ethics and Compliance Office, explained how “the Board’s first action was to define a set of AI Ethical Principles to guide how we use and develop responsible AI that has beneficial outcomes for people, businesses, and public services.”

According to Leon,

“AI should be:

1. Privacy-enabled and secure – respect individual privacy and be secure.
2. Human focused – respect human rights and be designed with mechanisms and safeguards, e.g. to support human oversight and prevent misuse.
3. Inclusive – minimize harmful bias and support equal treatment.
4. Responsible – be designed for responsible and accountable use, inform an understanding of the AI, and enable outcomes to be challenged.
5. Robust – be engineered to build in quality-testing and include safeguards to maintain functionality, minimize misuse and the impact of failure.”

In the world of transaction processing few can argue that processing a transaction and deriving insights, all in real time of course, is leading NonStop and AI on a course where paths will soon cross. We will become reliant on AI for future value determination from all that we transact and without AI it is difficult to comprehend how else we could come up with meaningful and actionable data. Having the Mission Critical Systems organization part of the HPE High Performance Computing unit seems to make a whole lot more sense the more we watch the actions of HPE executives.

Asimov may have been concerned about ensuring robots didn’t move beyond their original design goals and end up becoming our equals and possibly much more but when it comes to the practical side of AI, as is promoted by many technology vendors, it’s not too early to think ahead and to take steps to ensure AI benefits us all.

Social Media Round Up:

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more – the sites are alive with commentary over corporate moves out of Silicon Valley. The Most recent move? Apple building a campus in Raleigh for some 3,000 folks and it will be the first east coast campus that Apple will create. This represents an investment of $1billion and complements an earlier investment of $1billion in new campus for Apple in Austin Texas. What caught my eye with this latest announcement from Apple has more to do with Raleigh and Research Triangle Park (RTP) than anything else and for one big reason. The very existence of RTP owes a lot to IBM that centered one of its most important divisions there – Communication Products Division (CPD). Yes, if you know anything about 3260 devices, 3705 Front End Processors, Series 1 servers and yes, SNA / VTAM then you will know it all came out of Raleigh.

My first assignment in the US was in North Raleigh after a move to marketing. Arriving from Australia it was kind of a wake-up call as to just how important communications and networking were to IBM and the impressions gained in Raleigh have stayed with me ever since. And it’s not just me as Margo was perhaps even more involved as Margo managed the only team that successfully implemented the SNA / VTAM Cross Domain Facility. As was reported at the time by Network World (see Vol 6, No 15 of April 17, 1989), “with SNAX/CDF as a hardware / software package (making) a Tandem OLTP system appear as an IBM host in a SNA Network.” So the roots of Pyalla Technology run through Raleigh and it will be very interesting to see what will be the focus of the Apple folks once they take up residence.

On social media all the talk has been about the fact that both Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams have MBAs from Duke – one of the three big universities that anchor RTP the other being UNC and NCSC. If you follow college basketball you will know all about these universities. In a world that is increasingly being driven by edge to core considerations and where the edge itself is becoming increasingly complex – mini clouds, for instance – there is no question whatsoever that NonStop will increasingly bump up against whatever Apple creates. The cloud experience is one thing but all of this is being driven even now by the user experience and Apple in this regards is in the driver’s seat.

And now for the posts and articles published during January 2021

Real Time View blog:

April 27, 2021
Cloud experience is under the spotlight; no time to ignore NonStop systems.
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2021/04/cloud-experience-is-under-spotlight-no.html

 April 13, 2021
Feeling good out on the edge, are we?
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2021/04/feeling-good-out-on-edge-are-we.html

April 1, 2021
My paper chase; all for a view of the big picture!
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-paper-chase-all-for-view-of-big.html

Buckle-Up:

April 18, 2021
A time to weep and a time to laugh; Colorado experienced it all!
https://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-time-to-weep-and-time-to-laugh.html

April 26, 2021
Fourth post to NASA Speed News; that joy that comes from making new friends!
https://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2021/04/fourth-post-to-nasa-speed-news-that-joy.html

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC