Pyalla Technologies looking forward to NonStop Technical Boot Camp

The upcoming NonStop technical Boot Camp is looming large on the calendar with only days to go before the NonStop community gathers in northern California – this time, it will be closer to San Francisco, a location many within the NonStop community have been lobbying for through the decades, dating back to early ITUG Summits when the focal point had been San Jose.  However, holding this event in nearby Burlingame in the San Francisco airport Hyatt hotel not only makes it more convenient for our international friends but also brings the event a lot closer to Palo Alto and the headquarters for HPE.

This year both Margo and I will be active in the space set aside for vendors – not completely sure how well this area will be integrated with meeting rooms and the dining areas but we will just have to wait. Following many years where Margo has been fronting the registration desk, she will be joining me as a vendor. While I will be part of the Striim team, Margo will hopefully be more visible than in the past as she works to promote our new endeavor, the digital publication NonStop Insider. Did you see the terrific job she did last month in pulling together some twenty submissions? As I watched her working email, lobbying NonStop vendors and consultants for even more articles, you could really tell that she was back doing what she really loves to do – work with people while remaining a staunch supporter for all things NonStop.

Pyalla Technologies, LLC., celebrated its eighth birthday just a few weeks ago and the response on sites like LinkedIn were encouraging – we have definitely created a brand with Pyalla and there are a lot of folks who now know that Pyalla is quite different from Paella. Not that we don’t like good Paella, but let’s put the rice aside for a moment. Pyalla is all about conversations, discussions and pursuing a fruitful dialogue with someone with whom we share interests and looking back over the eight years, we couldn’t have come up with a better name for the business. Yes, we are consultants but equally importantly, we provide opinions and analysis even as we welcome feedback from all of you. Again, taking LinkedIn as just one example, there isn’t a day that passes when some member of the NonStop community doesn’t comment about something we have written. Expressed as simply as we can – these comments are what keep us going and they do influence the posts and commentaries that follow.

After a small break over the summer, you will begin to see more of our submissions to banking and payments publications once again. If you are in payments and haven’t checked out the sites for both ATMmarketplace and BankingTech, you probably should find time to do so. Shortly, ATMmarketplace, for instance, will publish my one hundredth post and as for Banking Tech, they pick up every second or third feature and include it in their hardcopy high-quality magazine. These publications aren’t directly tied to NonStop and there have been times when the editors of these publications have pushed back on my pro-NonStop stance but these sites and publications reach a much larger audience than more traditional publications so it is important that we keep the NonStop flag waving whenever the opportunity presents itself.

This upcoming TBC is going to hold surprises. I have no doubts about that at all. For each of the past four years there have been surprises, starting with the news that NonStop was being ported to the Intel x86 architecture. NonStop X now dominates the conversation at most user sites as plans firm up for migrations away from Itanium to x86. What I am anticipating is further news on just how NonStop customers have migrated to x86 as it really is in everyone’s interest to keep track of the score – if we have as yet not made hard and fast plans to migrate to x86 then hearing about all those who have completed the migration without running into issues should certainly give us more confidence to proceed down a similar path. Then came news of HPE IT deploying NonStop X systems which in turn slipped from our conscience as we heard of the even bigger news – NonStop was going to support not just traditional systems including NonStop X but was going to support virtual machines. Virtualized NonStop (vNS) was on its way and when all those present at last year’s TBC got to see vNS running on just a couple of ProLiant servers connected via Ethernet with RoCE support, we realized that the earth had indeed shifted on its axis!

What can we expect to hear this year? With so much news coming from HPE that populates headlines of many publications, it would be good if we heard a lot more about NEXT and whether NonStop in one form or another was going to make a contribution to the major initiatives of simplifying hybrid IT as well as empowering the intelligent Edge. It is still far too early to speculate on either of these but all things considered, I sure hope we see some movement by NonStop to become a better HPE corporate citizen and be seen to be a part of the efforts toward where HPE is headed. Out there somewhere remains The Machine and after talking with HP Labs Chief Architect, Kirk Bresniker, at this year’s HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, there is nothing that I can point to that shines a light on NonStop’s participation in any of the above but then, it’s still very early days so fingers crossed.

We may hear a lot more and yes, surprises could still be just around the corner but the only way we will know for sure is if we beat a path to Burlingame and participate in this year’s TBC. As for Margo and me we will be there so hopefully, we will see many of you but if we pass you by without saying “Hi!” then make sure you stop us and let us know what thoughts you may have on HPE and NonStop as we are always open to all your ideas. So, safe travels and see you at the Hyatt!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC