Pyalla Technologies … NonStop’s initiatives continue to help it meet your new business needs!

As you read this month’s update it will be only a matter of days before we head out to Edinburgh for the ETBC hosted by BITUG. We are really looking forward to catching up with many of you and I know that the organizers will have done a great job to ensure the content provided during the event is topical and holds our interest. As for the social program, I am sure that there will be plenty of opportunities to taste the local whisky.

Naturally enough, I am expecting that there will be considerable interest in the NonStop product roadmap updates and of course, there will be as much interest in the business side of NonStop – new logos, new applications and solutions and yes, new partners are always a highlight of any HPE presentation on NonStop.

Events such as ETBC are a time to check the pulse of NonStop. When you listen to the messages coming from HPE it continues to be all about simplifying the transformation to Hybrid IT. In so doing, HPE highlights the cost of maintaining legacy infrastructure – a loose term that covers a multitude of sins. And products! In many respects we are still just coming out from under the technology hangover created as enterprise pursued “best of breed” deployments over the past two decades.

As HPE tells the story now, these enterprises are struggling to stay on top of their IT deployments that have become a complicated mix of point products. The many management tools in place and the layers of personnel tasked with the oversight of sprawling data centers are simply further costs that continue to burden the enterprise.

However, it begs the question – is NonStop addressing this problem? Or is the message more about NonStop being part of legacy infrastructure? More relevant perhaps is the bigger question – which NonStop are we talking about? By this, it’s all rather easy to break down today’s NonStop into separate traditional NonStop systems and the more futuristic, virtualized NonStop systems.

The enterprises NonStop has served for decades have moved slowly and for most of them, knowing there is a better price performance option becoming available, is more or less business as usual and can be planned for with little to worry about. Take the old box to the loading dock and bring inside the new box just delivered! However, there are enterprises NonStop has been serving for as long as it has been around that are not growing and therein lays the real challenge for NonStop and for HPE.

The virtualized NonStop has the potential to find a place in the new world of software-defined everything. Whether you are taking a look at HPE products like SimpliVity or Synergy, you know that HPE is pulling out all the stops to make the oversight of the data center less costly, less human intensive and yes, less dependent upon point products. The upside of having a software-defined everything world is that even your infrastructure is software-defined.

Clicking on icons, moving between pull-down lists and checking off entries in schedules is a lot easier to accomplish than developing scripts and it is something that HPE is addressing on many levels. Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a small provincial bank, there will be something from HPE that makes the task of managing IT a whole lot simpler.

For NonStop to truly experience the type of growth that was once so visible across the globe, NonStop has to become part of the new world of IT. One that is based on industry standard hardware, features inexpensive commodity components and yes, supports modern development environments capable of being managed by well-known management tools. And guess what? NonStop is almost there today – in case you missed it, even with traditional NonStop all of the above can be stated. Add in virtualized NonStop with its support of industry-leading VMware, and you have all the ingredients for a very easy way to add NonStop to practically any solution you wish to deploy.

However, is there still a catch? Has the rest of the world cornered NonStop and roped it off as just an example of an old-school fault tolerant system? Worse; is fault tolerance now outdated when compared to cluster technologies? The short answer is no to all of this with the exception that we can all appreciate how good a job NonStop competitors continue to do to further isolate NonStop from the mainstream.

And this is what makes the upcoming ETBC event with its NonStop product roadmap presentations so interesting, as tucked away within the PowerPoint slides will be a couple of bullet points that highlight just how NonStop is moving to becoming a part of the software-defined everything initiative. Furthermore, I am expecting to hear more about the efforts being put into ensuring availability and fault tolerance are refreshed such that they break out of the box others are trying to put NonStop back into – should prove interesting and indeed enlightening to hear about the efforts HPE is putting into promotion of their most important mission critical system of all!

See you all at ETBC and yes, look for my presentation on Tuesday immediately after lunch where I will be taking a fresh look at NTI and its DRNet® expanded product set.

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC