Pyalla Technologies …the news from NonStop vendors is that their customers are migrating to NonStop X, and more

These past couple of weeks we have been focused on our clients. Each of them is mulling over development plans. Each of them is trying to come to terms with a changing NonStop landscape. Despite the best efforts of HPE to bring NonStop X and virtualized NonStop (vNS) to market, it is clear that the NonStop user community is exercising a healthy degree of caution. Looking back it’s hard to believe that NonStop X systems were first introduced to the NonStop community in 2013 – see our post of November 4, 2013, to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, The real deal – NonStop supports x86!. The vNS was first discussed publically at the Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, and covered in our post of March 7, 2016, to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, Covering all points on the compass, NonStop is hard to miss!So really, it’s all happened rather quickly when you think about it!

From the discussions we have had with our clients, the take-up NonStop X systems has now begun in earnest and in North America some of the biggest NonStop users are pulling plans together and have begun testing in earnest. New NonStop X systems will begin shipping and deployments should begin shortly. By the end of the HPE’s financial Q4 we are expecting to hear of how many of the biggest NonStop users have NonStop X deployments in production, which will be good news for all members of the NonStop community.

We saw for ourselves our first NonStop NS7 X1 system just a week or so ago and it was up and running in support of one of our newest clients. The client was happy to show us and to highlight how little of the chassis was occupied by the processors themselves – the CLIMs / Proliants still look a lot bigger than the processors which is like saying the transmission looks much bigger than the engine! However, in reality, the CLIM solution is now working well for NonStop customers and even as the generations of Proliant change, how best to configure and deploy CLIMs is now a lot better understood and we are not hearing as many bad stories about them as we did in the past.

The story of NonStop, however, isn’t limited to the NonStop system roadmap. When we first heard the news that NonStop was becoming a software solution having cut its ties to the hardware it ran on, like many we were skeptical about how this would play with the NonStop community. NonStop X systems are unlike any NonStop systems that have come before them as there is no specialized or customized technology residing in the chassis – it’s all off-the-shelf commodity components. Commoditization and reliance on industry standard hardware underneath the NonStop OS and supporting open source stacks and middleware on top, comes as a surprise to many of the NonStop faithful, but it all works and opens NonStop to supporting new applications. CIOs may have counted NonStop out of the game a decade ago, but no longer – any enterprise that has standardized on the Intel x86 architecture now has the option to run fault tolerance configurations of x86 in support of mission critical applications that can run 24 x 7!

This has become the theme of our presentations and conversations with our clients – what are you working on to better exploit the new business opportunities that HPE is lining up with NonStop as a software offering? Whether running on the x86 servers HPE packages as NonStop X servers or on virtual machines, either provided by HPE (NS2) or on anyone’s x86 servers, the potential for generating new business for every participant in the NonStop ecosystem is becoming pretty obvious. When you see the faces of the CEOs of vendors who have worked with NonStop for decades suddenly light up with an understanding of new business opportunities this NonStop will generate, you get a real sense that they “get it” and it’s really great to see! And we have been a witness to such occurrences more than once these past couple of weeks.

What’s really changing for NonStop is the recognition by the vendor community that with the new NonStop – everything being migrated to, or developed for, the NonStop L-Series operating system can be run anywhere NonStop can run, traditional or virtual – it will create new opportunities to grow their business. Talk to anyone who has returned from the recent RUG events in Asia, for instance, and you will hear of how there is a big uptick of interest in all things NonStop and yes, talk to solutions vendors in Europe, as we are right now, who are porting their applications to NonStop for the first time and yes, it’s hard to ignore the rebirth of NonStop that HPE is witnessing today!

No, NonStop didn’t go away nor did the enthusiasm for all things NonStop die with the passage of time. What we are seeing though is that the investments HPE has made in NonStop are sending a very positive message into the marketplace – NonStop can run your business 24 x 7! And there is no mistaking how well this message is being received when you get the chance to sit down and talk with the CEOs of NonStop vendors, as we have been doing of late, and hearing from them directly about how the enthusiasm for building solutions for NonStop users has been rekindled anew. And for the NonStop community this has to be the best possible news of all! #NonStopRocks!!!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC