Social Media Round-Up

Last month I asked the question – how many blogs do you read on a regular basis. In part this question was fueled by the arrival of two new blogs that I am closely associated with but just as importantly, the question was asked to prompt feedback about where today’s NonStop community members turn to for interaction with other members of the NonStop community. As more and more publications are becoming digital and as the realization dawns on many publishing houses that it is becoming way too expensive to continue to print, I suspect that many members of the NonStop community have windows open all the time on their desktops that are dedicated to current affairs, be that newsfeeds or opinion columns. As it turns out, in the digital world, publications can include as many opinion columns as they like, without restriction, pro and con on any topic and yes, meaningful or fanciful.

For the NonStop community, it is good to see how effective a communications vehicle the digital form of the community’s publication, The Connection, has become. I keep copies of each issue of The Connection as it arrives in the mail but for the most part, as soon as I see the digital version announced, I turn to the Connect Community web site to check it out. The current issue was a particularly good one and the article that really caught my attention was that authored by HPE NonStop Product Manager, Prashanth Kamath U, “HPE NonStop takes new strides in its journey through the cloud.” What stood out for me wasn’t just the basic storyline of clouds but how Prashanth raised the topic of virtualization, it’s upcoming support of VMware and perhaps most important of all, the contribution these recent developments in support of virtualization and clouds plays so well with the bigger HPE message of transformation to hybrid IT. Yes, NonStop can now fulfil an important role in hybrid IT: “You now have a choice to deploy your Mission –Critical workload in the HPE Integrity servers, the traditional method of NonStop computing, or in your private cloud built using your choice of hardware managed using the paradigm of cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Two items from the above statement are worth mentioning as they fueled discussions on LinkedIn groups even as they influenced subsequent blog posts that will shortly be published on the NonStop community blog, Real Time View. They will also make an important contribution to articles being written for the May- June, 2018, issue of The Connection where the theme will be virtualization. The two items are choice of traditional versus virtual (cloud) and using your choice of hardware. Imagine just a few years ago how radical it would be to even suggest that you could obtain a license for NonStop to run virtual, on hardware you sourced from another vendor.

It’s a poorly kept secret that for years Dell relied upon NonStop to support the ordering of new Dell PCs and Laptops. Call into Dell’s sales organization and that call would pass through at least one NonStop system. This infrastructure was developed well before Compaq and later, HPE, became involved with NonStop and even as Dell upgraded from one system to the next, it made sure the Tandem chevron was always visible on the systems. Imagine today, if a big vendor like Dell could continue to run NonStop (and yes, my understanding is that there are still NonStop applications remaining albeit of lesser importance than in the past) on its own x86 servers? Imagine every Dell server sale to an enterprise could leverage Dell for a working NonStop platform?

Far fetched? Probably, but all the same, tantalizingly real as a short time ago I had discussions with a former Dell executive who relished the prospect of being able to compete with HPE on a level playing field. With NonStop! More importantly, there are many sites I have come across that will only buy a platform if the hardware can be sourced from multiple vendors. Ultimately, the label on the hardware will become meaningless in the darkened corridors lined with server racks in a server farm deployed at a lights-out facility in some remote part of the world. It’s still running NonStop, right? If you are interested in where this conversation is heading and with no disrespect to HPE and the HPE NonStop team, mind you, it has covered a lot of ground then check out the LinkedIn group, Fools for NonStop and join the discussion The case for do-it-yourself, Tandem!

Once again, as I look around the various social media channels, the opinions expressed here are totally all mine and do not reflect on any known programs of HPE NonStop. As such they are speculative but even so, just reading the latest issue of The Connection and digging into the storylines it contains, much can be ruminated upon that is productive – the big question that remains open across the NonStop vendor community is how to best leverage virtualized NonStop, particularly when it comes to the new NonStop Dynamic Capacity (NSDC) capabilities, but I will leave more on that topic for another column … just keep reading those blog posts where you will hear about NonStop first!

And with that, I sure hope I see some of you next month as I will be heading to GTUG where, like you, I hope to hear even more about NonStop’s contribution to hybrid IT and of the choices being made by members of the NonStop user community!
@RichardKBuckle