Social Media Round-Up [February, 2019]

When was the last time you went to the HPE web site and looked for updates on HPE NonStop products? Is this something you do routinely or is it mostly on an exception basis, when time permits? I am often taken aback when members of the NonStop community remark how little time they spend checking out what’s happening with NonStop on any “official” basis and by that, I mean checking directly with HPE sources as compared to the time spent on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. These sites are very good when it comes to interacting with the NonStop community, I have to admit, and if you want to know where individual executives just happen to be at this moment, you can always find a happy-snap of them in front of London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, or the New York city skyline.

However, the HPE web site is still a great source for information about the bigger HPE as well as NonStop itself. Of late, I have been spending more time paging through the HPE web site to see what is happening with NonStop X and with virtualized NonStop. There will be several upcoming RUG events, some of which have already wrapped-up, where the topic of NonStop successes will be a much talked-about topic as 2019 is the year of delivery! Or perhaps the year of integration! Or even the year of DataBase as a Service. And what about NS SQL being fine-tuned to run in an optimized manner on the new Memory-Driven Compute fabric?

I would like to start with the HPE and check out the full Mission Critical Systems (MCS) portfolio – when was the last time you actually took a look at all the products that contribute to the success of this unit within the greater Hybrid IT organization? For starters, you will find HPE Integrity NonStop, HPE Integrity with HP-UX and HPE OpenVMS Operating System. As for these last two product offerings, OpenVMS is a pure software play and one where partners anchor the sales and upgrade efforts whereas HP-UX is still all about support for the HPE flavor of Unix, but I have to say digging down one layer to find HP-UX given the title Stay Always-On HPE Integrity servers and HP-UX 11i v3 Ummm, should unsettle a few members of the NonStop community, but given how HPE didn’t port either OpenVMS or HP-UX to the Intel x86 architecture, these last two products appeal only to a few diehard organizations that are technology outliers.

Which is not the case for NonStop and you see the efforts HPE is mounting in support of memory-drive computing (as is now beginning to appear with Superdome Flex), high performance computing (following SGI / Cray integration and the MC999 X) and yes, regular Superdome X and Integrity NonStop. It’s a broad portfolio but as you look more closely at the servers themselves you will see far more reference to software indeed, SAP HANA is part of the MCS product portfolio, but when you look at what complete systems HPE MCS provides today it’s only x86 servers running either Linux or NonStop (and yes, perhaps VMware). Itanium is being phased out and with it, your choices will firm up on Linux and NonStop even more and is that necessarily a bad thing? OpenVMS; HP-UX – awkward!

Now take a look at the NonStop Server page and – View NonStop Solutions Video It’s all about HPE NonStop Solutions – Always on and always adapting. NonStop; the infrastructure of the planet! Yes, HP-UX may profess staying “Always on” but the inclusion of “Always adapting” is pure NonStop and should resonate well with the NonStop community. After all, you want to be assured the investment in the world’s best fault tolerant systems continues well into the 2020s. And it will … just watch the video and make sure you share with as many folks as you can. This video was first shown at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) late last year but it was only a short time ago that the video – and yes, it features one of our favorite NonStop product manager (of oooh and aaah, fame) Mark Pollans – was uploaded to the HPE web site.

One last item from social media channels and this time, it’s a post by HP Inc. that caught my attention. It was an update promoting a post to the HP web site, How startups and established corporations are joining forces – The whole is greater than the sum of its parts It wasn’t the title so much that had me digging deeper into the post as it was the opening lines of the post – “Here at HP, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Both corporate giants and small startups have one challenge in common: how to stay ahead of change.” Read a little more of this post of November 19, 2018, by Andrew Bolwell, Chief Disrupter at HP, and you will also come across – “Is it any wonder that, at times, we all feel a bit frazzled? We spend hours pondering how we can stay ahead of this change instead of being led by it. Even if we could predict the future perfectly (which, of course, we can’t), we need to be willing to reinvent ourselves continuously as all of this change in our world occurs.”

Closer to home perhaps comes the observation that is even more relevant considering the conversations taking place across the NonStop community – “In the banking industry, online companies are taking to partnering with traditional banking institutions. Online personal finance company, SoFi, is planning to roll out bank accounts and debit cards in a bundle … While customers will be dealing with SoFi on the front end, the primary banking services are responsibilities of WSFS Bank, a Delaware-based community bank. The partnership with SoFi is a win-win for WSFS due to the possibilities of building new technology into their own culture and processes.”

Which brings me back to the tag line for HPE NonStop described earlier (and because we cannot predict the future and time when change will happen) as yes, HPE NonStop is always on and always adapting. Adapting throws aside any association with rigidity or inflexibility – and isn’t that what everyone in the NonStop community wants to hear? NonStop may have made the cut in terms of ports to x86 but it really is only the beginning. Ooooh and yes, aaaah; seems more than appropriate for these times, now doesn’t it!

@RichardKBuckle
#HPEblogger
#NonStopRocks