Social Media Round-Up [March 2020]

How do I work this?

It may not be a big number – and yes, it continues to grow – but when you get 675+ views of a post to LinkedIn that’s squarely aimed at the NonStop community, it still comes as a pleasant surprise. And to everyone who viewed this update – many thanks. This post was a promotional, supporting another post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View – Where are we headed: Looking back over half a century!

If you missed the reference to lines in the song, Once in a lifetime, then it’s worth repeating:

And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?

This led me to return to the LinkedIn post to add a couple more lines from that song:

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?

You may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?

And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?

Letting the days go by (same as it ever was)

Now this is neither a promotion nor an endorsement of the lyricist or indeed the group that made this song famous, but rather I wanted to reflect on a couple of key points. In this day and age when everyone is hunkered down, weathering the pandemic storm that rages all around us, then how do I work this? Where does this journey go? And of course it will leave many of us to wonder, am I right or am I wrong?

It may be too simplistic a response to say that the journey to commoditization and open source comes with unintended consequences. It’s also too simplistic to say that IT is on its own journey to where everything will be free. We have already written that the cost of a processor is headed to zero (in relative terms) and terabytes of storage are being given away by exhibitors at major events. Unintended consequences? We are forgetting our true mission within IT; providing reliability, predictability and a level of stability that allows business to prosper. And, doing so, with an eye on security and recoverability!

How do I work this? I am directing this question to the NonStop community specifically. Context here is that in other exchanges on social media outlets, responses continue to focus on NonStop being expensive when, in reality, the priority should be on business outcomes. Many years ago I wrote a research note for the NonStop team that looked at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of NonStop. The results surprised many and as old as this research note now is, (it was published in November, 2014), you may still want to take a look at –  https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/getpdf.aspx/4AA4-1519ENW.pdf

For many years it was reference in PowerPoint presentations given by the NonStop team and for good reason. When you total up the initial purchase price, the software stack and all the tools and utilities that contribute to the ease of managing NonStop in production environments supporting mission-critical applications, NonStop still has no peer. Making maters even better? You can now turn at NonStop your commodity and open source tools used to support development and deployment on other systems. In case you missed this publication as well, you may want to take a look at –

Modernizing the development world of NonStop applications,

Posted by Karen Copeland, Manager, Worldwide HPE NonStop Product Management, it is an up to the minute accurate portrayal of “just how far NonStop has come with respect to ease of programming.” In so doing, it further reduces the overall TCO in ways not everyone in IT anticipated occurring with NonStop –

What may also surprise CIOs is how DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins can be used to develop applications even as NonStop developers directly interface with products like Ansible. What may surprise IT management even more is that there are NonStop engineers that today use GitHUB, Jenkins, Ansible and other open source tools for DevOps to deliver many new offerings for the NonStop platform.

Returning to how do I work this? The simple answer is well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore – use the tools you have and have been trained to depend on for implementation on any other system. NonStop will look after the rest for you to deliver truly 24 x 7 support for all of you mission critical solutions. And if this comes as a surprise to you, but you do want to know more, check back with any NonStop team member and remember, keep checking social media channels whichever ones you prefer as content on NonStop will continue to be provided this year.

We may indeed be all hunkered down for the time being but at least we do know where the highway will go … and please, look for the latest post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time view where you will read more on this topic in the post, NonStop – it’s all about trust and track record!