Social Media Round-Up [May 2020]

HPE Newsroom –

It is in these times that we look to our leaders to step forward and set an example to us all. In case you missed the posts on Twitter and on LinkedIn (or came across the press release in the HPE newsroom), this is exactly what HPE CEO Antonio Neri did only a few days ago. Under the heading of Building a more equitable, inclusive world starts here Neri makes it very clear to the greater HPE community that:

“Everyone deserves to live free of oppression and racism. We must use this moment to take a stand, to speak up on inclusion and to advocate for equity.”

It wasn’t all talk either as HPE hosted a number of meetings in order to listen to colleagues and came up with four main focus areas:

Inclusion: We must improve in building an inclusive environment at HPE. One important element is helping our managers become more inclusive leaders and get more comfortable having conversations around race and discrimination.

Equity: As we strive to create and foster a corporate environment that provides equal opportunities for all of our team members, we need to ensure equity in all our people processes and programs.

Advocacy: We all must be advocates for change. We must continually listen and learn so we can be the best allies possible for our black and African American colleagues and for all of our team members whose voices are underrepresented.

Community: We must ensure we’re giving our time and resources to diverse communities to help advance education, as well as to address issues of racism that continue to plague our society. 

Following the many posts and reposts as well as looking at the comments made, it’s clear that from Neri’s perspective that this is just the start of a period of action on the part of HPE. “We’ve made commitments that will serve as the beginning of real and impactful change,” posted Neri.

Anticipate reading more from Neri on this topic as from next week, HPE “will publish our Living Progress Report, in which we will share our diversity representation figures.”

This is coming too at a time when the COVID-19 global pandemic is still very much on all our minds and it must be said that posts and commentaries continue to come from HPE as the company, its customers and supporting ecosystem continue to work through the difficult times even as there is still no clear view of what the future holds. While we are almost all exclusively working from home, when it comes to NonStop it is encouraging to see the many social media channels being tapped to better communicate all that is happening around us.

LinkedIn –

Two interesting LinkedIn posts that attracted attention are worth mentioning at this time. The first involves IBM while the other highlights statements coming from Suse.

Before getting to one of the exchanges involving IBM, remember that just a short time ago the IBM cloud went down, experiencing a prolonged outage as was reported in the press. The significance of this untimely outage is that it came only days after IBM Cloud published a paper about ensuring zero downtime in April, also suffered a minor outage in its Dallas data center in March. Two separate outages, as it turns out at a time when IBM was assuring their cloud users that IBM was promising zero downtime. Check the story:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/09/ibm-cloud-suffers-prolonged-outage/

So what was the IBM post to LinkedIn all about? How about an update promoting “Mainframes: The cloud before the cloud” that just had to be the real deal as you could go online to order the tee shirt:

Oh for the days when every marketing campaign at Tandem Computers was only legit once the tee shirt was made public!

Of course, I couldn’t let that go unchallenged and this is the first part of what we all need to do. Never let any statement by competitors go unchallenged so if you want to join the exchange, for those who follow me on LinkedIn, look for the post by Bob Thomas of Mainframe Journal fame.

Imagine IBM talking up big the potential to run clouds on mainframe coming out at the same time as the IBM cloud took a big hit that humbled their marketing efforts. However, that isn’t all that happened on the web. How many of you were aware that Suse now supports Nonstop IT?

If you missed the news, according to the Suse web site, you can Reduce Planned and Unplanned Downtime through Nonstop IT. Furthermore, you can become a Nonstop IT shop simply by deploying Suse Linux. If you want to be part of the conversation on this topic, then join the LinkedIn group, Fools for NonStop.

According to Suse marketing, “Nonstop IT means minimizing downtime and mitigating the associated risks by planning ahead and implementing the proper technologies and procedures to provide constant availability of your systems and data. Constant availability can be your competitive advantage. This approach to providing Nonstop IT requires realizing that while things will inevitably break, downtime doesn’t have to affect your users.”

After years of writing about high availability, continuous availability and even dabbling with permanent availability, Suse has come out with constant availability. All of which is to say, as a  community focused on NonStop we need to be always on our guard whenever we see attempts at diluting the value proposition of the brand, NonStop. Yes, Suse dropped the capital S, resisting doing so as they fly close to the wind with Nonstop but for us, this still isn’t good enough. Without being challenged then it really does become a slippery slope down which we all might slide.

And finally, since we are on the topic, here’s a recent cartoon brought to by the cloud: