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Social Media Round-Up [September, 2019]
NonStop Insider
Dan
Social Media Round-Up [September, 2019]
There happens to be a common theme easily recognizable to every member of the NonStop community that has been making its presence known across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It has to do with looking at different NonStop and Tandem Computers over time – from the very first NonStop 1 to today’s NonStop X and yes, well into the future as well when it’s all virtualization and clouds.
What stands out most of all though is that the NonStop community is quite happy to discuss the history of NonStop even as it anticipates a lot more to come from HPE. At the very end of this article there is reference to a Blog as well – you may want to take a look at the complete post as you find time – are we welcoming XaaS? NonStop, as we have all read of late, is all about “Wont’ Stop” and in saying this, it’s also a relevant comment when it comes to the future of NonStop! Keep those new products coming …
From Facebook:
We are all familiar with the English language adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” In this case, we could also add that pictures tell thousands of stories. There is a group on Facebook simply called Tandem Computers – if as yet you haven’t joined this group and you do spend time on Facebook, you may want to consider joining. You will be among friends with lots of familiar names (and faces) routinely contributing to the rich fabric that is NonStop today.
Joe Yu, a member of this group posted this photo a little while ago. Can you name it? If not, that’s OK as it is truly a NonStop 1 – yes, that NS 1 that a lot of us knew existed but never saw. Initially it was called the Tandem/16 or simply the T/16. The picture Joe came up with was taken at the Hong Kong offices of Tandem Computers and it had to be the late 1970s, I suspect. As for programming NS 1 there was only one language at that time, Transaction Application Language (TAL).
Social Media channels attract all sorts of folks who use it to reconnect with past acquaintances but in this instance, Facebook proved to be a valuable resource when it came to looking back at the history of Tandem Computers. While it’s kind of fun to look back when it comes to what we have today with NonStop systems, it’s hard to believe the road that Tandem went down to finally deliver us the latest NonStop X systems and as I understand it, the road goes on forever (and yes, for Tandem folks, the party never ends!)
From LinkedIn:
What caught the attention of many of us was when this picture appeared on LinkedIn. It is of a newly installed NonStop X NS7 which you should be able to make out in the background – the foreground being a collection of cables and cords. Many years ago, Tandem Computers Product Manager, Roy Graham, had me and a group from development that did include our talented hardware engineer, Joe Castellano Sr. as well as Margo, who was heading comms and network development at the time.to travel down to Sydney, Australia. Our objective, as Roy saw it, was to take a look at whether we could develop a chord-less / connector-less Tandem Computer system – have everything communicating wirelessly. Finding someone doing research on very high bandwidth took us to Australia and to the government funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).
At that time, CSIRO was testing with 100Mb connections – pretty impressive at the time – but with the downside that every surface in the room became a mirror and there was as much technology needed to sort out what was real and what were reflections / echoes that we decided pursuing the solution any further wasn’t going to lead us anywhere. However, looking at the NonStop X NS7 above, it gave me pause to think that well, what if? If we had succeeded then it was Roy’s intention to offer a life-time warranty on all parts of any new Tandem Computer; cool! As an aside, shipments of NonStop X systems have accelerated of late and their installations across the planet are at an all-time high so we have been advised – just another statistic to watch for during NonStop management presentations at the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC).
From Twitter …
From a HPE tweet, in support of HPE Servers @HPE_Servers, depicting where we are headed given HPE’s overriding strategy to deliver everything as a service by 2022. Already we are reading about NSaaS, DBaaS, IaaS and Paas – but from the recent tweets, it seems that many within the HPE organization are taking a very bullish stance on where this will lead. Could it be that future NonStop offerings are simply nothing more than a virtual machine that will happily be ensconced in your infrastructure supporting your enterprises’ mission critical applications without any tangible evidence of their presence in the data center?
I suspect, that as they tell me so often science to the untrained eye is close to magic – yes “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and in this case, I believe that NonStop shortly will qualify to being magical. After all, it won’t stop and no, you won’t be able to see it! Magic? You better believe it! The future is evolving very quickly and where there is talk from HPE about technology being embedded everywhere, I am not aware of any specific reference to NonStop being included, so let’s just see – there is no telling where this might lead and yes, just another reason why you can’t afford to miss the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp event in Burlingame, California.
From Blogs …
As for blogs and in particular HPE’s position over the future direction of the company, there was an interesting post to the HPE community blog a week ago – The Land of Everything-as-a-Service. According to blogger, Jennifer Smith:
It started off with infrastructure-as-a-Service, progressed to Platform-as-a-Service, which in turn led to Software-as-a-Service. All of these -as-a-Services have opened the door to the ultimate service – one that captures everything. And I mean everything.
Everything-as-a-Service (which goes by the slightly scary name ‘XaaS’) models allow businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of technology giants’ expertise all on an ‘as and when you need it’ basis. Among the many advantages are knowing you’re using the very best technology at any given time (with automatic updates / maintenance), not having to attract/develop/retain internal resource, and being able to deploy new features – and launch new products and services – much faster.
All of which, of course saves money: as you pay only for what you use, costs align fairly and directly to your business.
If you want to check out the complete post and the hyperlink above doesn’t take you there then you can always cut and paste this url into your browser –
Thank you.
@RichardKBuckle
#HPEblogger
#NonStopRocks
#Fools4NonStop
