2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
The HPE Corner
HPE is marching into 2018 and NonStop is marching in lockstep; deployment options for NonStop continue to flourish!
NonStop Insider
It is time to look ahead at what we can expect to see coming from HPE in support of NonStop. Who could have imagined what has happened to NonStop over such a short period of time, but here we are, starting afresh, and already there is a lot of speculation over what the future really holds for NonStop. At a time when industry pundits are simplifying models for us – it’s all about the cloud and the edge – and aggressively promoting a path to clouds via (yes, yet again, simplified) hybrid IT, there are a couple of surprise technologies beginning to make their presence felt. Autonomous data centers, AI and machine learning (and deep learning), and of course, AI that is doing a much better job than we can do writing new AI algorithms.
Add to this hyperloops and self-driving trucks and cars and yes, even self-navigating ships. Ride sharing and transportation apps. And all the while, we read of breakthroughs like robots that can do somersaults. Blockchain; distrusted immutable ledgers, and the “technology most likely to change the next decade of business is not the social web, big data, the cloud, robotics, or even artificial intelligence.” Business and consumers hyperconnected where everything computes! Or, to paraphrase HPE executives, business operating at the speed of you! And with everything that is coming from the industry and HPE, NonStop isn’t being overlooked. Arguably, NonStop brings with it key attributes that other systems are working overtime to aquire – if you want to simplify hybrid IT, it helps in having a fault tolerant, scale-out (near linearly, forever) deployable out of the box.
For the NonStop community, change has been coming at a breakneck pace – it’s almost as if there was a thirty month plan to turn NonStop on its head. And the good news is that the NonStop community isn’t being left behind. The NonStop community now has choices and you need to rewind the clock to the late 1980s and early 1990s where there were as many options for NonStop as we see today. A time when there were CLXs alongside VLXs and even Integrity S2 systems running NonStop UX. Today, we not only have two “personalities” to interface to the kernel, but the ability to continue running on Itanium chipsets, embrace the Intel x86 architecture or simply pull down a copy of the L-Series operating system and run on any commercial, off-the-shelf hardware based on x86 chips where access to RoCE is supported. Cool!
In last month’ column there was reference to the edge and cloud and no, as much as Gartner promotes the message that the edge will eat the cloud, drama aside, we will continue with retaining powerful centralized compute for at least the next decade or so. However, what is important is to begin considering just how powerful edge computing will become as more than half the data passing through the edge will be analyzed, filtered and essentially, vented into the ether. As part of the developing story behind virtualized NonStop (vNonStop), wherever there is a hypervisor capable of supporting virtualized NonStop workloads, there you will find opportunity to exploit the attributes of NonStop. As was stated in that column, HPE is introducing the community to NonStop and IoT for one very good reason and it should not be overlooked – NonStop can scale up (and down) as much as it can scale out – whether it’s on an edge product with two processors each with two cores or on a center product with sixteen processors, each with fourteen cores. And it will all be vNonStop. And it will be exactly the same vNonStop.
There is no discounting the potential upside value NonStop brings to any users’ storyline. Business and consumers are indeed hyperconnected where everything computes and it is becoming clear to analysts and users alike, breakages or compromises of any kind are simply unacceptable. The protection we provide the data center and cloud applies to the edge as well – both ends of the compute spectrum share the same requirements. So yes, as last month’s column observed in closing, looking ahead to what we can expect to see being prototyped during 2018 it is anticipated that we will see early adoption of vNonStop. However, don’t be surprised as to what is finally disclosed as being the target server for vNonStop as it may very well be out there, far from the center, thriving on the edge! Yes, it’s a very big message from HPE; NonStop is core and yes, NonStop is high value and yes, this is exactly what end users will be looking to deploy and for that, across HPE NonStop has no peers!