The HPE Corner – November

Will there be more surprises? It’s hard to say that there will not be any more surprises, but the real news will surround user deployments of much that has already been announced.

Vendor marketing events always attract a crowd. And when it comes to HPE throwing an event, there’s always an eager community willing and prepared to put aside daily routines to participate. The NonStop community is no exception and as the days count down to the start of the NonStop Technical Boot Camp nears zero, early registration numbers suggest that this will be a well-attended event. There are concerns though about just how much influence HPE will exert on the program, but then again, HPE’s messages are what most attendees want to hear anyway.

Expectations are running high on a couple of topics and so it’s worthwhile speculating about what we will hear and see. Expect more information about early adopters, with Proof of Concepts under way, in support of virtual NonStop (vNonStop). We have all heard that HPE IT is testing vNonStop and there have been numerous references to telco businesses also testing vNonStop but perhaps the bigger story may in fact be the uptick in development energy in support of VMware. While support of OpenStack (Linux / KVM) is admirable and is consistent with HPE’s support of all things open, when it comes to the commercial reality of what is deployed across the world’s data centers then it is far more likely for vNonStop to encounter VMware than KVM.

We will also hear a lot more about NSADI – the NonStop Application Direct Interface (formerly Yuma). It seems such a short time ago that we first heard of NSADI and yet, there will be a number of vendors providing update on their own exploitation of this fascinating technology. And in line with the uptick in development energy in support of VMware expect to see considerable progress being made to complement InfiniBand (IB) with RDMA over Converged Ethernet, particularly as vNonStop frees the user community from any further dependence on HPE hardware. While HPE anticipates the majority of vNonStop users will select systems from the ProLiant family of servers, this is no longer mandatory.

Finally, when it comes to software I am expecting to see NonStop SQL/MX take much of the limelight. Moving applications to NonStop has never been the problem as NonStop has had good support for all of the popular programming languages and frameworks. However, compatibility with popular Relational DataBase Management Systems (RDBMS) that SQL relies upon, has been a problem. But apparently, no longer, as the gloves have come off and HPE is funding NS SQL/MX to more aggressively take on Oracle.

So yes, even as expectations are running high, I have to believe at this year’s Boot Camp HPE NonStop is going to deliver! vNonStop running on VMware with Oracle compatibility – who would have guessed we would be discussing any of this, but then again, that’s why we attend the marketing events of major vendors like HPE. It’s where we can all hear the news first!