The moves that count

OzTUG Melbourne March 2024

For those who have been following us this year and viewed our posts on social media sites, you will know all too well that our changing circumstances have included moving house. Well, that’s all done for the most part even as the bigger question happens to be – where next? We have the condo but where will be our home? For those who have faced similar situations, chaotic as they may be at the time, this is not about a primary home together with a vacation home, but rather, recognition that having family in Colorado means that we will need to have a place close by to stay as we contemplate extended stays with children and the grandkids.

What this symbolized in many ways is how today we have separate IT requirements we categorize as being on the edge versus something more central. It is fundamentally an acknowledgement of the way our enterprises pursue business and the support they establish as part of their operational pursuits. We used to call it the Head Office versus Regional or District Offices. In fact, much of the history of IT is dedicated to providing the optimal solution to this dual deployment scenario. Remember how IBM provided the mainframe and then introduced a variety of what they called distributed computers. These included the 8100, the AS/400 and even the Series/1, not forgetting the baby mainframes that began shipping in the late 1980s.

This wasn’t a reflection upon the primary versus the vacation homes but rather, was driven initially by the high cost of communications. There was only so much bandwidth until quite recently but even so, the model remains. We may call it the edge versus the core, or cloud, or something else, but the model persists. In so doing, it lays down a challenge for the HPE NonStop community, particularly, NonStop development. Does NonStop continue to focus solely on the core or will a play develop where it becomes economical indeed, enticing to run NonStop out on the edge. There has always been another model that has influenced pricing and it’s a simply game of shifting orders of magnitude – price the core at a million, the remote or edge at a hundred thousand and the consumer device at a thousand.

Given that the models persist – then for NonStop to find a role at the edge, its pricing will be significantly below what we see today for solutions sold into the core. However, even as that challenge is addressed by the NonStop team, where does it leave the vendors? Can they create a working (i.e. profitable) business plan where software is licensed with a similar reduction in price – from millions and even hundreds of thousands to just a few thousand? The arrival of virtualized NonStop holds promise but can the NonStop vendor community thrive let alone survive in this marketplace?

A move in this direction by the NonStop community is ultimately inevitable. For many, even with the reduced pricing structure and a model that includes reduced functionality, I suspect the prospect of addressing a network of dozens, indeed hundreds, of edge deployments running virtualized NonStop may prove too tantalizing to resist. Therein lies the challenge for NonStop vendors. It may not be a case of adding more developers but the support could prove challenging. Rising to the occasion and growing rapidly as a result will be the numerous managed services providers focused on NonStop as this isn’t going to be the generalized, cookie-cutter, model preferred by the GreenLake team. It will be something entirely different.

For those who have attended recent NonStop RUG and Chapter events and have heard of plans from NonStop executives and their Product Managers, it will be hard to ignore the possibility of such a dichotomy of products tailored to the edge and the core. From supporting millions of transactions at the core to just a few thousand out at the edge bring with it different needs and throughout its fifty-year history, NonStop has always found a way to step up to meet these needs of the enterprise. We often discuss NonStop in the world of Hybrid IT, but there is nothing more pronounced than a hybrid world of NonStop at the core and the edge.

With the pan-European event in Berlin having taken place, did you leave with the same impression I left with? Look for further updates from this latest RUG event elsewhere in this publication.

Always intense; more often enjoyable; realistically, occasions where plans are formed.

Making the moves and having to face a new housing scenario always generates challenges. What logically belongs where and what to do with realistically sizing for each situation? Conditions may prove chaotic at some point before routine operations arise from the chaos. When it comes to IT all moves count – some moving us forward while others may prove to be a setback.  For the rest of 2024 this will be a theme that will be revisited on a regular basis and if you would like to read more about how this came about then you may want to check out the articles, posts and commentaries of the past two months all of which are referenced here:

Real Time View column (The Connection):

March – April, 2024
Scanning the horizon; looking for potential threats; relying on experience!
https://connect2nonstop.com/real-time-view-5/

Feature article (The Connection):

March – April, 2024
OzTUG knows how to pull together a program that captivates
https://connect2nonstop.com/oztug-knows-how-to-pull-together-a-program-that-captivates/

Real Time View blog:

February13, 2024
It’s that time again for My Three Wishes for NonStop.
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2024/02/its-that-time-again-for-my-three-wishes.html

March 22, 2024
When is vision all you see?
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2024/03/when-is-vision-all-you-see.html

Buckle-Up:

February 25, 2024
Could springtime be just around the corner?
https://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2024/02/could-springtime-be-just-around-corner.html

March 28, 2024
Moves, changes, multitasking …so what’s the future hold?
https://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2024/03/moves-changes-multitasking-so-whats.html

Follow me on LinkedIn and look for my regular commentaries on the industry, HPE NonStop and the community as I am now posting on a more regular basis.

rkbuckle@gmail.com

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC.