When standing still is not an option for Nonstop customers

TCM: When standing still is not
an option for Nonstop customers

“The customer is always right!” Or better still, when it comes to business, “we are customer driven!” When customers begin to look like thistle seeds, blown this way and that, unrestrained by connections that tether them to solid ground, being impacted by the slightest change in the direction of the wind, it’s their unpredictable paths that allow them to travel far. Their fluffy, parachute-like structures dispersing their seeds. Not always finding fertile ground as many fall by the wayside.

Our IT industry is liberally populated by such technology providers who have oftentimes fared poorly, impetuous-enough to try tracking every whim and developing fad while trying the best to please their customers. They may indeed be customer driven, but then again, the customers they serve can cover a multitude of sins. We might be doing so much for the customer, with the services we provide, but their demands need to be balanced against the goals of the enterprise that IT serves. Perhaps it’s time to look at IT where the definition of customer includes our enterprise. In this case, do we always deliver on what the customer wants?

Of all the attributes we associate with IT, there is no greater attribute than availability. When it comes to what enterprises deploy in support of mission-critical applications, this is more so the case as the external presence on the enterprise may be negatively impacted. Operational IT that ceases to operate is little more than a thistle seed that has fallen on rocky outcrops unable to deliver on its promise of growth. At its core, an enterprise’s business operational availability is the enterprise’s most prized attribute.

The ability to continue to function, always ready to carry out its intended tasks when needed, in today’s online world represents the primary IT contribution to the success of the enterprise. In meeting the demands of customers, such tasks might include maintaining uptime 24 x 7, providing a source of reliable processing, as well as the ability to recover quickly whenever bad actors penetrate security defenses.

The challenge for IT is to never stand still. Doing nothing and hoping for the best has never proved to be a blueprint for success. When it comes to the IT organizations where Nonstop anchors their mission-critical transaction processing, nothing spells uncertainty more than a Nonstop application that cannot deliver results. Once the integrity of a Nonstop systems has been compromised there is no counting how many other bad actors might capitalize on a weakness uncovered through perseverance.

Availability, as the sole attribute, perhaps overlooks an equally important consideration, that being, the acquisition and deployment cost. Increasingly, TCM’s customers are looking for opportunities to run virtually, where virtual Nonstop (vNS) is attracting adherents. However, the costs associated with virtual machine deployment have of late climbed when vNS is deployed on VMWare. In pursuit of a more cost-effective move to virtualization, TCM has invested in alternative open-source options and became the first Nonstop vendor to deploy vNS on a KVM derivative – open-source Proxmox. If you have accessed ITUGLIB of late, you might like to know it now runs on vNS supported by Proxmox.

“In the world of mission-critical computing, ‘standing still’ was never an option,” said TCMs Andy Vasey. As we move into 2026, the landscape of high-availability infrastructure has seen a general shift away from traditional, reactive maintenance toward a model of proactive business partnership. Driven in part to protect the availability of Nonstop applications, it is also being driven by programs chosen for cost-effectiveness even as they are being designed to be more system-wide resilient. Where once it was simply a case of ensuring recovery following disasters, it’s now more a case of moving rapidly to better protect and if needed recover from overt acts of bad actors – a situation rapidly accelerating with the entrance of state-sponsored intrusions.”

Resilience may conjure up many scenarios needing to be addressed. There is perhaps no more frightening situation than becoming embroiled in a “Ransomware Attack.” What to do? How badly is our application effected? Who can we turn to for help? Recovery from such attacks isn’t a straightforward, “press the recover key,” possibility. For Nonstop customers, pressing the recover key most likely will require synchronizing the execution of multiple infrastructure products.

“No one vendor today has the all-encompassing tool guaranteeing resilience of your Nonstop applications,” said Andy Vasey. “Just as importantly, within each category there may be multiple vendors present. So, it’s not just a case of not standing still, but rather, coming to terms that a Nonstop customer may have deployed a mix of infrastructure that differs significantly from their peers.” Nevertheless, as a Managed Services provider, TCM is among the very few Nonstop vendors that have accumulated knowledge over multiple mixed-infrastructure deployments.

If you have attended a Nonstop conference or event in 2025 you will have seen the variety of vendors, all championing solutions for business resilience. There are backup solutions, multiple security offerings and a choice of disaster/recovery solutions. Monitoring too has been well served by the Nonstop vendor community. Taken at face-value, this means that almost no two Nonstop customers will have exactly the same middleware in place to ensure resilience can be maintained. It then is the accumulated knowledge retained and shared among TCM team members that affords the Nonstop community the insights that can respond readily to that ever-present inquiry, “Is the system up?”

Today, TCM is seeing that even with the most robust of disaster/recovery solutions in place, bad actors penetrating an enterprise operational IT presence that includes Nonstop might mandate a full restoration of Nonstop software stack, including the applications. Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) was a common theme in 2024 through to 2025, on reflection, it would seem BMR has dropped off the radar. “We can confirm, BMR recovery is an ongoing concern and something that here at TCM, team members are actively looking at solutions that can be tailored to a Nonstop customers’ needs,” said Andy Vasey.

To this extent, TCM is not standing still when it comes to business resilience. This is an arena in which the goal posts are constantly shifting. It’s as though the potential opportunities to weaken resilience either for profit or simply as means to embarrass, potentially damaging an enterprises’ reputation, almost certainly guarantees continued attacks. Whether it is a simple case of restoration from a D/R site running active-active replication, to a rebuild of a data base from a back up site or to a complete restoration from the bare metal upwards, TCM has the experience to identify the best way to capitalize on the software an enterprise may have already invested in; there’s no single solution, no recovery key to be pressed, and no script to be run!

It takes knowledge and for that, the TCM team brings to bear years of experience in what works best given the circumstances likely to be encountered. Call it situational awareness. Call it proactive oversight. However, you want to think about the software you need and the procedural steps that this will mandate, TCM can provide the guidance you need. Thistle seeds may indeed simply drift on wind currents, aimlessly and without any regards to where they are headed but the Nonstop customer can be assured, they have a purpose and a chosen direction should their resilience ever be challenged.

Should this be a topic that needs addressing at your enterprise and your solutions running on Nonstop systems need assessing for level of resilience, then pencil in these conference and event dates for 2026: Munich, April 14 – 16 for eGTUG – European Nonstop Symposium 2026 as well as Orlando, September 14 – 17 for Nonstop Technology and Business Conference 2026. It has become very clear to the TCM team that we have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to the future of resilience and the global vision for TCM, as your managed services provider, should be the first conversation to have whenever you see the presence of TCM anywhere in the world in 2026.

Should you need to reach out to us prior to these events occurring, you can always reach us at:

https://tcm.co.uk/contact/