It’s Showtime! NonStop takes on Vegas!

With the 2013 HP Discover event only weeks away, even as many NonStop users remain undecided about their participation, I continue to rank participation highly! See you there …

This past weekend I overnighted briefly in Las Vegas. Business took me to Southern California for both, track time and client meetings. However, the impressive skyline of Las Vegas is hard to miss and it was easy to spot the Venetian and Palazzo hotels – the site for this year’s HP Discover event that will kick off in about a month’s time.

I have already spent several weekends in Las Vegas this year and the picture above, that I took a short time ago, is of the Bellagio fountains with the Paris hotel in the background – sites that are just a little further south along the famous Las Vegas strip. It was following the ITUG event of 2005 that a group of us rode motorcycles from San Jose back to Boulder, and the only regret I have to this day is that we didn’t avail ourselves of the opportunity to cruise the bikes down the strip, and of course that Margo could not make this trip!

However, when it comes to HP big tent events, I never have any regrets about taking time away from my daily routines to listen to what HP has to say. The stories that I write after the event often feature quotes from HP executives and for me, it’s just so important to hear them first hand, unfiltered, in context, and then to immerse myself in the discussions that almost immediately follow as we spill back out onto the exhibition floor.

Earlier in the week, I posted to the comForte Lounge blog site The future is moving fast … where I remarked on how I am never surprised by what transpires at big tent marketing events, like HP Discover, and I am never surprised to see familiar faces as I walk into sessions or onto the exhibition floor. Last year, I then added, I was pleased to see such tangible support for the NonStop platform clearly visible in technology presentations and product demonstrations and I am hopeful that once again, such tangible evidence is on show for all within HP to see. But will we enjoy a similar experience this year? Will NonStop be as visible as we all would like it to be?

Whenever I think of Vegas, I think of entertainment – the many shows that are on hand. Last year Yash Kapadia, CEO of OmniPayments Inc., entertained many of us at the Cirque du Soleil performance, Elvis. “The opportunities to network make HP Discover too important to miss,” Yash told me at the time. “As for the event this year, I hope to be able to convey to HP just how much success we have enjoyed from deploying on the NonStop system!” Coming back to the hotel after the performance by Cirque du Soleil I couldn’t help but wonder, how many folks within the HP community realize that NonStop continues to support some of the biggest casino operations or just how dependent the flow of money along the strip is on NonStop systems?

For many within the NonStop community, the big event for the year will be the NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp in San Jose, CA, on November 3-5, 2013, with perhaps many among the NonStop community electing to skip HP Discover. Scanning the program for the Vegas event doesn’t produce all that much NonStop-specific content. However, there’s more to these events that the keynotes and product sessions – just having an opportunity to catch up with senior HP executives makes participation worthwhile. When the curtain goes up for the first time then yes, it’s showtime for HP, but it’s also a showtime for NonStop.

Last year, three of the four examples in the opening presentation of customer usage of HP products made by HP CEO, Meg Whitman, featured well-known NonStop users and it triggered a lot of discussion amongst the attendees – anyone with knowledge of NonStop was only too happy to make all other attendees aware of this fact. Not the least being me, of course! In the moments immediately following this presentation I happened upon Mark Brayan, CEO of IR, and this fact hadn’t escaped him either.

A short time ago HP took the decision to reshuffle the organization once more, and this time, it directly affected the NonStop community. In a press release of April 29, 2013, “What used to be HP's Business Critical Systems (BCS) and Industry Standard Server (ISS) units are now one business called HP Servers. Mark Potter, formerly senior VP and general manager at ISS, will lead the combined server unit, also as senior VP and general manager … Products under this unit's wing will include HP's microservers called Moonshot, its ProLiant and BladeSystem x86 product families and the Integrity product line.”

For many reasons I laud this decision. As I recently expressed in a private email to my clients, I never did like the concept of there being an “Industry Standard” group where NonStop didn’t participate. It just made no sense, given all the commoditization that has occurred within NonStop! Of course, the obvious question that follows this announcement has to be how will this help NonStop? Will there be anything we regret with the demise of BCS?

I have spent a lot of time talking with the NonStop vendor community and there is no escaping the doubts surfacing over the take-up of NonStop among Global 1000 companies. However, I am not sure whether this is a communication issue or just a short-term pause – after all, the acceptance level of the NonStop BladeSystems has been extremely high across all GEOs. Perhaps these doubts about the success of NonStop have more to do with users coming to terms with just how much NonStop power they now have on tap and having business managers turning to them for support of further mission-critical applications. Ask any HP executive associated with servers, and they remain firmly bullish on the prospects for NonStop.

In the same press release of April 29, “HP also announced that it will align its two server businesses under a single leader to increase the speed of transformation of the server industry and drive profitable growth.” Will this alignment be enough to ensure a future for NonStop? After all, and for many years now, the mantra of NED was all about ensuring NonStop remained profitable, reiterating that without being profitable there will be little likelihood of any future for NonStop at all. From where I sit, I have to say, I think so!

HP Discover is now just a few weeks away and it will give HP the opportunity to showcase its products, its technology, and its new organizations. Catching up with HP executives is likely to prove imperative for many within the NonStop community. I will be busy, as will a number of my clients (I am sure Yash will not be alone promoting his success stories), but for those from the NonStop community who will participate – look for me in the Bloggers Lounge as I would welcome every opportunity to catch up with you. After all, it will be showtime and I wish all those planning on attending, safe travels!

(Keep on) walking the line!

In my lifetime I have walked away from very little so talk of auto manufacturers walking away from what made them famous is a message to all within the NonStop community – who has fallen out of love with NonStop?

 

According to a road test featuring the 2013 BMW 135is in the May 2013 issue of Road and Track, “The 1-Series is the last car that BMW engineered before the Germans, as a car-making culture, fell out of love with driving.” Of course, this really grabbed my attention so I kept on reading.

Was Road and Track simply taking liberties with the truth? Had they crossed the line and what about the mighty BMW M3, the envy of every car enthusiasts? It was late last year and I just couldn’t resist taking this picture. It happened outside our local Starbucks and yes, the police officer was sharing a joke with someone who had apparently stepped over the line. It was Halloween, of course, and the other party was a fellow police officer. However, for just a moment, it sure did grab my attention!

“The 3-series, which used to make so much more sense that the 1, is now a perfectly nice car that barely registers on the fun-to-drive scale,” Road and Track explained, before adding, “Like most German cars, it focuses too much on electronics and the eventuality of a driverless future. It errs toward isolation where BMWs have traditionally favored refinement and engagement.”

And then came the bombshell quote, “Most disturbing of all, Munich seems to have walked away from the very thing responsible for its success: the compact sports car. The 135is and the cars that came before it explain why BMW means more, to more enthusiasts, than any other brand.”

Two things strike me at this point. If you are still reading this post then you must be as much a car nut as I am, and if you want to read more about cars you should check out my social blog,

Buckle-Up-Travel. However, the more important observation is that, if you come this far into the story, what’s the connection to NonStop?

I am not an expert on tautology, even though over the years I have collected many apparent expressions that, for me, represent tautology, but a “driverless BMW” makes about as much sense as “giant shrimp” or even “user friendly”. I don’t want to appear disrespectful to all those readers that have bought a Toyota Camry over the years, but reducing the mighty BMW to be on par with the less-than-fun-to-drive Toyota makes little business sense to me.

About as much sense, when it comes to that, as a “general-purpose NonStop” system! Over the course of the past several years, I have written of how NonStop truly is HP’s halo product when it comes to the absolutely best server for processing mission-critical applications in real-time. The world’s soon-to-be 3 million ATMs handling more than 62 billion ATM cash withdrawals annually are a testament to just how well NonStop performs this task, as today, there’s hardly an AM cash transaction that doesn’t touch a NonStop system along the way.

I have also written of how NonStop is a niche product and that by definition, niches have little to do with the size of market opportunities (consider Apple, for instance) but rather allude to implementations a little outside the expected, or norm. A product that is much respected for its superior capabilities as anything else – and yes, I am ignoring the penchant of some marketing types to bracket niche with fashion or sports.

If you missed reading it, I commented in more detail about niches in the post of February 25, 2013, It’s yet another sign! in which I quoted WebAction’s Sami Akbay and OmniPayments Yash Kapadia who provided a couple of insightful observations. “Niche means distinct, specific, and distinguishable,” suggested Akbay, adding “niche doesn't have to mean small or dying.” This observation then drew the comment from Yash, “when it comes to the bigger picture of computers worldwide – then yes, NonStop is a niche … when it comes to a sub-market as big as payments, NonStop is the predominant player and this is a message not lost on solutions vendors.”

However, it’s the very presence NonStop has in key markets that makes NonStop special. It’s a potent system, slotted into a highly visible niche, and I am certain that HP has no illusions about the profile of NonStop customers dependent upon the system, Unlike BMW, I cannot see HP walking away from NonStop or relegating it to being just one of many servers in the HP product portfolio.

Of late, I have been somewhat preoccupied with documenting just how heterogeneous today’s data centers have become. Many could almost be categorized as technology museums – yes, I have been inside a number of US federal government facilities that clearly are border line museums and it’s not until you realize that they support pretty significant and highly important national infrastructure operations that you inhale rather noticeably.

With heterogeneous data centers, where an element of specialization can be readily recognized – there’s the IBM mainframe, the Teradata data warehouse, the private Linux Cloud, housing web and application servers, and the NonStop server supporting the network 24 X 7 – it’s less likely that NonStop will look out of place. Skills honed working on other platforms can now be easily leveraged in support of NonStop; after all, it’s done a wonderful job embracing standards and becoming as open a platform as it has of late.

There will likely never be the ubiquitous server that meets everyone’s needs in my business lifetime. Yes, folks at Google and Amazon have demonstrated how far you can go with “warehouses”, full of simple motherboards, even to the point of challenging the likes of IBM, Oracle, Teradata and Greenplum, but Google and Amazon are the exceptions. For Global 1000 companies, differentiation of products and services doesn’t come from building their own computer systems.

I am certain that none of you has fallen out of love with NonStop, nor have you lessened your appreciation for just how well NonStop processes transactions. Furthermore, as you interact with fellow IT professionals, it is difficult not to be overcome with feelings about just how fortunate all of us are just to be associated with NonStop. Yes, “I keep my eyes wide open all the time,” as Johnny Cash once sang, even as “I walk the line”. We love our NonStop computers for a reason.

Clustering? Yes, we have that! SQL database? Got it covered! Java? Yes, we write in Java along with C and C++ and even COBOL. Applications? Plentiful, with more coming to market! Big Data? Yes, we integrate with well-known Big Data frameworks, with even more options becoming available! Clouds? We see potential new products about to appear! Competitively priced? Yes, and with even more power on tap, accessible, at price points that continue to come down even as greater commoditization is being embraced.

At a time when BMW’s cars are erring towards “isolation where BMWs have traditionally favored refinement and engagement” I am ever mindful of the number of comments being made requesting the fault tolerant NonStop become more general purpose, more universal in their appeal to companies as well as ISVs.

However, I am also acutely aware of being extremely careful about what we are asking for. Just as motoring enthusiasts have no need for a driverless BMW, there are just as many within IT who would abhor seeing HP provide the faulty NonStop. No, let’s not canvass in any way HP walking away from the very attributes we value so highly – availability, scalability and data integrity. After all, as a community, we haven’t fallen out of love with NonStop!

It’s time … and the idea is not as wild and crazy as we might imagine!

Watching this year’s Academy Awards event led me to look again at the success of solutions and middleware vendors and their contribution to renewed interest in NonStop!

This past weekend I reported in a client newsletter on just how wild and crazy the weather has been of late in “Colorful Colorado”. Then again, the locals continue to insist – wait an hour or so, and it will change. With so much snow falling, as shown once again in the picture to the side here, it’s hard to imagine that just a week ago I was turning laps in our car on a local racetrack within the shadow of Pikes Peak.

However, the upside is that we have spent the past couple of days watching newly released DVDs of films that won awards at the recent Academy Awards festival. We have watched the film adaptation of Les Miserables, the winner of three Oscars, as well as taken in the pageantry of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that won one award. Up next, Life of Pi, a film that had eleven nominations and that came away with four Oscars in all.

Earlier we had watched the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, which had won, somewhat surprisingly for many, two Academy Awards – for original song as well as for sound editing. As one publication noted, “the Academy hasn’t been especially kind to the venerable series in the past. Up until tonight, the entire franchise had only been awarded 2 Oscars. That trend continued, with “Skyfall” winning two Oscars of its own.” 

There is a popular song, It’s Time, by the group Imagine Dragons, that included the lines:

Don't hold back
Packing my bags and giving the academy a rain check

and when it comes to Skyfall, gaining the attention of the Academy has certainly reinvigorated the James Bond franchise. As a November 8, 2012, USA Today article so clearly stated, 'Skyfall' sends Bond franchise soaring again. The columnist then makes the observation on how “Re-booted in intriguing ways, Skyfall still respects its predecessors. Nods to classic Bond-isms are duly meted out, incorporating the super-spy's distinctive martini order, classic Aston Martin and array of snazzy gadgets.”

It takes considerable effort to reenergize a franchise; getting a topic to be the center of popular buzz is no easy undertaking and yet, fifty years on, James Bond seems every bit as relevant and topical is it always has been, or as USA Today observed, “with a powerful jolt, 007 feels relevant again, with serious questions about espionage vs. cyber hacking amid the fun.”

For NonStop systems, while not carrying quite the legacy of James Bond, nevertheless, the general consent among many with whom I have discussed NonStop of late is that perhaps the marketplace is coming back to NonStop. Perhaps there are changes underway that make the NonStop system every bit as relevant as when it was first conceived. Could it be the right time for us to paraphrase the USA Today observation and say, “Re-booted in intriguing ways, NonStop still respects its predecessors; nods to classic Tandem Computers attributes are duly meted out …”

For the past couple of weeks I have been reviewing commentaries provided by Yash Kapadia, CEO of OmniPayments Inc. Yash and I have enjoyed a number of exchanges of late, as he has kept me informed about his latest projects, which I have been able to reference in posts to ATMMarketplace.com blog, the Tandemworld.net e/Newsletter as well as in this blog, Real Time View.

The most recent comments having appeared in the February 25, 2013, post It’s yet another sign! “There are times when we do struggle hard to make NonStop sound like a normal system… and this is a message not lost on solutions vendors like OmniPayments.” Yes, it’s time but it’s also about no longer holding back. This too is the message that comes through in the comments made by Yash that I have combined into a single opinion paper I am hoping to see published shortly ...

As I wrapped up the opinion paper, I made the comment that the development of the OmniPayments product suite represents a textbook example of what can transpire when a company starts out offering little more than consulting and best practice advice before transitioning to a services company. It is the attributes of a very astute company to then make the jump to middleware tools and utilities (as they leveraged observations made and accumulated knowledge) to pull together a viable product suite.

Today, with the OmniPayments product suite, the company is finding success among financial institutions even as it faces a large and highly successful competitor. That Omni Payments came away having won the business of the fifth largest banks in the U.S. is a testament to the work that went into the development of OmniPayments and a reflection of just how much Yash’s team had learned each step of the way. It is also a message about the value to users from having choices – with multiple vendors to choose from, there’s greater enthusiasm for NonStop systems as it’s hard to argue against NonStop, continuing to attract solutions vendors as it is doing, sending the “franchise soaring again”!

More recently, Yash suggested that with some of the most recent wins that have been made, “don’t rule out OmniPayments combining features that might be on NonStop in part or in whole with OmniPayments features that may be in the Cloud just as you shouldn’t rule out greater support for additional channels such as mobile and online banking. So much is changing that it’s time that we look out as much as we do up; new channels have to be supported even as overall transaction volumes climb.” So much for legacy NonStop systems! Again, having even more options bodes well for keeping the costs of NonStop in line with users’ expectations.

I have always gotten a kick from talking to solutions vendors. For the most part, I work with middleware and tools vendors, whose goals are to complement solutions, adding value with innovative ways to pull additional information from product suites already deployed. These middleware and tools vendors have lengthy feature lists usually addressing multiple disciplines and where, finding the right fit between a user’s requirements and a tool that is beneficial isn’t that hard to do. These middleware and tools vendors too have developed a business model targeting the installed base and there is diversity enough to keep them prosperous.

On the other hand, solutions vendors absolutely need to see the systems they support prosper. OmniPayments is very committed to the NonStop system and are one of many solutions vendors who have come to appreciate the lower prices of entry-level NonStop systems. While it’s perhaps a stretch at this time, given how new these systems are, to suggest that HP has reinvigorated the NonStop franchise yet for businesses like OmniPayments, there are at least some early signs as one of their latest wins in South America has seen Unix replaced with NonStop!

Payments, too, is but one market segment where NonStop systems provide a good fit but so are mobile phone operations, manufacturing and homeland security. Only a short time ago I became aware of just how many manufacturers were relying on NonStop and that a number of new case studies have been written and become available. This summer I hope to be able to provide even more coverage as I dig a little deeper into the types of manufacturing applications involved.

The good news here is that franchises can be reenergized – the idea is not as wild or crazy as some may think. Products can remain popular over extended periods of time. They may not always be generating the headlines we all think that they should, but that in no way lessens the value they provide to their users. While IT doesn’t enjoy today the thrills of an Academy Awards night, with the global media attention it attracts, it’s still good to know that at the heart of the most important mission-critical applications running today, users have already voted. And it’s NonStop! 

My Strange Holidays

I wasn’t trying to set a record, but I have to admit my Holidays have been strange.

I moved to California in 1983 and started working at Tandem Computers the day after Thanksgiving of that year. Of course we never celebrated Thanksgiving back in Poland; there were no Indians to speak of, and corn was food for cattle, so Thanksgiving was a new Holiday for me.

I still recall my very first Thanksgiving, 1975, in Minnesota, at the home of our friends, Dan and Dorothy. It was the first time that I ever tasted turkey. I mostly enjoyed the food, as the conversation was in English, and I did not speak  it yet. From the time I arrived in the US at the end of June, 1975, till that November, I took all the English as a Second Language (ESL) classes I could find at the University, and I watched Sesame Street  every day, but I still had a hard time hearing individual words in fast delivered sentences! Anyway, it was a great dinner and the very next day we took off to Michigan – a new chapter was starting.

Back to 1983 and my first days with Tandem – we were staying in a temporary location, a long-stay hotel, while looking for a house. I was rummaging through my luggage looking for “work suitable” clothes – we went to a local fast food restaurant to celebrate the holiday - and all I could think of was my new job. It was again a new chapter starting the very first day after Thanksgiving. Little did I know that the next 30 years I would be involved with NonStop technology!

My first two weeks on the job was in a TAL class – I have to admit I found it a tad difficult, and as I was still making some of my notes in Polish,I ended up with a pretty unusual notebook. I used it over the next year quite a bit whenever I needed a reminder. I was in the SNAX group and was given a programming assignment. Those were the early days, and we still tested software in the computer room, flipping switches on machines.

Christmas of 1983 was another strange holiday – we moved into a rented condo, and as I was preoccupied with my new job, I did not get around to tree shopping till the very last moment. We found a small tree, but all the stands were gone, so we hung the tree upside down from the lamp hook in the ceiling and decorated it with handmade ornaments my mother brought me from the old country.

One thing that really made me love the job was that that in the computer room we had complete control over the machines – but then we had to learn so much more about them than was directly related to the task at hand.

Before joining Tandem, and after leaving Minnesota for Michigan, there was a New England period: my very first job ever in the US was at a company called Key Data Corporation, now long gone. Key Data was a data processing company – batch mostly. Just to make my Holidays story complete – I started working for Key Data the day after Thanksgiving, 1979.

Looking back at it, except for the fact that it was mostly batch processing, the Key Data model wasn’t all that different from today’s modern Cloud computing paradigm. Our customers couldn’t care less what machines were used to process their data, had no direct involvement with the computer room--data processing was done for them, and that was all they wanted. But there is a significant difference – in the days of data processing companies there were no provisions for  backup – it was as if you were to rely on a single cloud today.

We know how that ends… Need I remind anyone of Netflix over the last Christmas Holiday?

In CNBC.com’s  TechEdge, November 2012, there was an article by Jennifer Parker, “Are Two Cloud Servers Better Than One?” In it she cites a VMWare consultant who said, “Entering the cloud is the act of storing data on someone else’s server.”

Exactly!

That’s why I believe that InfraSoft’s  latest pursuit, maRunga, an implementation of NonStop based cloud services, will be the answer for those who want to store data on someone else’s server but want to be assured that they have access to that data no matter what happens to those servers!

I sometimes think of maRunga as “Chameleon on steroids” – you may recall Chameleon as the code name given to the project undertaken jointly by Tandem and Ungermann Bass back in 1993? I still have those cables we cut to demonstrate that when connection to one of the comms controllers was broken, the other connection would take over and your connection to the server stayed up!
With maRunga, when the connection to one cloud fails (or indeed the cloud itself fails to respond) for whatever reason, connections established to other clouds will take on the task – so yes, the answer to the question posed by Jennifer Parker in the title of her TechEdge article is YES! Two clouds are way better than one!

Fast forward: it is Easter Sunday of 2013. In a few hours’ time, my family will be arriving for our Easter meal: again, it will not be any one tradition – I will carry on with my Polish custom of deviled eggs and my Australian husband wouldn’t be happy without a leg of lamb for dinner.

I look back at the past holidays, and I wonder… so much has changed and yet so much is conceptually the same. Key Data, Chameleon, and now Cloud computing and maRunga. My upside down Christmas tree and baked lamb dinner on Easter Sunday … It is as upside down as Australia  – mind you, as a child I always suspected the folks on the other side of the globe hung upside down, didn’t you?

Anticipate Change …

As much as we all anticipate warmer weather to arrive so too does the NonStop community anticipate change. But let’s be careful about the advice coming from friends …

Each time I think I am making a final reference to winter, along comes a storm to remind us all living here, in North America, that we have ways to go before warm weather arrives. Driving back to Colorado, following another week visiting with colleagues and friends in northern California, we were caught up in yet another winter blast where driving proved difficult. While there are many heading south for Spring Break, a ritual I still don’t fully understand, we are not among them and the only view we have is of snow-clad trees.

But change is on the way. I get the sense that readers of this blog share only a passing interest in what is happening here in Boulder, but are far more interested in observations about the changing nature of NonStop systems and how this is reflected in changes appearing across the NonStop community. Expressed as simply as I can, the big users of NonStop systems are getting bigger as a result of transaction volumes continuing to grow, even as the smaller to mid-size users of NonStop are passing on opportunities to further invest in NonStop.

In a parody of what we are seeing across society in general, the middle class is evaporating even as we watch those more fortunate becoming even better off. In an early March, 2013, CNN interview by Piers Morgan of American record producer and one time CEO of the RCA Music Group, Clive Davis, observations made about staying on top of the recording industry rang very true for me. Having overseen the career development of the likes of Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, Alicia Keys, Carlos Santana, Kelly Clarkson, Leona Lewis and Jennifer Hudson, Davis told Piers Morgan that his advice to up and coming record producers was to “Stay on top of the game; don’t get rooted into one era or kind of music. You must anticipate change.”

Perhaps the most overlooked attribute of the NonStop system remains its scalability. Even as the individual power of the processors climbs and the number of cores grows the NonStop stack, as integral part of all that constitutes a NonStop system caters for expansion in ways few other systems can match. And it does so with only minimal impact to the cost of key middleware and infrastructure software – anyone who has seriously considered running a Windows or Linux Cluster and then tries to add Oracle into the mix knows full well the financial hit they will take. And they still have to redesign the application and even the way they interface to the database to make it work effectively.

Friends in the industry continue to relate how the human resources required to run such a solution quickly becomes prohibitively costly and they still don’t have anything near the scalability they expected. In fact, they are anticipating further changes to the implementation to prove even more expensive, should the deployed application become successful across their user community. Modern, state-of-the-art solutions in use today should scale effectively and efficiently without destabilizing all that is in place.

I am a regular reader of the Rust Report, an Australian publication produced by a business colleague and someone I continue to call a friend, Len Rust. Over the decades that I have known Len, who at one time was the VP, Asia Pacific, for the industry analyst powerhouse, IDC, his insights and commentary have proved uncannily accurate. “SimCorp StrategyLab, (a) private research institution sponsored by SimCorp and headed by Ingo Walter, Professor at the Stern School of Business, New York University, Len writes, “has released the results of its Global Investment Management Cost of Operations Survey.” 

At the heart of this article is the premise we have heard many times before that firms “running legacy systems need to spend more in maintenance costs versus state-of-the-art systems that can scale and adjust with growth.” And that, according to Professor Walter, “For any business, knowing the critical value of maintaining systems versus investing in state-of-the-art technology for future growth is imperative.” Clearly, a key attribute of a state-of-the-art system is its ability to scale and to handle future growth.

How many of us view our NonStop systems today as state-of-the-art? How many of us are evangelical in our praise of NonStop to senior managers and executives within our companies? And yet we should have no difficulties doing so – clearly, NonStop is as state-of-the-art as any alternate system offering. It’s an oversimplification of course, but when you look at the steps made in exploiting commodity hardware, the work being done to ensure a highly competitive future for NS SQL and the ease with which solutions vendors are porting Java solutions to NonStop, there’s very little left of the former legacy Tandem Computer.

Friendships are always valuable and we often pride ourselves on just how many good friends we have. However, there is a much darker side of course. We all know the adage “with friends like you, who needs enemies”, just as we know that it was the Chinese general and strategist who stated “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Closer to home, there’s a Boulder T Shirt shop that once printed a number of T Shirts that simply stated “*%!@ Off, I have enough friends!” Within IT, and particularly within the NonStop community, I think we all need to be really sure we know who our friends are and the value to place on the advice.

Again, as succinctly expressed as I can make it, how comfortable are we today with our state-of-the–art NonStop systems and just how much encouragement are we providing colleagues and friends that yes, NonStop can do that and yes, NonStop has the headroom (the disk, the protocols, whatever) to easily accommodate that new product you were contemplating bringing to market.

There’s no question that the arrival of Clouds has many of us thinking about the benefits of embracing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model. After all, our friends are all telling us how cost effective these are. Low-value transactions, CPU intense applications, prototyping and even piloting can all take advantage of Clouds and there’s much I am involved with to make this a reality for many NonStop users. But don’t discard NonStop too quickly and don’t ignore what NonStop provides today.

“You must anticipate change.” Not to forget, the “state-of-the-art systems that can scale and adjust with growth” that change inevitably brings (when done right). Among those vendors I count as clients, none of this is lost on them – NonStop continues to remain among the most attractive platforms that they support. Ever so subtly, messages coming from them of late have changed from “with one code base we support Linux, or Windows, or whatever” to “we support open systems including the new NonStop systems!”

I truly hope that this is the last time I include a winter photo taken outside our home. Even as I write this post, the skies have cleared. As seasons change, as they always do, I look for even more reasons as to why changes being made to NonStop can be appreciated – and in much the same way we welcome the warmer weather we welcome all that NonStop provides today. Most of all, don’t just appreciate it but anticipate change as yes, as we can all relate to, there’s a lot more radio stations than just classic rewinds!    

Before it rains, or even snows; check out the clouds!

 “The cloud is the love child of the internet and virtualization” was posted to a LinkedIn discussion - is that all it is? Is there anything more? For the NonStop community it’s getting “exciting”, to quote Jimmy!

Today we live in a stylized world. Symbols are created as a shorthand way to convey information as well as to reinforce historical connections taking us back, so as to speak, to better times. As the latest generation Corvette was unveiled by GM in Detroit, just a few weeks ago, it was the appearance of a very stylized chrome stingray along each side of the car that generated considerable interest. It was as if the presence of the stylized stingray legitimized the car, irrespective of what might be present under the hood!

I have often wondered about how stylized images and what they depict resonate with communities. We see a yellow diamond with a black cutout of a deer alongside a road and immediately we know to be careful as there could be wildlife crossing in front of our car. We see an image of an airplane ascending and we assume that there is an airport nearby. We look at symbols and numbers on a hotel’s television remote and we immediately recognize the many functions that they support. We see a row of harvesters – yes, the stylized symmetry of the group caught my attention and I just had to capture them in digital form - and we immediately think of seasons about to change.
  
“Since the dawn of recorded history, we’ve been using visual depictions to map the earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human body, organize the natural world, perform music, and even decorate abstract concepts like consciousness and love,” was how one review of Scott Christianson’s book 100 Diagrams That Changed the World began. This observation was followed with an explanation that the book chronicles “the history of our evolving understanding of the world through humanity’s most groundbreaking sketches, illustrations, and drawings, ranging from cave paintings to The Rosetta Stone to Moses Harris’s color wheel to Tim Berners-Lee’s flowchart for a ‘mesh’ information management system, the original blueprint for the World Wide Web.”

It was against this background, particularly the inclusion of the comment about a flowchart that essentially was the original blueprint for the World Wide Web that I thought about clouds. Cloud computing is often represented by using a stylized cloud to depict resources of any size and complexity that we can essentially ignore as whatever resource we need to perform a specific function ,be it the execution of a transaction or the storage of a massive amount of data, the cloud will deliver.

However, we have seen these cloud pictures before. They are not new to those who have worked in IT as long as I have. The very first networks were depicted as clouds. No one really understood all the complex components that went in to making a network but everyone always assumed if a computer connected to it at one point and then a terminal somewhere else, it all would work. Perhaps no better example of this was when IBM presented Systems Network Architecture (SNA) as a cloud, long before we knew about X.25 clouds, and more recently, IP clouds.

It just seemed logical to skip all the hard stuff that went in to providing a reliable resource, as networks eventually became, in order to jump to the really important stuff – who would be accessing resources and where would applications be running. After all, if we had been honest, depicting all that was within the cloud would have covered almost all of any whiteboard we would have used to describe the application we were promoting. But now, as so much of the complexity of the network has been eliminated, it is the systems themselves that are being shielded within the same stylized cloud depiction.

There have been numerous exchanges about clouds within several of the LinkedIn groups I follow. Considerable coverage of clouds has also been made in many of the blogs I subscribe to, including this blog for the NonStop community. How many have followed the posts by Margo Holen whose latest focus has been on clouds and on the potential for NonStop to participate in clouds? However, it is the current discussion in the relatively new LinkedIn group, Host System Advocate Group, that has attracted my interest.

Within the discussion What is the difference between mainframe computing and the cloud? which in turn is a reference to an exchange that occurred on Yahoo!, and group members were directed to look at some interesting observations that had been made. Among the comments was one that simply observed, “I have heard that mainframe and dumb terminals are really bad for computing, but isn't cloud computing and thin clients the same thing?”

However, the group member that started this discussion then began by suggesting that, for him, “the cloud is the love child of the internet and virtualization, and puts centralized computing back in fashion”! And I exhaled deeply – wow! Who knew? Cloud Computing was nothing more than IT circling back to reinstate a legitimate role for very big homogeneous systems. Mainframes, revisited. So today’s stylized depictions of clouds can now be overlaid with a picture of a very big system. I don’t think so …

Deeper into the comments posted on Yahoo! came another remark “Mainframes have single servers and require specially built air conditioned rooms to house these machines. Whereas the concept of cloud is very simple, it may have many scattered individual servers. Cloud Computing technology reduces the complexity of deploying and managing IT resources dynamically.” Once again, I exhaled deeply as I recognized the message being conveyed. The stylized cloud shouldn’t be overlaid with a picture of a very big system but rather, a collection of geographically scattered servers of varying capabilities.

For the NonStop community, with systems predominantly deployed among Global 1000 companies, cloud computing might actually prove advantageous. Not in terms of building a cloud out of a collection of NonStop servers (although I don’t want to deter any business from pursuing such a plan), but rather, looking to NonStop as a system on the edge of a cloud. For these Global 1000 companies, a private cloud (assembled from rack after rack of probably Linux or Windows servers combined with terabytes if not petabytes of cheap disk storage) front-ended by NonStop systems might resolve a number of business issues that block any immediate consideration about deploying clouds.

Why NonStop as an edge product? Think in terms of being present and connected to offload low value transactions during peak times; to off-load potentially processor-intensive application components that otherwise may affect the performance of the NonStop system; and to on-load high-value transactions that might have otherwise executed in the cloud without assurance of completing as required.

Imagine configurations of multiple private clouds, or even combinations of private and public clouds, cloaked with the same level of availability and indeed scalability of the NonStop system itself? Yes, even IBM mainframes could rely on NonStop as inexpensive gateways to redundant clouds that are always available, thanks to the NonStop system. Low-cost? NonStop? Relative to the MIPS / LPAR needed on the mainframe offering much less capability, then yes, definitely a lower cost option.

It may take some time to catch on among the NonStop community. It may even take some time to catch on within HP. However, a little creativity can go a long way and it’s really not out of the question to imagine the future of IT where stylized symbols used to depict clouds include a stylized chevron depicting entrance via commodity NonStop servers. There would be no question that this would add to the cloud’s reputation for being “not only less complex”, but with NonStop, as robust as users envision the cloud becoming at some point.

The love child of the internet and virtualization? Perhaps, but with NonStop truly in play, so much more I suspect. It may be raining outside perhaps even snowing, at this time of year. No matter, the ever present clouds are simply too numerous to ignore! For now, all I can add is to watch all that unfolds this year – there are some gifted engineers already working hard to make NonStop and cloud integration happen. Stay very much tuned-in for more to follow particularly in the weeks and months ahead of 203 HP Discover!

Fight like a man or fight like a girl?

For many, many years I have worked in IT – and as a women, you would know just “how alone” you are if you attempted to use the restrooms at breaks during conferences – long lines to men’s but nearly empty women’s bathrooms. Yeah, it had its good sides. I guess.

Most of the female coworkers in that environment you might describe as “Tom boys” – in conversations with many I found out that they grew up with a bunch of brothers, or their father always wanted a boy and tried to bring them up as one, or they came from a foreign land and were simply fighters to start with. All three apply to me, sadly.

Consider the words from the song “Fight Like a Girl” by Bomshel: 

“I'll hold my head high
I'll never let this define
The light in my eyes
Love myself, give it hell
I'll take on this world”

 

Seriously, and I realize it is an inflammatory subject, there is a huge difference between managing teams made up mostly of men versus those made up of women.

The biggest difference, in my experience, is what supplies you keep in your office. When dealing with “the boys” you may have a little fridge with beer for Friday’s “end of the day” discussions. You might even keep a car model on the shelf to break the ice just as you might scatter a few car or airplane magazines on your conference table.

When managing “the girls” you absolutely need to have a supply of Kleenex tissues – I found that you need them even if you offer praise, and you sure need them when you want to offer a critique or expect to disagree on any topic. The cultural differences between the genders are mind blowing in the work environment.

Have you ever been to a meeting that turned hostile? I have on several occasions, and I’ve seen my female co-workers just storm out the door, eyes full of tears. I’ve seen my male co-workers get red in the face and pound the table. I have never seen a man, on the verge of crying, just leave a room. I have never seen a woman get up, use profanity to make her point, and spill everyone’s coffee by hitting the table with her fist!

Returning to the words of the song “Fight Like a Girl” I particularly like these lines:

Yes, I'll stand and be strong
No I'll never give up”
I will conquer with love
And I'll fight like a girl

When it comes to assignments, tasks, and creative thinking both genders perform about equally, in my experience. Expressing opinions, though, is another story. I don’t recall a male co-worker starting with “I may be wrong, and it is probably a stupid idea…” and yet I have heard many smart women preceding their statement with something similar. Also, my personal favorite, “I am sorry, but I have to disagree!" A male would have said “I disagree, here is why, and you are wrong!”

As I was writing this post Richard sent me an article he found in the Australian paper, Business Review Weekly (BRW) , published March 6, 2013, “Brain game: Why women are better marketers than men”.

Here is a pointer: http://www.brw.com.au/p/marketing/brain_game_why_women_are_better_sU4I9zzbt1JyaZ9FM6whZI

I found this paragraph to illustrate my point particularly well:

“We all start out with a female brain, at least for the first eight weeks of our pre-birth existence. It is only then that our genes and sex hormones take over. In the case of boys, a huge surge in foetal testosterone in the womb results in the destruction of cells in the communication centres of the brain and growth in the sex and aggression centres. Devoid of this surge in male hormones, the female brain continues to grow unaltered. The result is a brain far superior in its ability to communicate and, crucially, understand others”

Now, Gentlemen, you understand why Richard is hiding behind the disguise as well!

In literature, films, and plays you see gender cultural differences. Likewise, even as women join the workforce at a rate greater than ever maybe it will change, but today, as I am working in the world of nonprofit associations, I carry a box of tissues whenever I expect to meet with my co-workers face-to-face. I also work on dropping my training from the world of IT of being direct; just the facts ma’am, and try to be more like a girl. I feel at times like I am wearing a mask. I just want to get to the topic at hand and have it discussed, and no, I am not wrong, and I disagree, %@#%&!

Lately I have been spending more time back in IT as I re-engage with friends and former colleagues. I am working once again in an area that really interests me and where I see great potential for NonStop participation. And I am going to be fighting a lot harder than ever before. Perhaps in closing it is the words from another song that resonate so clearly for me these days. From the Petra song, “Fight Like a Man”:

“Get on your knees and fight like a man

You'll pull down strongholds if you just believe you can
Your enemy will tuck his tail and flee
Get on your knees and fight like a man”

No love mentioned here, is there?

 

It’s yet another sign!

A persistent top ten most popular post has been one of the earliest posts to this blog, “It’s a sign!” so it’s about time the topic is revisited in light of just how fruitful fulfilling the needs of a niche has become.   

There are so many times when we simply remark on how it’s just a sign of the times. Perhaps not as dismissive as the comment “Whatever!” but all the same, it’s a short-hand, somewhat equally dismissive way to reflect on how it’s just not our fault. We aren’t to blame. We aren’t involved. The snow that fell here in Boulder this weekend and pictured above was a reminder that seasons manifest themselves rather predictably. If there is snow on the ground then yes, it’s winter. The fact that we aren’t enjoying nearly as many snow days as we once did, well, yes, that too is a sign of the times.

Readers of this blog will have scarcely missed that the most widely read post of all times was that of November 6, 2007, It's a sign! The post drew attention to forecasts, and in particular to the technology forecasts made by Gartner that year and where “The list includes green power, unified communications, virtualization, mashups and social software” according to an October 7, 2007, report in the IDG publication, NetworkWorld. That it retains overall top spot in terms of reader popularity ever since doesn’t really surprise me – we are all interested in topics to do with NonStop especially when we view NonStop as having a role to play in areas considered topical .

In her classic song, It’s a sign of the times singer, Petula Clark, penned the words “It's a sign of the times and I know that I won't have to wait much longer. You've changed a lot somehow from the one I used to know” and I couldn’t help thinking how relevant this is to NonStop today. NonStop has changed and for the better and yes, it’s not the same system we used to know. But can we also acknowledge, somewhat enthusiastically, that given such a changed system we will not be waiting much longer for NonStop to prevail. Globally, and across many market segments!

It may be new, but it’s still a world where transactions count and where the need to process even more transactions than at any time in the past is obvious, and the value of NonStop’s contributions goes unheeded for the most part. Is it truly a sign of the times, however, as a community, we haven’t propelled visibility of NonStop as highly as it ought to be?

Five years later, what is Gartner now forecasting as its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013? Any surprises? The list this time is dominated by predictions about mobile device battles, the advent of the personal cloud, the changing role of IT as hybrid IT and cloud computing take hold, and of how, under the general heading of actionable analytics, again it will be cloud, packaged analytics and big data accelerating even further in 2013.

The outcome from unified communications, virtualization, mashups and social software seems to be in evidence everywhere we look, and much of the interest, and indeed take-up, of offerings in support of mobile devices, clouds and big data seems a natural follow-on to what was forecast fully five years ago. And yet again, the question lingers – what of the changed NonStop? Will it be playing a major role? Will there be another burst of enthusiasm in support of much wider deployment of NonStop systems?

In a somewhat controversial article in the January 26, 2013, issue of The Economist Only the digital dies the journalist writes of how “Innovation tends to create new niches, rather than refill those that already exist. So technologies may become marginal, but they rarely go extinct. And today the little niches in which old technologies take refuge are ever more viable and accessible, thanks to the internet ...”

For more years than I care to recall, when it comes to NonStop markets any references to niche markets draws considerable fire. However, in today’s global marketplace, niches have become considerably larger with the result that customers do benefit from some selective tailoring better meeting their needs. Occupying a niche in no way suggests a limited or restricted marketplace addressed only with aged, legacy products.

“Niche means distinct, specific, and distinguishable - although we often use it as a small sub-segment. It really means a ‘distinct segment’. Apple iPhone has its niche with the young and cool crowd. That sub-segment is neither small nor marginal. So yes, you are right with your assessment - niche doesn't have to mean small or dying,” responded Sami Akbay cofounder at WebAction and formerly of GoldenGate Software.

“Technology is invented, has a lifespan, and then it becomes obscure or dead,” Akbay then added. “It isn't born as a niche or it doesn't die as a niche; people create technology to address a real or perceived problem that is believed to exist now or will exist in the future. If the innovation and technology address a ‘real’ problem that exists now and continues to exist into the future, you have a winner. If the problem doesn't exist or disappears as a side effect of some other phenomenon, the technology dies away. The success, lifespan, longevity all depend on the size of the problem and the merit/brilliance of technology or innovation.”

“In todays’ interconnected world it is also easier to access and serve niche markets,” observed comForte marketing head Thomas Gloerfeld. “You could even argue that NonStop and its commoditization of components has helped it out of the ‘technology niche’ and hence will help it survive, indeed thrive, in select sub-markets. The key however for infrastructure vendors like comForte is that customer organizations elevate NonStop and what it provides in support of their business critical transactions / data.”

However, it was the observation by OmniPayments Inc. CEO, Yash Kapadia, that perhaps put it into context for the NonStop community. “There are times when we do struggle hard to make NonStop sound like a normal system and try our best not to call it a niche. However, when it comes to the bigger picture of computers worldwide – then yes, NonStop is a niche. Once you appreciate that niches are indeed sub-markets, then when it comes to a sub-market as big as payments, NonStop is the predominant player and this is a message not lost on solutions vendors like OmniPayments.”

Ownership, or dominance, across a niche that maps to a rapidly growing and increasingly important market segment is a good thing; niche doesn’t necessarily equate to small, declining, or mostly overlooked and provides enough incentives for vendors to continue to invest and to innovate. And to rebut one of the observations of the writer in The Economist, while “some technologies may become marginal, and rarely go extinct” where the niche or sub-market is big enough, it’s quite the contrary, “if the innovation and technology address a ‘real’ problem that continues to exist you have a winner”.

The key to unlocking further success for NonStop, according to Akbay, comes back to the basics. “NonStop today addresses a limited segment. It owns that segment and it is here to stay. However, the path to resurgence of NonStop is finding new segments, owning those segments too and going through a second lifecycle starting from ‘early adopters’. Owning mission critical across the computing landscape, making it affordable, adding compatibility for Java applications running on it, conquering the cloud, re-segmenting the market and going after it again. And again.”

In a final remark it was again OmniPayment’s Yash who put this in a more pragmatic light, observing that “even as I agree with what has been said here, our company started out providing consulting services that led to us providing a number of specialized services that then resulted in us becoming a product company. We have invested a lot in the NonStop platform and continue to do so as we see NonStop having few peers doing what it does best. Processing transactions, 24 X 7, right out of the box. And with the costs continuing to decline, why wouldn’t we continue to support and promote? Yes, I would like to see some distance put between NonStop and niche and yet, these niches or sub-markets do offer an extremely viable, historically easily accessible, and indeed increasingly valuable opportunity to all those who pursue the development of solutions.”

For those within the NonStop community who track the forecasts of industry analysts like Gartner, there really isn’t any surprises for 2013. And perhaps this of itself is a sign of the times as well. Certainly, when it comes to NonStop systems today, they have “changed a lot somehow from the (systems) I used to know” – a message well worth communicating. There will be more clouds. There will be more mobile devices. There will be more hybrid IT. And yes, engaged in all of this, there will be a lot more of NonStop!

Plain White T’s song running through my mind …

 

 

So many cloudy discussions out there, and it seems we each mean something different when we say clouds. On the other hand, I have to say I always smile a tad when I read of clouds and think of the popular song by Plain White T’s.

It goes like this:

“My head is stuck in the clouds
She begs me to come down
Says ‘Boy quit foolin' around’
I told her ‘I love the view from up here
The warm sun and wind in my ear
We'll watch the world from above
As it turns to the rhythm of love’”

The Wikipedia provides a comprehensive definition, and tells you that the term “clouds” is used liberally, to mean so many things – here is what it says:

“Outside of the information technology and software industry, the term ‘cloud’ can be found to reference a wide range of services, some of which fall under the category of cloud computing, while others do not. The cloud is often used to refer to a product or service that is discovered, accessed and paid for over the Internet, but is not necessarily a computing resource. Examples of service that are sometimes referred to as "the cloud" include, but are not limited to, crowd sourcing, cloud printing, crowd funding, cloud manufacturing.”

Common routines frequently accessed by multiple applications ,for instance, could be candidates to become services and as such, IT might just elect to run from out of a cloud saving each customer from having to pay for their own resources. Complete transactions may find themselves too residing in the cloud. What makes the prospect of using cloud resources tantalizing is that they may just save us all a lot of money.

I started writing about InfraSoft new product, maRunga, and many folks wanted to understand what is it, and why would it be relevant.

If you want to get the good sense of what is it maRunga will deliver take a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITrhynkOb4g
First phase: deliver a product, fully instrumented, supported, etc. that delivers on the PCS demo promise....

In a recent email Thomas Burg of comForte joked: “Here’s my definition of cloud: “a wonderful marketing buzzword which can mean a lot of things and which you better throw up in the air a lot these days to stay relevant”

I agree. Everyone throws around terms like clouds and big data and reserves the right to interpret these terms as they please. That is OK, as both are relatively new and developing right in front of us.

To me what is important is the role NonStop will play: it is uniquely positioned to front end resources that themselves may not be as stable as you would wish – we all experienced Netflix fiasco over the Holidays! NonStop front ending clouds environment will be able to switch you from the environment that failed to the one that is chumming away! To your user that will mean no interruption of services, and that’s all that counts!

“We'll watch the world from above” is a position I have always endorsed when it comes to development projects of any kind. With understanding comes products and with products and the interactions with real users comes knowledge and, in time, expertise. Of course this only eventuates when you are on top of it all ...