Java rocks!

With all the talk about modernization and of NonStop truly being a modern system, it is worth noting just how easy it has become to run modern Java applications on NonStop today!

The past ten days have seen me working out of a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, as Margo oversaw events for the association she now works for…. and I took advantage of the free room and the barbeque. But no sooner had we landed back home in Boulder than we packed the RV and headed to southern California for the long weekend, setting up camp just outside Rosamond and reveling in the lack of humidity at Willows Springs race track. Finally, we pulled up stakes and headed to Las Vegas where we are now baking in the desert heat, wishing we had a little more humidity, as we wait for HP Discover 2012 to begin! And the picture above is of me setting up camp and unloading the track car that for the next ten days will once again become our daily drive.

What to expect? What will be demonstrated? Who will be there? Where will we meet? Thank goodness for smartphones and tablets and their ability to keep us all connected, all of the time. When events get as large as HP Discover, traditional approaches (sitting in a hotel lobby bar, slowly sipping a latte at the coffee shop, pacing the floor alongside registration) simply don’t cut it – and I don’t want to miss a thing! Already I am reviewing the emails I have and fine-tuning my calendar as I shuffle through the commitments that have already been made. But what will really stand out for me? And what of modernization and the NonStop server’s support of new solutions?

When I last attended HP’s big show I raised this subject with Randy Meyer, who heads HP NED product management, and asked him specifically about what modernization meant for NonStop. In the post of June 11, 2010, that followed, “Modernize? Evangelize!”, I wrote of how Meyer had told me of the work NonStop development had been doing to “make it easy to build new applications and functions using modern toolsets – Java, Eclipse, Hibernate, etc,” a reference to the availability of industry-standard software-stacks, such as SASH, that meet the runtime requirements of applications developed with these tools.

All the while, transparently leveraging the very same NonStop fundamentals of availability, scalability and data integrity that have underpinned so many mission-critical applications for nearly four decades. Or, as NED product manager, Keith Evans, told me back then “applications using modern paradigms inherit the same NonStop fundamentals as classic applications”, as well as “modern application containers (NonStop SOAP server and NSJSP) use the same scalable and available server process infrastructure as Pathway applications”.

It’s been two years since that post so I thought I may want to start out this year by checking with the vendor community to see how well the NonStop group had performed and to focus this time solely on Java – after all, the ability to externalize current business logic via SOA and Web services seemed to be well understood by all within the NonStop community.

“Java itself performs well, but if you look at performance there are still several things to look for,” Jürgen Depping, of CommitWork GmbH and a frequent commentator in many of the discussions I participate in. Depping then added, “How does the database perform? How do you communicate? How do you design your system?” For me, this was an encouraging starting point – in the past so much had been discussed about the need for more complete support of Java services, but now there appeared less concerns about functionality, as though having all the services needed (to port Java applications) was a given.

The richness of the functionality found today in NonStop Java was also confirmed in emails I received from Franz König of HP’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC). “There are several other examples of Java products (on NonStop, today); in most cases I wouldn’t even call them ports, because the Java for the most part does not need any porting. It is rather the database migration that accounts for any additional effort.” And this too was confirmed by others I talked to – Java applications simply run today on NonStop, as is. Period. No worries.

There’s attention that needs to be paid when SQL is involved, but that’s about it, and as you discuss this with the NonStop SQL development team it’s not lost on them either, and they too have been busy on this front. “We understand the migration process and we have established world class partnerships to bring tools that automate the entire lifecycle of a database migration:  DDL, database objects, SQL statements, PL/SQL code, and most importantly data itself.”

This was how NED SQL product manager, Ajaya Gummadi, explained it to me recently before adding “we are continuously investing to support the non-ANSI standard Oracle syntax in the NonStop SQL engine with the objective of reducing the costs and risks of such migrations and we have the best resources in NED ATC and Solutions Development and Integration (SDI) services to execute these migration projects.”  Indeed, Gummadi informed me, “we have a great talk on this topic (Session TB3012) at Discover being presented by Ursula Hilson (ATC).”

So the emails continued. Porting new applications to NonStop – solutions such as the most recently ported fraud detection application from Retail Decisions (ReD) - and invariably exposing the NonStop server and the NonStop fundamentals to a whole new cadre of vendors, was what had fueled the need for Java support and vendors are finding it relatively easy to get their solutions installed and up and running on NonStop.

“Java performance is nearly on-par with performance on the HP-UX Java; in fact, it is the same JVM,” according to HP’s Keith Moore before he changed gears on me to talk about Garbage Collection, something I only vaguely understand. “Garbage Collection is one of the most researched areas in virtual machine. With the next JVM for NonStop, we will greatly improve our performance by “parallelizing” garbage collection. The new version will exploit a new design that will allow for some Garbage Collection activities to occur in parallel with user code execution.”

“Our current method has not been observed to cause more than a split second hiccup while garbage collection occurs.  However, our next JVM release will also include the option of a 64-bit JVM and the garbage collection times could get longer with that option.  So, this caused us to develop the parallel garbage collection capability,” was the follow-up response from NED Product Management leader, Tim Keefauver. “It will be available both for the upcoming 32-bit and 64-bit JVM versions.  The parallel option allows the JVM to continue with its regular work while also performing garbage collection.”

When I raised this topic with those closely working with NonStop and Clouds, and who I am hoping will reveal even more about Persistent Cloud Services this year, they too are making sure Java support is available. “As far as languages, we’ve tested native languages COBOL, C and C++ essentially any language which can call a “C” function - and we recently developed a JAVA API, was a response I was given by the team. “As for platforms we have tested WINDOWS x86, LINUX x86, x86-64 and IA64, and NonStop – what we now provide should run on any POSIX compliant platform.”

Java is not the only language that signifies a platform is modern. There are still solutions and middleware vendors investing in other object languages including C++ and these applications are every bit as modern as those written in Java. But what the Java story tells me is that applications developed for other platforms can now be brought onto NonStop with little additional effort – so much so that those directly involved no longer view the move to NonStop as a port.

I may not have to hang out in the foyer or linger by registrations as I am sure I will be able to find the time to catch up with many of you – yes, I will have the “Fools for NonStop” T Shirts with me as mentioned in the last post. And yes, careful examination of our track car, pictured above, will see how it too is adorned with a “Fools for NonStop” decal! Many years ago a strong advocate of Java running on NonStop, Sam Ayres, simply told me that with the arrival of NonStop on Blades, “Java rocks!” an endorsement I was only too happy to reference in my post of February1, 2010, “From beneath the swirling mists …”.

To many, this was simply Sam being Sam encouraging us all to give due consideration to running Java on the NonStop platform. However, nearly two years on, it’s a reality and from where I sit, a resounding endorsement that the rhetoric we have heard about the modernization of NonStop has materialized. Any thoughts of Sam being foolish put to rest a long time ago.

And with that, the NonStop community has to be pleased – a perfect implementation? Perhaps not, just yet, and still a work-in-progress. But sufficient for many to no longer even consider supporting NonStop “a port”, and for all of us who lived with much earlier implementations, that’s about all we wanted to ever hear!

Fools for NonStop!

From the moment I kicked-off the LinkedIn group of the same name, it was a given that there would be a T Shirt developed. It’s a part of our heritage as well as our tradition dating back to Tandem Computers.  Look for me at HP Discover and get yours!

I was only a few week ago that I flew into San Francisco, and from my window I could see the marinas that dot the water’s edge around the airport. For a number of years, soon after I had arrived in Cupertino, I had the pleasure of being part of his crew on Ray Walker’s catamaran “Two-Up”, as I recall it was called.  Ray was a product manager working in Bill Heil’s organization and had spent some time in Australia, and so we had an early connection – for much of the 1970s I regularly raced the summer program on Sydney Harbor.

I was really excited   when Ray called one day and asked if I wanted to sail on Steve Schmidt’s yacht – a magnificent Santa Cruz 70, much bigger than anything else I had sailed. Designed for the TransPac race, a mix of serious racing as well as attracting those keen on sailing the Pacific, where yachts pulled out of Long Beach “turned left” and then ran a reach all the way to Hawaii – “reaching” for most yachts being the fastest way they can travel.  To capitalize on this event, the Santa Cruz 70 (SC70) was long and very narrow offering very little wetted surface and hence little resistance – these yachts were designed to simply “fly” across the ocean to Hawaii.

Unfortunately, for many sailors, taking this yacht anywhere else to race, or using it for any other purpose, was considered somewhat reckless. There is a level of instability that comes with such a narrow beam for a yacht of this length – as the name SC70 implies, it was seventy feet (21.34 meters) long. To my surprise, any changes in wind direction or strength could have disastrous results as I quickly found out – easing a headsail brace past the mast so as not to catch on anything, the wind strengthened before I could let go and I was catapulted into the Bay. It was very cold that overcast day in September, 1994 and I felt very foolish as they pulled me back on board, wringing wet and suffering the early onset of hypothermia.

But foolishness comes in many guises. Followers of the morning television show from CNBC know all too well the central characters from the investment advisors, Motley Fool, (with the web site, fools.com), who provide contrarian opinions about the financial performance of many companies. The tag line on their web site simply states “to educate, amuse and enrich” but more often than not, their advice proves more accurate than that provided by other, much larger investment firms. Not easily fooled, they have developed a knack for being able to discern a company’s real position when it comes to meeting investors’ expectations.

It was a little more than six months ago when, in the post of September 7, 2011, “Foolish aspirations!” I wrote of how the LinkedIn group “Fools for NonStop” had just been created. It came about, as I noted at the time, following the observation from a participant in an online forum where I contribute who responded to one of more upbeat predictions for NonStop with a dismissive  “there is one fool exists in LinkedIn whose name is Richard Buckle!” As I wrote in that post, clearly my passion gives me away!

In that post of September 7, 2011, I also wrote of how there’s almost a sense of inevitability that the subject of foolishness should be raised among those who are fervent supporters of all things NonStop. Certainly, if my passion for all things NonStop suggests that I am a fool, then yes, I will wear that insignia with pride – and continue to welcome the more than 100 members who have now joined with me as Fools for NonStop. So, too, it should come as no surprise that I will be able to wear that insignia not only with pride, but on a T Shirt – yes, the T Shirts have arrived!

My other memory of Steve Schmidt, apart from his magnificent yacht, was of the time he took the helm of Tandem Computers R&D organization. As I mentioned in a private client newsletter recently, when he brought the organization together for the first time around a special beer-bust, T Shirts were distributed. In yellow, they featured a buzzard with a wry smile and with the directive “Patience, my ass, I want to kill something” – a T Shirt that is now firmly cemented in the folklore of Tandem. But we have moved on, and now we are a community anchored by NonStop and the time is right to bring back the T’s!

When I first floated the idea, in the LinkedIn group, Fools for NonStop, the reaction was immediate – yes, put me down for one! Fortunately, a group of vendors stepped in as sponsors of the T Shirt and with their support and following a number of design reviews they finally arrived on my doorstep this weekend.  The picture at the top of the page is of me wearing the first one pulled from the box. Again, thanks need to go to comForte, Integrated Research, Merlon, OmniPayments and Randall Consulting – a really good cross section of vendors within the NonStop community.

These T’s will become available at the upcoming HP Discover event in Las Vegas with a number on offer at the comForte booth in the exhibition hall, others given away to attendees at the NonStop Community Reception at HP Discover 2012 on Wednesday, June 6 – and yes, as participants head to the many social events planned for the Conference, they will find wearing the T Shirt the appropriate apparel for the occasion. These T Shirts will also be available at similar events planned for Europe later in the year.

It should be obvious to all that there’s an element of humor in all of this; a tongue-firmly-planted-in-ones-cheek expression of just how passionate the NonStop community continues to be. And for good reason – there’s little alternative to what NonStop provides as it’s uncrated, powered on, and the first TACL prompt appears. Well, at least, with the latest BladeSystems I am assuming that this is still de rigueur for new NonStop installs. The NonStop community is passionate, but not out of naiveté, but rather based on experience and knowledge, and it’s not going unrecognized.

The HP business leaders associated with NonStop – from Pauline to Martin to Winston have all recognized this about the community. And it came as no surprise that in his first editorial in The Connection it didn’t escape the attention of incoming leader, Ric Lewis, who observed “what I am quickly learning – is how passionate and dedicated the employees, customers and partners are.” Yes, we are all foolishly enamored with NonStop, but this should never be confused with being fools.

It takes considerable awareness of all that is happening within the industry to be able to recognize the special place NonStop occupies in all that we do for the businesses we support, and as fools, it is our responsibility “to educate, amuse and enrich”. I did survive my fall into the Bay off of Steve Schmidt’s yacht, as foolish as I had been at the time; now all I need to be concerned about is surviving HP Discover 2012 – I hope to see many of you there and look for me later in the week, sporting a very blue T Shirt, Fools for NonStop!

Predictions you may regret!

There have been occasions when my predictions have turned out to be way off the mark. And when it comes to technology I am not alone when it comes to straying afield. However, when it comes to clouds computing I have little doubt that there is a future for NonStop!

Predictions have a way of coming back to haunt you. Aggressive forecasts about what is going to happen next should be best left to professionals – the local television weather spokesperson. It was many years ago that we all laughed at the title of the James Bond movie “Never say Never Again” where after more than a decade’s absence (from playing the role) Sean Connery did indeed return to make one last appearance in the iconic role that has indeed defined his career; foolishly having said he would never play that role again.

The photo at the top of the page was taken by good friend Brian when we stopped by to watch an AMLS event in the streets of Long Beach – the subject of the April 26, 2010, post "What's in your container?" It depicts Margo and I standing near an Aston Martin prototype wearing the number 007, a connection hardly anyone would miss. After all, for many, Aston Martin, Sean Connery, and James Bond would be forever intertwined. Brian, his wife Jan, along with Margo and myself were attending the event to cheer on the Corvette team but we couldn’t resist the photo opportunity. As for diehard Corvette families such as ours, never a thought was spent on wondering about Aston Martins.

“The cars we drive are track cars – hard, yet fine-tuned; we’ll never have a luxury car,” so said Brian. And yet it was only the weekend before last, in between preparing the BBQ and bringing the food outdoors, when Brian found time to join me for a quick visit to the local Aston Martin dealership and where, accompanied by his wife Jan, ended up coming away with an Aston Martin Vantage V8.

If I had suggested to Brian that he was going to buy a car before dinner and yes, a supercar at that, I suspect he would have questioned what it was that I had been drinking. Not the usual take-away from a Buckle’s soirée. And what was that? Never say never, again?

Only a short time ago it had been in email exchange that I had with Bruce Williamson, a former colleague of mine that had influence two recent posts I had made to the blog, comForte Lounge. Readers may recall the exchanges I had over his prediction that when it came to end-user interaction with applications, according to Bruce, “the NEW iPad … IS the next corporate terminal!” After reading my posts Bruce then sent me an email that included an all-too famous quote from Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com that I found very timely.

While working at Xerox PARC, it was Metcalfe together with David Boggs who invented Ethernet; an accomplishment I will always associate with him. However, it was the same Metcalfe who in 1995 wrote of how "almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

Another case in point? And perhaps generating even more notoriety was a prediction made by Ed Yourdon as Y2K bore down on us. Yourdon is known as one of the lead developers of the “structured techniques” for programmers in the 1970s. As a budding PL/1 programmer I read the books and remember participating in rewriting several PL/1 programs without using any GOTO statements.

However, as in the case of Metcalfe, many only remember Yourdon for his much-publicized prediction of March 1998 (as Y2K was approaching and many thought the worst would happen), "New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and a dozen other cities are going to resemble Beirut in January 2000. That's why I moved out of NYC to rural New Mexico a couple months ago ... The government of the U.S. as we currently know it will fail on 1/1/2000. Period."

Failing to correctly predict my visitors would go out and buy an Aston Martin may never be something I will be remembered for and yet, for Brian, it will be something he will likely never forget. However, it does go to show how careful you have to be when going public with forward-looking statements or suggesting a situation may never happen.

Given the growth in participation across the NonStop community within LinkedIn groups and the readiness members demonstrate in posting comments, it is within LinkedIn groups where I take the time to promote posts. It was only a matter of days ago when I promoted the most recent post that I had made to the web publication, ATMmarketplace. In support of the post of April 24, 2012, "What I do with my money..." where I had suggested that the popularity of ATMs may have something to do with them not wanting to start a conversation, it wasn’t long before the importance of the presence of NonStop was highlighted.

If that global system didn't already exist for decades and rather was introduced only now, everybody would be full of delight about the amazing progress of modern IT and would probably call it ‘the money cloud’”, was the response from HP’s Gerhard Schwartz. “However, it would also be interesting to see how reliably that ‘money cloud’ would work if it was not dominated by proven NonStop technology ‘failsafe and virus-free’?”

Stressing the point, Schwartz posted a second comment sometime later, admonishing us all to consider that “global payments system which allows us to withdraw cash and to use our credit and debit cards anytime and almost anywhere on this planet have indeed the characteristics of a cloud: somewhere there must be some underlying infrastructure, but the vast majority of users don't know and have no reason to care.” For Schwartz, it’s “just strange that many people would strongly deny that NonStop has anything to do with cloud computing!”

It would be hard to miss just how many references to NonStop and to cloud computing I have made over the past couple of months. It would also be very hard to miss my enthusiasm about the value NonStop brings to any company contemplating deploying clouds – whether private or public. It may prove true that NonStop’s only role is to play on the edge (of the cloud) or indeed, simply come to rely on the cloud as another type of resource that it can capitalize on. No matter.

I suspect now that few within the NonStop community would want to suggest that NonStop servers will never participate in cloud computing. The more the conversations about cloud computing that include references to NonStop the better, as it’s only a matter of time before Google begins to return responses to searches about clouds that include references to NonStop. With this post, the odds continue to get stronger in respect to this happening.

The fact remains, however, and as Schwartz observes as well, NonStop has been providing capabilities akin to what populists are now calling cloud computing for many years. And what is worth acknowledging, and I have no illusions about this – the ATM networks spanning the globe, all networked, and where financial transactions flow without any end-user awareness of where the resources exist - is as much a cloud implementation as anything Amazon.com, or even SalesForce.com may allude to.

HP Discover is now only a few weeks away and I for one will not be at all surprised at what is featured. No, I will not be surprised one bit to see NonStop and clouds stealing the limelight. Foolish as it may sound – but I will not say that it will never happen. Never again.  

With the coming of spring, expect more clouds!

It’s hard to miss the media attention being given to Apple these days. Their latest quarterly results are mind blowing, to say the least, with some financial analysts even speculating whether Apple’s valuation will be the first to break through the trillion dollar market-capitalization barrier. Who could have guessed all those years ago when Tandem was partnering with Apple?

There’s an air of excitement surrounding Apple that I haven’t seen around technology since Sony introduced the Walkman in the late-1970s and Motorola introduced the original Razr in the mid-2000s. And the picture above is of the wonderful display from flowering snowberry trees that surround the walkway to our house and yes, provide a fitting background to another technology marvel – the legendary Nissan GT-R, or Godzilla – that is now Margo’s daily drive.

The iPod shook up Sony, but with the iPhone and then iPad Apple is shaking up the whole industry – redefining the PC and refocusing the world’s attention onto smartphones and tablets. As another blogger expressed it recently, “looking backwards at the iPad disruptive innovation did happen. The iPad was a disruptive innovation. It was not predicted beforehand. It created a new product category.”

However, it is the ease of access to iCloud that has really captivated the marketplace and for those happy with the controls Apple has in place, being able to move from phone to tablet to laptop to desktop and enjoy the same user experience, picking up tasks exactly where they were left off – no matter the Apple device being used at the time – is for me another example of disruptive innovation.

Discussions about clouds have been going on for some time with Amazon.com and Salesforce.com, but almost overnight Apple has been singularly successful in moving discussions about clouds into the bigger, consumer, marketplace such that the value proposition has become perhaps even better understood.

HP is not blind to what’s going on either – mobility and cloud computing are at the top of the priority list driving their roadmaps. From product to services to consulting, pretty much every division within HP has a message in place involving clouds. The NonStop community is not being left behind or being ignored – quite to the contrary, there’s some serious heavy-lifting under way to ensure a role to play for NonStop in support of cloud computing.

Leafing through the pages of the March – April issue of The Connection, I came across the feature “Persistent Cloud Computing (PCS) Architecture” by Master Technologist for Enterprise Solutions & Architecture (ESA), HP, Justin Simonds. “Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in IT today. Articles abound on how cloud computing is a potentially disruptive architecture and how business will or will not, take advantage of this new computing paradigm,” Simonds open the feature, and he then adds “notorious outages and failures have recently occurred within public cloud systems have sparked huge interest in how and where HP NonStop can help customers in their journey to cloud services.”

In his post of October 2nd, 2011, “The ‘Big Five’ IT Trends of the next half decade: Mobile, social, cloud, consumerization, and big data”, that appeared on the web site of publisher zdnet.com, blogger, Dion Hinchcliffe, opened with “of all the technology trends on this list, cloud computing is one of the more interesting … among the large enterprise CTO and CIOs I speak with, cloud computing is being adopted steadily for non-mission critical applications and some are now even beginning to downsize their data centers.”

Perhaps of more interest to the NonStop community were Hinchcliffe’s closing comments on cloud computing, when he noted that “until cloud computing workloads can be seamlessly transferred back and forth between a company’s private cloud and public / hybrid cloud, adoption will be held back and favored largely for greenfield development.”

Really? With this in mind I went back to Justin Simonds for more insight about the feature he wrote for The Connection. “Cloud computing is ‘the’ topic today. About two years ago, Tom Miller, Keith Moore and I were working on a project where we wanted to bolster x86 architecture with some of the NonStop fundamentals and the idea of extending Pathway through an API came to mind; we all felt that NonStop involved in a hybrid architecture approach was a good thing,” Simonds explained.

“Wouldn’t it be cool to have NonStop overseeing a cloud environment? Since we were pushing servers out to a Linux server, which could be physical or virtual, it did not seem like a stretch to have the serverclass located in a cloud. Once we had that working, the same stuff we were doing with the local Linux servers could be done in the cloud. That is load balancing, failover and elasticity,” Simonds then added. “We demoed this at Discover in 2011 and everyone seemed fascinated.”

A subsequent exchange with Keith Moore provided even more insight into the program as, according to Moore, “our general vision all along is that most current cloud server instances support discrete application execution instances. We are thinking that this use of “the cloud” is somewhat limiting. Most of the current enterprise cloud deployments use application templates for creation of specific vertical enterprise functions. To the extent that existing enterprise applications currently work together in an integrated way, these are still deployed as mapped instances onto virtual cloud instance.”

But then, returning closer to home for the NonStop community, Moore suggested how “this is tremendous opportunity for HP and others to address a need for managing and monitoring these specific user needs. The benefits of moving to this sort of ‘templated-cloud’ are fairly well documented and often represented in a leveraged, cost-lowering business driver. However, if you look at legacy and future application development and deployment models you see that for most large enterprises, there are issues with inter-application complexity that cannot be simply resolved by deploying templates of vertical business applications.”

Reflecting on what Simonds too had suggested, Moore then continued on this theme as he pointed out how “the workloads in most pan-enterprise computer systems need to support dynamic, self-healing business functions. By using NonStop as a service manager for the cloud, there is significant value to almost all enterprise application scenarios presented for cloud usage. NonStop adds fault-tolerance, dynamic scale-up/down, and security/audit capability to real-time activities that might use cloud server instances of business applications.”

Digging even deeper into the topic, Moore then hit on what I believe could propel NonStop more visibly into the discussions taking place between CIOs and CTOs when he proposed how “in many enterprise applications, the usage is so dynamic, variable, and vulnerable when on the cloud that it needs some sort of external ‘daemon’ to manage and monitor the cloud instances. NonStop, using the fundamental capabilities of TS/MP to manage response time and availability, delivers this ‘cloud daemon’ capability. NonStop PCS uses standard NonStop TS/MP to deliver an always-on daemon for business application services.”

Much was written about NonStop and cloud computing following the demonstrations featuring NonStop interacting with clouds, private and public, at last year’s HP Discover event. My post on the subject, “NonStop revels in Clouds!” attracted more hits on my site than any previous post, and to me this was an indication of how topical clouds had become even within the NonStop community. Not a product and not strictly a service, Justin, Keith and Tom then provided education and put on workshops and more recently, began their initial pursuit of Proof of Concepts (PoC’s) that have already attracted considerable interest.

“We just completed a PoC for a financial institution, where Base24 was used to drive Java servers using PCS. The configuration consisted of two NonStop blade servers and a Proliant RedHat Linux server, all running the same Java application,” explained Tom Miller. “In all of the tests the application employed the JDBC driver connected to the database of record, which for this customer, was an SQL/MX database. We tested two configuration policies; load sharing - where all three nodes evenly shared the BASE24 client traffic, and a capacity burst scenario - where, as the primary NonStop node reached a resource threshold, TS/MP 2.4 began distributing client traffic to the other two nodes.”

“The customer was extremely satisfied with the results. We were able to achieve > 1200 TPS with both configurations with an average response time of 10 ms ~ 2ms,” Miller reported. And for me, this proved to be a reality check. Yes, the early observations about getting NonStop involved in this way and to have it a part of a hybrid architecture, were beginning to be realized and looked to be paving the way for possible future consideration by others within the NonStop community.

As I was wrapping up this post I went back again through the comments Simonds and Moore had provided to me and what was hard to miss was their enthusiasm over the potential benefits NonStop could provide. “I like to tell folks that if they understand the difference between deploying a business ‘server’ and a business ‘service’, then you can understand the need and the capability of PCS on NonStop,” Moore had said.

“NonStop is, and always be all about providing a business SERVICE to enterprise clients. PCS is envisioned as a tool to deliver a NonStop-level of SERVICE to more than just NonStop servers.” Simonds then closed by saying “writing the article was a way to get the message out to a broader audience and to let everyone know NonStop plays, or should I say revels in the clouds, especially with all the HP cloud announcements going on.”

And in the coming months, I anticipate hearing even more about clouds as we move deeper into the summer months and it will be with a lot of interest that I walk the exhibition floor at the upcoming HP Discover event – what more surprises are in stall from the team of Simonds, Miller and Moore!

Time to cut the cord …

The NonStop community may not be aware of changes within the Telco industry other than they consume a lot of NonStop servers. But it would appear that the appetite for NonStop at these Telco’s is only going to get bigger!

It’s only been a short few years that Margo and I have been working for ourselves, but right from the outset I was pleased with much earlier provisions I had made for such an eventuality. While the house was being framed and we talked of adding wiring for a whole-house music system that pulled tracks from a massive 200 CD carrousel, it was pointed out how beneficial it would be to wire the house in support of multiple phone lines.

The picture above is of me alongside the cabinets that were eventually installed to support the distribution of video as well as audio, as well as to house a digital PABX in support of four lines and twelve handsets. That all occurred more than ten years ago, and when we returned to take up fulltime residence once more in our home, it was Margo who was first to point out that now, all these years later, we were living in a museum!

No, we have no distributed audio throughout the house, as one-by-one the home audio amps failed and they were units no longer being manufactured. The CD carrousel is a relic and it would be much simpler if we could connect to satellite radio or even through a PC to something like Pandora where we could play music directly off our own custom playlists. As for television, who knew that every satellite receiver could be configured with DVR support inexpensively which greatly simplify their operation – no more running to a central wiring closet to check whether it’s recording or not. Much simpler to just have a receiver beneath each television set.

Did I also mention I found WebTV receivers still plugged into the wiring closet? Yes Margo was right – we do have a museum and working through it, “modernizing” the house, will not prove inexpensive so somehow it’s just dropped down the list of priorities to where sometime, later this year, we will work towards setting a timetable, with an appropriate budget. All the while allowing us to continue with running our business without any disruptions to the services we provide. But of course, and it certainly was remarkable foresight on my part to insist on all those phone lines. Right?

Well perhaps not. Turning the (electronic) pages of USA Today this morning, on my iPad, I came across the story “State laws let telephone companies end land-line services”. According to the reporter, Adam Sylvain, “first it was the street-corner phone booths and home delivery of telephone books. Now, land lines are on their way to becoming part of American telecommunications history.” Behind it all, Sylvain wrote was how “phone companies including AT&T say deregulating land-line phone service will increase competition and allow carriers to invest in better technology rather than expand a dying service.”

At one point during the construction of our home Margo and I walked in on the company wiring the house for phones, the intercom and internet access, audio and television distribution, security including cameras as well as interfaces into every light switch for possible future control system support, and the fire suppression system, and we saw some multiple hundreds of wires making up the 24“ by 8” wiring “harness” – with redundancy, we were told, resulting in only a few wires short of a thousand. All for what purpose? Sure, if termites ate all the wood in the house there would be no worries, there was enough cable in place to hold the house together!

Modernization of today’s homes has resulted in nearly everything being distributed, apart from power, but I am guessing only for a little while longer, wirelessly. With much greater use of commodity components than just a decade ago. All of which is beginning to sound all too familiar to anyone with an interest in the server marketplace. Former VP and GM of NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) and Mission Critical Business Solutions, HP, Winston Prather, in his farewell editorial in the March – April, 2012, issue of The Connection remarked “the products have evolved to keep up with the times: modern hardware, open standards and development environments. And we have done it while continuing to do what we do best: helping our customer deliver on their business commitments.”

In the USA Today story Sylvain includes a quote from a spokesman for AT&T, suggesting that the various bills before state legislatures, “levels the playing field for traditional land-line providers in a competitive environment. Relief of these (current) restrictions encourages additional investment in the new technologies that customers are demanding.” An investment that for those of us close to NonStop translates into a lot more NonStop servers being purchased.

In recent conversations with BCS marketing and NED product management there was scarce need to downplay the significance of this for NED – the arrival of 4G networks across America represents a whole new era for telephone companies; mobile carriers along with the traditional land-line providers were all switching from antiquated voice-grade infrastructure, over which data had been passing for the past couple of decades, to modern data-grade infrastructure that would be carrying voice. A complete reversal of how phone networks have been deployed since Alexander Bell first deployed his earliest handset. Out with copper and in with optics and wireless.

Behind it all it is increasingly the domain where NonStop servers excel. Getting public access to exactly how many NonStop servers are being deployed is difficult as phone companies are reluctant to acknowledge which vendors are involved, but figuring it out is pretty easy to do – just check the NonStop vendor community for the frequent, strategically placed, phone company logos in the PowerPoint presentations.

And we all have become familiar with the fact that nary a text message moves in America without passing through at least one NonStop server! Perhaps, more importantly, the HP OpenCall HLR application, based on the NonStop server (the computer of choice for businesses, such as phone companies, requiring the ultimate in reliability and data integrity, according to one HP data sheet I read), almost universal deployed within phone company networks, is also a clue to just how popular NonStop has become in this marketplace.

“The great thing about licensing software to phone companies,” one former colleague in sales suggested at a sales kick-off I attended a few years back, “is that the deals can be measured in telephone number size number of digits. Including the area codes!” Perhaps a bit of a stretch but recalling my time with Insession Technologies, this wasn’t all that far off the mark. If you really want to know where all the action is taking place when it comes to upgrades to running NonStop on blades, you can’t ignore what is happening across the Telco marketplace.

Our daughter, Anna, recently married and in her home she and her new husband, Erich, have no use for landlines – they rely solely on their mobile phone operator. This is not a trend that is showing any signs of lessening and according to the closing comments in USA Today, “as of last June, nearly 32% of U.S. households were wireless only, according to CTIA - The Wireless Association, up from 10.5% in 2006.” While I am not quite there yet, once we sort out our priorities and come up with a budget, I suspect we will head down the same path.

The wiring closet we have in the house was selected as it had the capacity to expand to accommodate all the additional stuff we were expecting to accumulate. All that may change, however, in the coming year as the “museum” begins to be disassembled. I will probably hang on to that CD carrousel only because I am short on space for storing 200 CDs, but then again, if I had the time, I could probably duplicate it all on Pandora. Perhaps, with a little diligence and equal amounts of prudence, I could even free up enough shelf space to add a few NonStop blades myself. Now there’s a thought - let me make a couple of quick calls, on my mobile, of course!

The other system …

Perhaps it doesn’t immediately spring to mind, but our data centers are running many different types of servers and yet, how often is it that IT elects to acknowledge the presence of NonStop as the other system!

Springtime came early to the Colorado Rockies and some could argue that we did a quick jump to summer. The weekend saw temperatures climb into the 80s and our flowering tress all came to life putting on a pretty amazing show as the neighborhood came to life. And of course, with such weather, it was off to the store to pick up supplies as the task of cleaning up after winter pulled me outdoors, and the picture above is as I walked away from a local warehouse store with my arms wrapped around buckets and mops.

Of course, on returning home it was all hard work as first I brewed some coffee, gathered together armfuls of magazines that had collected on the table, and headed for the garage. The bucket and the mops that I had purchased were still standing there but with coffee in hand I flipped through the pages of the magazines one last time. In haste I had picked up some very recent issues, and as I began to separate the latest arrivals to return them to the table, I came across an editorial by Sam Mitani in the May 2012 issue of Road and Track.

“While I’m excited by these new coupes – rear-drivers that fully embrace traditional sports-car virtues – are in the marketplace,” Mitani opened his column with this observation, but then much later made the comment about the new sports car he was covering, that “we see the brands as being quite different (and) will appeal to someone who already has another car in the garage … buyers will be interested in getting the original article as well!”

Whoa – now that’s quite the statement. Certainly, one goal of cleaning up after winter is to reveal a clean, sparklingly shiny house bereft of the detritus of winter’s storms; something closely resembling the original at the very least. A familiar site to those driving by, and a constant reminder each spring as to why we like to work hard to ensure the house looks good.

But then, the reference to the other car in the garage brought my attention back very quickly to IT, and to the other servers in the data center. It would be hard to miss all the effort being made by the folks at HP to clean-up NonStop and to ensure it faithfully performed as well as the original, but it’s also visible how NonStop is still one of many servers we see today within the data center – the other car in the garage!

Recently, I completed an opinions paper on the HP NonStop server and it has been made available from the HP web site. The topic of the paper, “Why more corporations today depend on HP Integrity NonStop mission-critical servers!” focuses on the continuing popularity of NonStop, even as the hardware leverages more and more commodity components. Perhaps the subtitle says it better, proposing how “Modern HP Integrity NonStop Servers continue to deliver on hallmark attributes – Availability, Scalability and Data Integrity.” To download a copy of this opinions paper, click on the title above.

As part of the executive overview I wrote of how our tolerance for failure is declining and yet NonStop prevails, and for this companies are thankful. We can no longer afford the time and our patience wears thin, I suggested, observing that whenever outages interfere with our ability to perform the task we need to accomplish our frustration is hard to miss. And yet, when it comes to general purpose computers, we often rely on them in support of much that we simply must do, even as they routinely fail us.

The system crashed, failed and is dead in the water! It doesn’t matter in the least how we describe what has happened, I then added, and there’s just nothing we can do. The application is simply no longer accessible. The pain experienced by companies responsible for disruptions like these is apparent to all – companies that disrupt the flow of services lose revenues, and perhaps even more damaging, weaken the value of their brand. Reestablishing a company’s reputation after outages can be prohibitively expensive.

And yet, even with data centers full of general purpose computers, there is another computer that changes all of this – with attributes every bit as valuable as the original Tandem. It’s the HP NonStop mission-critical server.

As I prepared for this opinions paper I was able to talk to many customers and to the HP sales and support teams working closely with them. Most of what was covered in these discussions made it into the final version, however during the final editing phase and for the sake of keeping the size of the paper manageable,  a couple of customer references didn’t make it into the final version.

Bank Verlag and VocaLink, both receiving “Meritorious Achievement” acknowledgements as part of last year’s NonStop Availability Award program, and recognized in the editorial of the September – October, 2011, issue of The Connection, as well as Greyhound  Lines  missed out, but they are no less significant or important.  Furthermore, VocaLink, a large European payments processor, was referenced in a feature written for The Connection and published in the same September – October, 2011, issue as referenced above on page 26 under the heading of “VocaLink, Specialist Payments Partner” and Greyhound was the subject of a recent customer case study developed for Attunity and available here.

Wolfgang Breidbach of Bank-Verlag IT Services division is well known across the NonStop community and has been featured as a speaker many times at various conferences. “Availability is a ‘must’ for us,” Breidbach has stressed more than once, and “we are the central access point for ATM and POS for the private banks of Germany. So, if we are not available, no POS payment with cards from those banks is possible.”

And imagine the fall-out in Britain should VocaLink lose its ATM network. “Every household in the country relies upon VocaLink’s services as it processes 94% of UK salaries and over 70% of the population uses its services to pay their household bills using Direct Debit, Faster Payments and standing orders,” according to sources within VocaLink. Essentially, any major outage at VocaLink would not just be a calamity, but potentially, a nation-stopping event.

However, all the customer testimonials that did make it into the final version of the opinions paper provide a compelling argument for why the latest, most modern, iteration of NonStop is excelling at a time where once again, availability of mission-critical applications is paramount. Consider the above references as being just being a small sampler, in terms of what can be found in this opinions paper, as there are many more customers represented. Yes, the hardware has changed significantly and much of the middleware present on NonStop today leverages the world of open, standards-based components and frameworks.

And yet, today NonStop is every bit as available, near-linearly scalable (both up, and just as importantly, out), secure, and with unmatched data integrity, as well as needing fewer human resources than ever before to manage it, in terms of application availability, and the negation of the frustrations that inevitably set in with alternate offerings – NonStop is appealing to professional CIOs that already have another server(s) in the data center.

General-purpose computers that proliferate within the data centers are just not up to the task of supporting the mission-critical applications that truly underpin the business. When it comes to 24 X 7 NonStop remains “the original article!” Perhaps we should entertain a little spring cleaning inside our data centers after all – I wonder just how many would be surprised to find another server in the data center - a clean, sparklingly shiny NonStop at the very heart of their operations.

Thinking SQL/MX? Rel 3.1 now delivers …

The last trip to Cupertino gave me a chance to check in with NonStop development for an update on SQL/MX and the exchange didn’t disappoint!

Last week I had the opportunity to spend time in Cupertino and to catch up with colleagues past and present. While much of my time was spent with those still working with NonStop there was also an opportunity to catch up with partners as well. And each colleague’s perspective add a lot to why I continue to be attracted to the platform and those still so very much committed to the NonStop platform always provide an interesting  view on whatever else is happening within HP.

Of course I drove to Cupertino over the previous weekend, but this time I had to add an extra night. The rain that had been a familiar presence in the Bay area the previous week had become a snow storm up in the higher altitudes of the Sierras and dumped several feet of snow onto the major interstate – I80. Cautiously navigating deteriorating roads, I soon came across two big-rigs on their sides straddling the median. Visibility dropped to near zero and what would normally take only an hour or so to pass, stretched on for most of the morning and well into the afternoon.

The picture at the top of the page is of the faithful SUV being washed at what is tantamount (dare I say, tandemount?) an institution for all who have worked at NonStop over the years. Only a few hundred yards east of the offices in Cupertino, along Stevens Creek Boulevard, a short distance after the I280 underpass, there’s barely been anyone who hasn’t washed their car at this facility and the number of discussions I have had with former managers and executives are too numerous to recall, and through the years there’s been many colleagues associated with Tandem and NonStop who have liked their cars clean as much as I do.

There’s much that’s been updated along Stevens Creek Boulevard, with car dealerships routinely changing hands and new malls rising from once vast expanses of concrete. At least the Range Rover dealership added some variety to their location, with some elevation changes to better frame the prowess of their cars. But these updates to the scenery haven’t strayed too far from the core theme of Stevens Creek – fast-food stalls and car yards.

Last year I wrote a white paper on NonStop SQL/MX that featured a number of interviews that I had conducted with many former colleagues who are still actively engaged with the NonStop platform. The white paper has now been made available on the HP web site and can be found and downloaded at
http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/downloads/NonStop_SQL_The_path_to_the_always-on_easily_administered_out-of-the-box_clustered_database_server.pdf

You can also read more of my observations about NonStop SQL/MX, written at the time I wrote that paper, in the post of July 31, 2011, “It only requires a few steps!” However, in the months that have passed, just like on Stevens Creek, there’s much that has been updated with this flagship NonStop product.

At the time I was writing the white paper, referenced above, a new release was anticipated, Rel 3.0 / 3.1, and when it arrived there was considerable discussion about it, particularly in the LinkedIn group, NonStop SQL Professionals. One discussion “NonStop SQL/MX R3.1 is out now!”, started by Frans Jongma, a Senior System Software Engineer with the HP NonStop Advanced Technology Center, began by highlighting new features - table rename, additional security features (separation of duties required for PCI Compliance, change ownership – yes, another security feature), SSL support, preprocessor changes to facilitate MP migrations, support for popular Oracle functions, like TO_CHAR, DECODE, COALESCE ,etc. to make it easier to migrate from Oracle to NonStop SQL.

When I chimed in and asked Frans for even more info, he was quick to respond with "I listed the main features that appealed to me. Renaming of tables can be very useful for DBAs and developers. The feature even allows renaming the underlying Guardian (the ZSDxxxxx.xxxxxxxx) filename. This was on a specific customer request. The new supported functions make it easier for users who are used to them on other DBMSes. Call it ‘standardization of features’”.

Longtime supporter of the SQL SIG, Scott Randall, came back almost immediately with “this release is just awesome!! The ability to RENAME tables, both ANSI name and the Guardian file is critical to customers that perform table migrations and use RDF. Think PK change or column name change, etc. IMHO, this is the most important new feature available since SQL/MX was first released. GREAT JOB HP!!!” Both Scott and Frans contributed to the white paper mentioned earlier, and it was encouraging to see them this active among the social media channels I follow.

I must say, though, that there were more than just a few individuals who had doubts about whether there would ever appear anything new from HP NED development. There were certainly numerous deteriorating roads that had to be navigated. But deliver they have and the reactions following the availability of this most recent update to SQL/MX have been very encouraging. The take-up of Rel 3.1 of SQL/MX has been cause for much excitement within NED,” according to Ajaya Gummadi, SQL Product Manager, within NED. “To date the stability and quality of the product has impressed our NonStop users and they are seeing the value of the many new features."

This wasn’t all that Gummadi had to say on this topic when I caught up with her last week. “NonStop developers are excited to work on new features that add value to customers as they develop apps for SQL/MX, and we had quite a few new apps go into production just last year”, she told me. “This brings the NonStop SQL on par with competitive databases while preserving its RAS fundamentals, and does this with quality and stability that NonStop customers are used to.”

Overheard while in Cupertino was the news of how HP NonStop SQL can now serve as a database repository in an Enterprise SAP environment. SAP ERP Apps and NetWeaver middleware continue to run “as-is” on HP-UX or HP Linux/Windows servers. NonStop database server becomes the Enterprise System of Repository integrating data from numerous SAP instances and non-SAP apps running on multiple platforms in real time and serving enterprise wide business processes. Again, expect to hear more of this in the near future.

In talking to customers and partners, the biggest surprise with this release was simply how much was included and deep down the list of stated customer requirements the supported features descended. When looking at past releases, where just a single new feature or component was introduced, Rel 3.1 marked a substantial change in direction for all involved at NED – product management and development. “Quality, stability and performance, and making it easier to migrate to SQL/MX– these were key goals for all of us within NED and already customers are benefitting from what we have been able to deliver,” Gummadi was quick to highlight.

And what comes next? Will there be another big release later this year? On this point Gummadi wouldn’t go into too many specifics, other than to acknowledge work was well advanced in a number of areas and that users would again be pleasantly surprised. For more about these releases, Gummadi was encouraging me to attend HP Discover in Las Vegas this coming June, something I had planned on doing anyway, but now most definitely will – news about what is to come next typically attracts a large crowd.

The presence of a strong product offering in support of SQL is incredibly important for the ongoing future of NonStop. Probably no other middleware offering could hold as strong a potential for greater visibility of NonStop within IT than NS SQL/MX – with it, and its ability to fully leverage the fundamentals the NonStop community continue to value highly, NonStop is certainly a viable server offering.

The car wash on Stevens Creek was every bit as good as it used to be, and the SUV was in a very bad way when I arrived. More than one eyebrow was raised as I drove onto the site among the many pristine vehicles in for nothing much more than a cosmetic refresh. Surviving the snow storms and picking my way through poorly illuminated roads, as I had done, had certainly cost us. And yes, many of these metaphors carry over to what the NS SQL/MX development team has faced of late.

It may be routine to simply roll-out new releases of NS SQL/MX but in reality, these days, nothing is guaranteed and no assumptions can be made about any program within HP. So yes, I am greatly encouraged with all that has happened to NS SQL/MX and with the success and accolades now coming its way.

Distributed grills and scattered data!

There continues to be new products coming to market and for the NonStop community, when it includes the NonStop server, this is good to hear – investments being made in NonStop by parties apart from HP is definitely a topic that’s always well received!

I love to grill! I love to cook in general, but I really like to grill. While I am the junior partner in our household when it comes to cooking, as soon as there’s any talk of barbecues I am the first one to head to the butchers to pick up the meat. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, as being an Australian it is all part of our heritage.

When it came time to landscape my house in Sydney and to hollow out a couple of terraces it was only natural to erect a brick retaining wall, and yes, within a bend of the wall a multi-grill barbecue was installed. And there were many opportunities to entertain the NonStop community – during the very first training session involving Tandem personnel from all over the world working on NonStop NET/MASTER it was only natural that there would be a barbecue at the house!

I am only ever one flight of stairs away from a barbecue in my home in Boulder, Colorado. The kitchen has a range in which, naturally, there’s a separate grilling rack. Outside, in the backyard by the pool, I insisted we build an outdoor kitchen with another grill - pretty much a duplicate of the one in the kitchen – surrounded by a walk up bar and this has been put to good use through the years with several ITUG Board and committee meetings held at the house.

But given the nature of the climate in Colorado, yet a third grilling area was established as we wanted an indoor “outdoor barbecue” be set up within the basement’s walkout area. And it’s proved every bit as popular as the outside, “summer only”, facility! The picture at the top of this post is of the outside barbecue and readers may recall other photos taken of this summer retreat showing it covered by a deep blanket of snow – check out the post of December 25^th, 2011,  “Falling down? Ouch!”

There were times when I took my love of the grill into the office – when Tandem Computers product managers were in building 4, Bill Heil arranged for a social gathering for all of product management and their friends in marketing and development and I grilled on the deck outside our second floor offices – not just the usual mix of hamburger patties and sausages, but a little lamb along with mushrooms, onions, bell peppers - the wafting smoke across the car parks was hard to miss. And then of course, Friday afternoons in the Tandem offices in Sydney would always feature a grill and I was never too far away.

These days, I am just one phone call away from any number of vendors I have as clients. The access may not always be as simple as traversing just a single flight of stairs, but with the option for Skype, WebEx, GoToMeetings, the ease of access is comparable. And while I am not carrying a tray of meat and vegetables, I am never too far away from my keyboard and writing pad. For the moment, I am enjoying a brief interlude as I have just completed a new opinion’s paper on “Why more corporations today depend on HP Integrity NonStop mission-critical servers!” for HP and I’m in the review cycle on a white paper on data integration for Attunity, a well-known software provider for enabling organizations to access data when and where it is needed.

The opinions paper for HP should be available for downloading from the HP web site and I will likely cover the highlights in an upcoming post – likely the very next one you will see posted. As for the Attunity white paper, I expect that to be wrapped up and available even as you are reading this post. But in both cases, the need to write these papers gave me a terrific opportunity to get a lot closed to customers and partners alike. In the research connected with both papers, I came across much that interested me and aroused my curiosity, but it was the observations about CIOs and the difficult times ahead (for many of them) that struck a chord.

In the post already referenced, “, “Falling down? Ouch! ” I wrote of how not all pursuits produce the results anticipated, and increasingly the role of CIOs, as I heard recently, is becoming less involved in technology and products and more involved in people, physical structures and security and with helping keep the business whole during increasingly uncertain times. As I cook I can sympathize here - there are times when I grilled up something that turned out to have little connection with what I had originally planned to cook.

But what really I was highlighting was how CIOs continue to move further away from the technology resources everyone else in a company may think that they are familiar with and are getting more engaged with the actual running of the business. In the white paper I am writing for Attunity (revisiting the topic of data replication and its role in data integration) I came across a special feature in the February 25^th, 2010, issue of The Economist where correspondent, Kenneth Cukier, had been interviewed by other journalists from the magazine.

“CIOs have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data,” Cukier explained to the other journalists. Deeper into the special feature, even more was revealed about the CIOs and the expectation of them having skills as statisticians when Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, expressed it a little differently, predicting “that the job of statistician will become the ‘sexiest’ around. Data,” Varian then explained, “are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.”

Storyteller/artist? Statistician? Extracting wisdom from the data? Fortunately, in the list of attributes there is still some reference back to software, but the earlier references I made to CIOs helping keep the business whole during increasingly uncertain times still holds true I suspect – company CEOs will expect them to have contingency plans for all situations, and that the data, feeding all that makes up business intelligence (BI) these days and the analytics that is a part of BI, remains accessible to all within the company looking for competitive edges.

In the post of January 30^th, 2008, “CIOs? Relevancy?”, I wrote of how in good times, and in bad, CIOs will always have a list of strategic initiatives being pursued. The only difference will be the depth of the list – in bad times the list will be a lot shorter with perhaps only three of four projects making the cut. And it should come as no surprise to any vendor that the tendency, in bad times, is to stay with the incumbents and avoid all risk-taking. Then again, this was written very early in 2008.

However, does that continue to make any sense all these years later? With the financial meltdown triggered late that year CIOs were counted on to help sort it all out and whether storytellers or statisticians, sticking with the same plot and avoiding risk taking didn’t look to be the way out – continuing to do what they had done, as the adage acknowledges, will only produce similar results. Attunity is now bringing something new to market in Attunity Replicate and CIOs will now be presented with even greater choice when it comes to better integrating data – will they be inclined to take a look?

My love of the barbecue led to me distributing grills throughout the house – inside and out. No matter the prevailing conditions, the heat of summer or the cold of winter. It mattered little; I could still keep on grilling. I could take my tray of meat up or down a flight of stairs and have access to a grill no matter what.

And data, and the way it has become scattered around a company, can it be as easily accessed when it has to be? That Attunity has elected to provide support for NonStop is a big plus and one I am pleased to see, of course, but the work still needs to be done to achieve the type of company-product stickiness all vendors look for; will CIOs stick with what they have or will they check their options?

There will always be difficulties ahead for new products and vendors are I’m under no illusion as to the difficulties that come with launching something new and yet the cyclical nature of our industry assures their message will be heard. However, having written this I think they have all the ingredients that they need, on the tray, and grills are out there, beckoning!

Is membership in mission-critical still open?

With so many references being made to mission-critical applications, has its usage become too general? And is the impact being watered down from over exposure? Or is the pie getting bigger with each slice of the pie becoming more valuable?

The situation came about during my last trip to Las Vegas where I had to stop by the local airport. Friends were arriving from Burbank, California, and I had promised to pick them up. We had arranged to meet alongside a baggage carrousel, and after grabbing a coffee I headed for the one I believed was where they would first appear. Imagine my surprise then, as I approached the carrousel to find a limousine chauffer holding up an iPad (pictured above) with a Mr. Davis brightly illuminated on the tablet’s screen.

Of course I would be interested to hear from the NonStop community about other unusual uses they may have seen of the iPad, but this pretty much best sums up the appeal of these new devices – no, there isn’t any limit to what you can do with them. The all-conquering iPad has found yet another new way to help increase our productivity. Yes, I know, it may be useless when it comes to swatting a fly, so we still may want to buy a Sunday paper. But seriously, as an end-point device iPad seems to be replacing many specialized devices, including laptops, and it brings with it an unprecedented wealth of applications for business and personal use.

Across several posts to the comForteLounge blog I have exchanged observations with comForte’s Thomas Burg. Initially, somewhat reserved about the potential opportunities the iPad might exploit, Burg soon agreed with me that any client device that could spur the creation of even more transactions just had to be good for NonStop. “But the trick, in terms of further embracing modernization,” Burg explained in the post of October 16, 2011, “Modernizing Applications? Client devices may hold some keys!”, remains “to fully and correctly understand the business requirements!”

Looking back at this comment I don’t think either of us could have second-guessed the iPads helpfulness in connecting with incoming passengers the way that I saw demonstrated in Las Vegas. On the other hand, with anticipation visible on the face of the waiting limo driver, I could easily recognize the mission-critical nature of this ad hoc application! And this is perhaps the most relevant aspect about the rise in popularity of the iPad and of their acceptance across the business community – they are increasingly being used in support of mission-critical applications.

In my most recent post to the comForteLounge blog, When did “almost” become “good enough”?, I again quoted Burg after I had asked him about the increasingly liberal use of mission-critical and where he thought the boundaries may lie. “If the service is down, and it REALLY, REALLY, hurts, and costs (you) a lot of money its operation is mission critical,” Burg began. “From an application perspective, I am thinking networks of ATMs, POSs, mobile phones and even stock exchanges prior to millisecond trading.”

I also made reference in this most recent post to the difficulties a number of Australian banks had experienced of late and of where it was reported that the National Australia Bank (NAB) CEO, Cameron Clyne, had said “unfortunately in any large organization these things happen from time to time.” It would be so easy for me to quote a line from Forrest Gump, but I will resist. Yes, it happens, from time to time – but following outages of this duration (almost 6 hours for the NAB) should we discount NAB’s ability to support mission-critical applications? And will anyone “downgrade” their IT group’s performance as a result – will a yellow “caution” flag be thrown that forces these banks to regroup?

In pursuing this further with Bill Highleyman, when it came to what I had broadly considered mission-critical, he broke apart the category into three distinct areas. In so doing he aligned closely with language I came across when reading the opinions paper by Jim Johnson, “Megaplex – an odyssey of innovation”, first published in 2009. Subsequent reading has now led me to understand that the exact origin of these terms dates back to earlier work but even so, Highleyman and Johnson were instrumental in bringing this to my attention.  “An outage of any sort is very expensive to a company in terms of dollars and reputation (such that) a prolonged outage could bring severe regulatory penalties and could even mean the demise of the company” then you have true mission-critical, or five nines of availability according to Highleyman. Above mission-critical, both Highleyman and Johnson included the category labeled safety-critical, a term that refers solely to those applications where any outage could lead to loss of property and even life and where recovery time has to be in seconds.

On the other hand, according to Highleyman, “an outage that prevents a company from operating fully, but where the company recovers painfully from the outage (then) as long as service is restored in a few hours,” Highleyman noted, you really are describing business-critical, or four nines of availability. Essentially a downgrade from a gilt-edged “AAA” status, to a lesser “AA+” status, and perhaps an indication to future IT hires that this is not a priority for this particular  bank, as well as being a response that a financial institution like the NAB would readily understand.

HP has its own perspective on categorizing “best fit solutions for critical workloads”.  According to a presentation given by HP Senior VP and General Manager, Martin Fink, at last year’s HP Discover event, among the slides he used was one where workloads were broken into three categories – Improved reliability, Mission-Critical resiliency and then, Zero downtime. Doing a little revisionist positioning and taking into account the work done by Johnson and Highleyman, it would appear that NonStop straddles the upper levels of business-critical, much of mission-critical and all of safety-critical. Particularly in light of mission-critical embracing pretty much anything HP produces – possibly more so in the future following the launching of Project Odyssey.

These exchanges however reminded me of my most recent post to the Buckle-Up-Travel blog. In the post of February 28^th, 2012, “It’s a Vette of another vintage …” I wrote of how badly abused the word “sport” has become. As I look at the cars around me I see the word “sports” appended to just about anything – from sports sedans to sports utilities. If a sports car is really best defined as a small, two seats, two doors car designed for high speed driving and maneuverability, as I observed, how did we manage to include the mighty Chevrolet Suburban as a “sports” utility van? Or has the expression sport become simply a reference to an aspiration rather than a description of an attribute?

In other words, even where the branding of mission-critical may appear too broad, and where almost any cluster-configuration no matter the type of system included qualifies, should we be concerned? And if we are aware of this, is it all necessarily bad? Is any subsequent dilution of the meaning of mission-critical, however perceived, harmful to the message of NonStop? While I most definitely cringe a little as I read of some scenarios described as mission-critical, at the same time I keep my fingers crossed that eventually, even with the worst examples, companies may learn by their experiences and seek out more comprehensive solutions.

Mission-critical computing has never been about participating in a special group or even about becoming members of an elite club – new participants will be joining routinely, often despite themselves. It’s about a pie that is increasing in size and about the necessity of some to really push for greater levels of what only comes naturally to NonStop – availability, scalability data integrity and security. New initiates may get by with the basics, where even business-critical will suffice, but they too will eventually push up into mission-critical – perhaps even higher, as the demands of business dictate.

Marketing, and indeed advertising, does have an affinity for latching onto labels that research tells them “sells”, and for many of us seeing the application of mission-critical as broadly as it is being done today causes us to cringe. However, there’s no escaping just how prominent a role the HP NonStop System plays today in supporting businesses worldwide in their pursuit of providing their customers with the most-available applications possible. And of that, I have little I can contend with.

It's the data ...

My earlier forecasts of a hybrid world, based on the flexibility inherent within HP’s BladeSystem are closer to realization and that user acceptance may be driven by our needs to more easily and cost-effectively pursue data integration.

In a recent posting to another blog I opened with a storyline about my affinity for the open road. I have developed a preference for driving and am now very familiar with the more popular motels along the way, and given a Friday afternoon departure, come Sunday evening I could be anywhere including San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, even Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Flying is no longer fun and the sense of adventure long gone – we all lost something following September 11th, 2001, and I get the sense we will never again enjoy the freedoms once so readily accepted as just part of everyday life.

So now, meet the new mobile command center of Pyalla Technologies, as we opt for something a little more to our liking than we typically find at motels. Parked temporarily in the driveway, is the new RV and Margo and I are busily engaged in fitting it out in a style suitable for both, event participation, such as HP Discover, as well as the many weekends we spend promoting Pyalla Technologies at road courses around the countryside. The picture above is of us both after we had closed the deal. More about this latest development will follow shortly in a separate posting to the blog, Buckle-Up-Travel.

However, out on the highways, it’s not just about the motels. There are plenty of other things to be concerned about as you proceed to your destination. Anyone who has had to traverse Los Angeles and been forced to “jump” freeways – connecting with the needed exit from the correct lane, all the while watching everyone else trying to kill you (as they clearly appear to be doing from my vantage point behind the wheel), knows of the risks involved and how to do so as non-disruptively as possible takes years of practice and an iron-clad sense of immortality.

A modern RV is very much a hybrid – anyone who has attempted to lift up the user-manuals provided by the manufacturers quickly becomes aware that this is not a vehicle that is quickly mastered. And there is little opportunity to learn as you go when you pull away from the dealer’s parking lot. A modern RV is built on a truck frame – and this chassis comes complete with its own set of manuals. Everything electrical, for instance, is 12 volts DC. But then a modern RV is also a home – and the accommodation element is similarly supported with another set of manuals, this time, everything electrical, for instance, is 110 volts AC.

Early observations suggests that nothing should work seamlessly together and yet, driving down the highway, it all seems to work just fine with the driver so effectively shielded from the complexity implicit in managing multiple systems concurrently. As I paged through the documents I had been provided I couldn’t help thinking about the convergence that had to have gone on behind the scenes to make it all work, and of how a series of monitoring systems were taking the guess work out of which button to press – yes, if the RV was moving, it made sense for the refrigerator to use battery power and not to switch to propane gas!

In the post of August 11th, 2011, “GuardianAngel? NonStop revels in Clouds!” I wrote about how I continue to speculate about the future of NonStop and that I had a strong sense that the industry is turning ever so slightly and pursuing a course where the capabilities of NonStop will come to the fore. As I wrote that post I once again mused about what I sensed was a return to what NonStop has always proved effective at doing; shielding imperfection behind a level of availability simply not matched in any other manner.

The focus of this post had been the GuardianAngel demonstration, performed at the 2011 HP Discover event, that I had found most intriguing and where I suggested how this was something that’s exciting and is now out there, demonstrable. End users working with NonStop solutions, developed using modern standards that leveraged open interfaces, were unaware that NonStop was leveraging private as well as public cloud resources to offset unexpected loads making extraordinary demands on NonStop resources.

One of the products that had been used in the demonstration had been the database and underlying message environment of newcomer, uCIRRUS, and I was reminded of the post I wrote following an email exchange I had with uCIRRUS CEO, Peter Richards. I must admit, I have been very impressed with what uCIRRUS has accomplished with their product XPRESSmp and how as an in-memory database, it was able to front-end NonStop SQL/MX for the GuardianAngel demonstration in an extremely abbreviated timeframe. As a kind of continuous ingest and load front-end, it was XPRESSmp interacting with the potential myriad array of sources including social network feeds, RSS feeds, even items such as web logs, as well as other data streams, structured or unstructured.

Richards provided me with more information as we discussed a possible future play of uCIRRUS as part of HP's mission-critical x86 roadmap announced with Project Odyssey back in November, 2011, but given uCIRRUS ability to easily port its parallel software processor XPRESSmp to other chipsets - such as Itanium – would provide a kind of “standards compliant, systems level, micro-cloud providing uniformity of environment of those chipsets at the OS systems level thereby enabling commonality and / or connectivity of application environments, in addition to an unprecedented scale-up of multicore efficiency,” according to Richards, effectively shielding the layers above the micro-cloud from potential complexities that could arise with the presence of multiple chipsets.

Throw into this mix how the product XPRESSmp is being targeted towards time-critical Big Data, there clearly could be some advantages to the NonStop community as we all come up to speed with where Converged Infrastructure, Project Odyssey 's mission-critical x86 offerings and Cloud Computing are all headed – greater exploitation of the one platform; the HP BladeSystem.

For nearly five years I have been extolling the benefits of hybrid clusters, all within the same box – mixing NonStop with HP-UX or Linux and even Windows. And now with Project Odyssey, and with x86 chipset supported in the same chassis as HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop, my vision for NonStop may be realized. There's still a ways to go, of course, but I have to believe that at some point, something along these lines is likely to appear. After all as far as connectivity goes, in the heterogeneous environments we have today, outside of any single chassis NonStop continues to play well with others!

But what applications will be first to exploit this hybrid capabilities? I have often been asked this question and the push-back (on potential benefits) I have received has centered on whether with the potential hybrid nature of Project Odyssey – is this really a solution looking for a problem.

However, in the discussions and emails I have had with Richards, and more recently with Justin Simonds of HP, where we covered micro-clouds, Big Data, unstructured data, etc. I saw a distinct possibility that those asking these questions may have overlooked the obvious. It’s all about the data and perhaps less about the business logic! “The idea of a loosely federated group of systems makes sense,” suggested Simonds as we looked at why we would want to have a hybrid configuration within the HP BladeSystem.

“Expect to have Vertica, say in support of Big Data, Autonomy for Unstructured Data, NonStop SQL/MX for ODS / Operational BI, maybe a legacy style Data Warehouse on Unix – all platforms are best-of-breed in their respective areas,” added Simonds. “Furthermore, imagine a smart front-end router, in particular uCIRRUS with XPRESSmp, that could also analyze queries as they arrived and ensure they made it to the right platform. Furthermore, should data need to get from say NonStop to Vertica then uCIRRUS (given its massive ingest, broadcast and data stream analysis capabilities) also provides the massive load support needed.”

Now there will be other products that will be able to play here and about that I have no doubt; what this highlights for me is that there will be real requirements to move data. Just as there will be real requirements for monitoring solutions to step up and oversee this movement of data as happening on just a single entity. Make it too complex and it will simply prove too difficult to “drive”. uCIRRUS with XPRESSmp may hide the differences of the chipsets just as the HP BladeSystem will simplify the infrastructure, but NonStop may end up overseeing it all, 24 X 7 and scalable in ways that make other architectures envious.

Shielding complexity has been a feature of NonStop for decades – one of the lesser-known attributes of NonStop, perhaps. HP’s one platform, the BladeSystem, is only going to make greater shielding even more imperative. And perhaps it is the potential conflagration of data that is arising all around us that will add the impetus to greater reliance on NonStop. Given the opportunity to be behind the wheel of that system could prove to be even more attractive than anything we could come across on any highway!