Of Crowds, Content and Corridors! The new three Cs of social media!

So, it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere and it’s keeping many of us housebound. Surely, this is a good time to check our favorite social media site!

This time of year is always a time to reflect. Whether it is the inclement weather that keeps us indoors or the winding down of the American football season, it’s all just reminders that this is a time when everything slows down. And rests! While biding my time I have been meeting with clients and working with a number of them preparing for webinars, the release of customer case studies and opinions papers, but in general, taking a second look at my office and wondering whether it is time to reorganize.

I have been back in Boulder working from my home office full time for just about a year. It was last January that the decision was made to forego the commuting to Southern California and to enjoy the home we built over a decade ago. As anyone that has experienced being an absent landlord of their own home can tell you the first few weeks are spent simply reacquainting yourself with spaces you haven’t been to in a while. But the real shock comes when you realize, after so many years, your home has become a technology museum in urgent need of serious upgrades. However, that’s a story I will leave for another time.

The picture above was taken while Margo and I were with friends at a Starbucks in Hawaii – escaping from an early Colorado winter, and while this year we took a break in Key West, Florida, there’s something special about time spent in the Hawaiian Islands, a vacation paradise. All too soon, however, it’s back to the “mainland” to face winter and the memories are all too quickly gone. Yes, it’s back to casting a watchful eye skyward and making sure you have plenty of bottles of windscreen washer fluid at hand. Looking out on a dormant landscape, the flowers and birdlife of paradise that is Hawaii – even Key West of a few weeks ago – seem otherworldly!   

Of course, if you happen to dwell in the Southern Hemisphere this is all hard to imagine, as its residents are blissfully unaware of the severity of winter and of how low the thermometer can drop in an instant. Looking back through the posts of the last couple of months there are pictures of Fall in the Rocky Mountains followed pretty quickly by a couple of photos taken of the house and the village nearby – each of them depicting the hold winter has on us right now.

What hasn’t been left to bide it’s time in the dormant season, so as to speak, has been the NonStop community’s participation in LinkedIn groups, the “preferred” social media site for business people. Membership in many of the groups that are focused solely on NonStop continues to rise and no more so than on the site “Fools for NonStop!” Created in haste only last year in response to comments made to a number of us within the NonStop community about how is it possible that we still harbor no ill-will to a platform we have been fond of for so many decades – yes indeed, the 40^th birthday for NonStop is less than three years away (November, 2014) – and surely, as passionate as we all are, we must be fools!

I have watched over the group since it was created and have been pleased by the steady growth in interest and have watched the membership grow to where in a matter of only a few more days, it will reach 300 – not that big a number but as you look at the membership of other LinkedIn groups, particularly those ties to a vendor, it’s not that often that you see membership push into triple figures - let alone multiples. And while there’s always a concern about there being too many groups to track and that interesting material on a customer deployment is hard to come by, crowds typically attract crowds and in time, discussions that develop “legs” and foster a lengthy exchange of comments are pretty much found in those groups with larger membership. When you see the number of comments posted pass 100, as I have seen on a couple of sites, it’s pretty easy to tell that the discussion struck a chord with the majority of the membership.

If you haven’t yet joined the LinkedIn Group “Fools for NonStop”, or indeed were unaware of its existence, with the New Year now behind us it may be a good time to think about becoming a member. It’s easy to forget about the presence of such groups and about how passionate the NonStop community remains, and even as social media channels still have their critics, as I often state, this “genie has definitely left the bottle!” No, if you want to read about issues popular among the community, there’s no more immediate way to check it all out than to visit your favorite group. And with a group name like Fools for NonStop, it is hard to forget! This year, for the very first time, even the American football “Superbowl” will have its very own social media center monitoring twitter, facebook and other popular sites!

Students of Marketing are well acquainted with the “four Ps” – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Although, I often read where today there’s a fifth P involved with more being considered all the time to the point where some advocates talk of as many as “seven Ps” having added - Process, Physical Evidence and People. More recently there have been those who have been championing the “four Cs” where a more consumer oriented focus has been applied – Consumer, Cost, Communication and Convenience. However, when it comes to social media and the role social media channels are playing when it comes to the manner in which we share information, then perhaps it’s time to consider our own brief list of attributes!

Recently, in a short exchange with a client I wrote of how crowds attract crowds and of how that hasn’t changed through the ages – communities develop around something that appears to be popular. Content continues to fuel everything of course – good stories are the basis for pulling in a readership (and membership), and that differs little from what’s worked for decades, perhaps centuries. And finally, promotion and the marketing of good content has now flattened out to include multiple social networking “corridors” that have proliferated and essentially ensured that pretty much any company can tap into global markets and businesses. Yes, welcome to the new, “three Cs” of social media (and yes, let’s leave marketing well-served with as many Ps as they come up with, and for the moment, ignore the consumer oriented C’s).

The new three Cs are Crowds, Content and Corridors. OK, Channels, if you prefer, but I was looking for something new in this context and Corridors suggest passageways a little more clearly than Channels! And today, Channels carries so much baggage for anyone working in Marketing.

First up, your social media drive will falter if you fail to attract a crowd. So then, focus on good content – and not just penned (or ghost written) by the CEO, as this quickly become repetitive and more often than not, boring! Finally, and most importantly of all, ensure your social media folks plug into all the channels related to your products and services and have good writers prepared to enter the more popular corridors to ensure your message doesn’t become diluted, or worse, corrupted.

For all of us that are a part of the NonStop community we are more than fortunate to have so many blogs, online forums, web publications and eNewsletters featuring news on NonStop – and just a click or two away. There’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t know when to select NonStop on racks or blades just as there’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t know of who is developing in C/C++ and who is developing in Java. And no, problems that some may have had with earlier releases of NS SQL/MX are just a thing of the past – check the latest with Rel 3.0 and 3.1! It’s all out there in blogs and on groups!

The dormant season will shortly end and biding our time will no longer be a luxury any of us can afford– so take some time and check out the “fabric of ink” that has emerged and visit the places where the buzz about NonStop prevails. In time, we will find out more of what we need to know just as we will tap into resources that are essentially free. Of course, we need to balance all we read and come to appreciate who to turn to and who to avoid, but this is not new “news” for any of us.

Are we foolish for continuing to leverage all that the HP NonStop Server provides, almost four decades on? Even as the NonStop platform continues to transform and take on more of the mantle that is modern, will we be viewed as poorly informed, perhaps even worse, when we stick with it? As simply as I can express it – I don’t think so! And on that, I suspect, I will hear much more in the coming months, no doubt.  

The forgotten attribute …

In prior posts I have covered the key attribute of “availability” and within numerous other posts I have written about “scalability” but, when it comes to the key attributes that contribute to success of the HP NonStop Server platform, it’s time to address “data integrity”!

With winter firmly entrenched I have been returning to our garage routinely, and what a sad site it is – battery trickle-feed chargers scattered around the floor keeping cold batteries alive. Having chalked up a lot of miles in 2010 it seems quite strange to see vehicles left this way – brooding almost, seemingly ignored and forgotten, as conditions ill suit rear-wheel roadsters.

Should you look at my social blog, Buckle-Up-Travel,the June 27th, 2010, post “…finally succumbing to heat” you will read of an incident at the Willow Springs track that sidelined our car based on something that for many is simply ignored. Power-steering fluid – when was it that you last heard someone talking passionately about something as inane! And it was NonStop Enterprise Development (NED) engineering Director, Mike Plum, who reminded me that “power steering fluid takes a beating on a track like Willow Springs with the long sweeping turns. The fluid is under extreme pressure and once it boils the observed failures can be: fluid expulsion, blown cap, blown reservoir, blown hose or pump lock up.”

The picture at the top of the page? It was taken at Willow Springs but earlier in the day as I returned to the paddock and it would be the following session when everything went horribly wrong. That day remains the low point of that year and a reminder that sometimes it can be the little things that, left unmonitored, wreak havoc at the worst possible times!

It was a little deeper within that same post where perhaps the most blatant of observations was made by my good friend, Brian Kenny, who pointed out to me that “power steering fluid may indeed be the ‘forgotten fluid’ (and that) the extra grip the Toyos provided overwhelmed the standard offering!” Indeed, I had completely forgotten to check with anyone about the likely negative impact on the power steering when running stickier track tires.

While there continues to be considerable coverage in forums and blogs today when it comes to scalability, particularly the almost linear scalability that comes with deploying the HP NonStop Server platform (and the many business benefits derived from this key NonStop characteristic in terms of being able to scale up, and down), there are other very important attributes as well, none more written about perhaps than availability and of how the NonStop Server platform remains available despite failing components. In attaining this all important attribute the chosen architecture addressed scalability as well, and in a highly intelligent manner. To read more about my observations on the importance of availability, check the post of October 31st, 2011 “What price availability?”

However, the attribute that I have come to appreciate of late, even as I have begun referring to it as “the forgotten attribute,” is data integrity. A quick check of groups on LinkedIn revealed little about the topic, and while there will be some within the NonStop community who will take exception to my observation, all the same, it seems of late that while we all accept it as belonging in the mix of key attributes of the NonStop Server – availability, scalability and data integrity – it’s more from a historical perspective than anything else. It’s always been associated with the NonStop Server I have to admit, but beyond that? Very little of the floodlights that are directed at availability and scalability fall on data integrity, the forgotten attribute.

And yet, in recent exchanges with NED product management it came up a couple of times, and in each instant was tightly coupled with availability in a manner I had not previously given enough consideration – after all, availability needed little by way of supporting attributes, I reasoned. “Data Integrity is indeed related to availability. After all, what would tend to be the ultimate outage (short of a fire or natural disaster)? Answer: A data integrity problem that took hours or days to recover a database to its proper state,” was how product management’s software boss, Tim Keefauver, explained the relationship.

In the same exchange Keefauver then added “It is with this thought in mind that data integrity is such a high priority for NonStop and always has been. For example, if due to a data corruption a numeric becomes non-numeric then some programs will issue a fatal error and end. This can result in an outage of the application even though no bad data got to disk or to the eyes of end-users.” And with this explanation, Keefauver had my undivided attention.

From the moment data arrives on the NonStop Server measures are taken at every step to ensure there’s no loss of data integrity. Opportunities to corrupt data as it is manipulated, stored and subsequently retrieved have been examined and addressed through a combination of what today’s modern Intel chipsets provide as well as the implementation of more accurate CheckSum algorithms.

When it comes to the role played by CheckSum algorithms it was Bill Highleyman, well-known commentator and author / editor of the Availability Digest, who observed how “in order for data corruption to occur, it presumably would have to be in the path through ServerNet, the CLIMs, and the disk units themselves. That is what a good CheckSum (algorithm) protects against.”

This morning, the waitress at our local diner asked me if I could wait a spell as they just shut down the computer! Yes, it was another reminder of how we have all experienced at one time, or another, the frustration that comes with data that is just not right – for years, “computer error,” was synonymous with a modern workplace. You wanted computers, right? Well, you just have to live with the occasional computer error and perhaps you need to go so far as to retain manual processes as a back-up.

But those days are long gone, and increasingly as traffic between computers escalates the obligation to provide accurate data is paramount – corrupted data not only impacts our own computers, of course, but can lead to cascading failures that can carry well beyond our own business pursuits in a way that carries with it a lot of potentially unwanted headlines.

Keefauver’s observation was later confirmed with NED product management Director, Randy Meyer, who explained that “Tim’s exactly right – data integrity issues are often what cause the hours/days of downtime that we read about in the papers. A fault occurs, creating a corrupted database. Then it takes hours or more to recover that database.” A computer system may indeed be available but if the confidence in the accuracy of the data is lost, then it’s no more available than a system that has crashed. Perhaps worse – actions may have already been initiated that then require considerable negotiation to back out.

It may not always be on the minds of users, but the data integrity provisions of the NonStop Server and their contribution to much greater levels of availability certainly are something we shouldn’t be oblivious to – there’s no reason at all to overlook the work that is done in this area and the engineering time spent in ensuring there’s never any loss in data integrity.

As for our end-users, never having to deal with bad data is of course its own reward and perhaps that is the most important aspect that comes from supporting this key NonStop Server attribute. Far from being the forgotten attribute, all of us should breathe a collective sigh of relief over just how seriously NED takes data integrity.

A trip to the other side!

The recent predictions provided by The Standish Group in a conference call included forecasts many within the NonStop community would be hard pressed to find fault with – but it will need us to take a second look!

Escaping the cold of winter turned out to be rather easy. And I didn’t have to leave the continental United States. Yes, in my last post I wrote of how shortly I would be in the Florida Keys – specifically, Key West – and now it’s only a day or so before I will be back in Boulder. For the time being, however, I am rested and warm even though a cold front moved through last night and despite the fact that I haven’t strayed too far from my laptop or mobile phone, just looking at the scenery made me feel like I am on vacation!

The photo above was taken as I stood underneath one of Key West’s better known landmarks marking the end of US Highway 1. A bit of a letdown in some respects, as this arterial highway simple peters out on a backstreet a little south of Key West’s more famous thoroughfare, Duvall Street. While the actual southernmost outcrop of land is designated by a highly decorated buoy, the centerpiece of many a T Shirt hanging displayed in the tourist shops, no such luck for the Highway 1. Just a simple green mileage marker zero tacked to a thin metal post.

Somehow it seems highly relevant to see mile marker zero as the year came to a close. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Key West is indeed at the end of the world. Crossing a short bridge only brings you to another small island before there’s another island and another all the way back to Key Largo before one final bridge crossing takes you into Florida proper. It is a 160 mile drive back to Miami airport but looking south, out across the reefs, Cuba is only 90 miles away and you don’t miss the connections that once existed between both locations – an original Cuban Cigar “factory” still exists just behind the bustling Duvall Street.

However, you could also argue that Key West is the beginning of the world as just across the street from mile marker zero is another sign. For drivers headed the other way, they will see that it is the beginning of US Highway 1 and the picture here is of me standing beneath the sign having walked less than twenty feet. The symbolism seems appropriate as the calendar ticks over for the start of another year. Yes, from one side of the street I could look back while across the street, I could look forward – all it took from me was a commitment to cross the street!

For the NonStop community there is so much that we could be concerned about. So many difficulties foreseen as to where the NonStop product line is headed. And yet, there is just as much that we should be pleased about, not the least being that the NonStop Server product roadmaps continue to point to a sustained presence for at least the next five years, possibly longer. Looking up at the signs we can easily see that Tandem is behind us and that NonStop is ahead of us - crossing the street after all isn’t that hard to do.

This is all background, however, to the thoughts I have had as the year begins. Just before leaving Boulder I participated in a research exchange (REX) online meeting put on by Jim Johnson, Chairman of The Standish Group. It was where The Standish Group provided their predictions for the coming year and where, apart from the usual topics, a couple of fun items thrown into the mix to ensure the discussions would be lively. If you are interested to read more about “Plaque Eating Guinea Worm” follow the link http://blog.standishgroup.com/news and scroll down to Standish Annual Predictions.

However, it was within the series of predictions covering likely areas of investment for 2012 – a subject that was subsequently divided into cold, lukewarm and hot markets – where I did think Jim and I were on the same page. Readers will know of my sustained interest in all things associated with the data center so when it came to looking at the data center, The Standish Group suggested that what will be part of a cold market will be “anything that are not cloud, social networks or mobile - the cold markets are enterprise applications, hardware and infrastructure software, and application development tools.” Furthermore, according to The Standish Group, “This is especially true of selling into the corporate data center. There will be good activity for organizations supplying cloud and social network services.”

It doesn’t take a lot of investigation to realize that apart from an increasingly smaller group of institutions most in-house development is being gradually scaled back with ever-widening acceptance of packaged solutions being the way to go. IBM mainframes remain the exception here, as few “modern” applications have been brought to market that target this platform – after all, off-the-shelf CICS application packages were pretty rare even in the 1980s! Not so NonStop and it remains a testament to how relevant the platform remains that packages continue to appear in support of the financial services an telco marketplaces.

My own observation about social networks and mobile solutions touching the data center hasn’t lessened in the years I have been posting to this blog. For me the rise in popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPad have been due mostly to the availability of apps – and yes, the design of these apps is beginning to change the way we perceive application should be constructed. For instance, why have a single application that captures all of our contact info including name, address and phone numbers such that when it comes to just changing our phone number, we have to load it all and scroll to the section where our phone number was entered.

Separate apps for name change, address change, as well as change of phone number represent a cleaner, more manageable way to capture information and involve less bandwidth and more tailored security. But what has any of this got to do with NonStop? And why would any of us within the NonStop community be interested? Simply put, as we look at new solutions from vendors providing them for the NonStop Server, those applications that provide support for access via social media channels and that present information in the more modular manner we see today depicted on our phones and tablets, will prove to be winners. Other solutions; less so!

It comes as no surprise that The Standish Group then proposed that when it comes to hot markets – those areas that will experience double-digit growth – include “cloud computing, social networking, security and mobile applications.” This is just The Standish Group’s way of saying that traditional views we may retain about what the data center should look like will be changing pretty rapidly in the near term. And by this, I am not so much stressing the cloud computing will permeate every square inch of our data center but rather, become an increasingly important resource.

Got Tapes? Sure do! Disk? Have them as well! Cloud? Yes we are connected and leveraged! Cloud computing will be that extra resource we all wish we could have tapped many years ago. It will become the low-cost service as well as storage option that will save many a data center from any need to make a short term hardware upgrade decisions. It will save a bunch of money when used effectively.

Cloud computing and social media do not represent a threat to the NonStop Server – you just have to cross over to the other side of the street and take a look at sign from a different point of view. One sign may tell us that it is the end and yet, there it is, only a few feet away, another sign telling us it is the beginning. It may be only a few faltering baby steps that need to be taken but I fully expect to see this year a number of data centers where the NonStop Server is actively tapping almost unlimited resources that cloud computing provides. Just as I fully expect to see companies running NonStop serving up business data via social media channels.

All too easy? Twelve months is a long time and we have all seen more dramatic events unfold in less time. Again, it’s all just a matter of wanting to cross the street!

Falling down? Ouch!

For the past five years I have ended posts to this blog with observations about topics of interest to us all and each year, those observations have covered a lot of territory. And through it all, NonStop continues to remain relevant and there’s little to suggest any lessening in its importance for IT. Especially in 2011!  

The year is winding down and already here in Boulder we are into our third or fourth snow fall of the season. Yes, there will definitely be a white Christmas this year, although I suspect we will not see snow falling on the day, but with more than ten inches having already fallen overnight it will be a while before it clears away. The picture above was taken looking out from the kitchen and across to the BBQ. A rather forlorn-looking place under this much snow, and a distant reminder of the good times of summer!


In a few days I will be in the Florida Keys, escaping the cold of the Rockies and catching a few rays! I have only been back there once since I took advantage of its proximity following the 1993 ITUG event in Orlando. With a weekend to spare in between ITUG and the Tandem sales kick-off in Palm Desert, California, it seemed to be the logical place to go and yes, I managed to sit close by to Jimmy Buffett as he enjoyed lunch in his own restaurant, Margaritaville! Yes, it will be an escape but it will also bring back memories of warm summer days.


I am often reminded of the cycles we witness in business – companies follow a lifecycle curve as does technology and products. The simple bell-curve most of us a familiar with reminds us that there are downward trends just as there are upward trends, and the trick for any in business is to step out of a perceived downward trend, reinvent themselves and ride a new trend upwards. Sounds rather simple, but many companies have been adroit at doing this for decades.


And the same is true of technologies as well – hanging on to a technology too long and the ride down may prove disastrous. From the famous buggy-whip company that failed to realize it was in the transportation business to the once all-conquering Polaroid (not to mention my own favorite, the Rambler or Nash Rambler that continued to be assembled in Australia up until the mid-1970s) there are just too many to name when it comes to adapting to changing markets.


As each year has ended I have selected a different theme each time. A quick look at the final post of 2010 featured my observations of the potential impact tablet PCs would have in the coming year – specifically, the Apple iPad. As 2009 wrapped up I wrote about the greening of the data center and how there was much to be done to trim energy costs from our data centers. Looking further back to the last post of 2008 I packaged my message of innovation inside a story of traditions and yes, wrote of how NonStop did have a tradition of innovation. Finally, revisiting the final post for 2007 I provided commentary on ACI’s changing tastes in primary vendors, and of how there were some signs that all was not lost for NonStop and for HP, even with the switch to IBM, a story that has certainly seen many strategy twists and turns ever since.


Running through these posts and then looking at what has proved popular to readers, the posts featuring Clouds, Innovation, Security and the Environment, as well as anything to do with ACI continue to top the list, and so finishing each year as I have done with commentary on these subjects has gone a long way, I am sure, to help bolster the interest in these topics. And yet, it is the changing shape of the data center that continues to intrigue me the most.


Simply put, it is the data center where issues of changing networks and the support of client devices, the concerns over the environment, security, and the innovation, all of this drives become more evident. After all, for the enterprise these represent a sizable investment in technology and people and continue to be at the very heart of initiatives aimed at reducing the enterprises costs and where innovative solutions often appear first. And yet, 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 with people, physical structures and security and with helping keep the business whole during increasingly uncertain times.


In other words, what may have once been popular may become less influential just as what is currently a trend may falter with wiser heads leaning more favorably towards standard-setters of only a short time ago. No, this is not an observation that there are CIOs electing to take backward steps, but rather in continuing to move forward are more receptive to what is tried-and-proven! Punch-cards, paper-tape and acoustic couplers are still items only to be found in museums, and of that I am sure I am on safe ground.


But today, for many with close ties to the data center, our discussions on Clouds, and on Cloud Computing models, is frequently seen in the context of this all being part of next stage in data center evolution. Software as a Service (SaaS) provides a number of strong arguments in favor of adopting this model and the success of companies such as Salesforce.com and even Amazon.com and Google are hard to ignore. Racks of commodity processors certainly bring with the power at unprecedented price points, so much so that we no longer even blink when we here an enterprise now has a thousand, even ten thousand “servers” in a bunker somewhere that powers the enterprise.


It is unfortunate then to read of how problems of the past continue to raise their heads – outages, applications no longer accessible, even machine-to-machine communications, such as those found in cars, airplanes and basic control systems faltering at critical times. Scenarios, missed during testing and QA, when they do present themselves overloading and shutting down otherwise robust systems. Perhaps worst of all, the prevailing economic thinking that suggests that critical business logic doesn’t need to be maintained at all – simply replace the application as and when it eventually fails!


As the snows began falling early this week, I took a bad fall as I stepped out of my SUV. I should have known better, after all I have lived in Boulder for fifteen years and ice and snow shouldn’t be a surprise. And yet, fall I did with my feet sliding out from underneath me and my back taking the full impact from the fall. Yes, it knocked the wind out of me and I needed a while to recover. Ice, slippery? Of course it is!


Systems fail? Of course they do, and part of the need for every CIO is to revisit is just how hard a fall do they want to take! Wiser heads are indeed beginning to reconsider the true value that comes from systems where the combination of the hardware, operating system, middleware and data base really is working, and all of these components work together to ensure an enterprise users’ experience is consistent. Larry Ellison and his team at Oracle may just be waking up to this reality, but for the NonStop community this is mostly old news.


There is a place for the NonStop System in data centers of the future simply as with the acceptance of commodity hardware and the embracement of open source and industry standards, the modern NonStop System no longer is residing on a technology curve of the 1980s but rather has successfully transitioned to the newest 21st century technology curve, and where it is situated the trend is definitely on the upswing. Innovation? Clouds? Security and the Environment? NonStop Systems? Yes, they all belong in the same sentence and the attributes of NonStop Systems will see it continuing to contribute to the evolving data center for years, perhaps even decades to come.

A fabric of ink!

While business has taken me far afield for the past two months, I still found time to write and post to this and other blogs. For the NonStop community there’s now a body of work, frequently cross-referenced by other writers, which can be easily viewed no matter which media channel they prefer!

I will refrain this time from starting out this post by saying something like back again in Boulder as paging through the posts in this blog looking for a reference I noted that several posts had started out with this observation. But for more than eight weeks I have experienced, for yet one more time, what it is like to be a road warrior. The picture above was taken on a previous vacation aboard the cruising yacht, the Windstar’s Wind Spirit and while in Italy, only a few weeks ago, I had sampled the delights of life at sea with the Seabourn yacht, Spirit. The coincidence of being aboard vessels bearing the name Spirit wasn’t lost on me particularly as I headed for my first drink each evening!

However, there were more than spirits in common with these vessels as their respective owners made sure there were desks set aside to market future sailings. Common among all cruise lines, the effectiveness of onboard re-bookings turns out to be quite high – capturing a subset of the community at a time when they were clearly offering little resistance. And everywhere you turned, whether it was in common areas, bars or your own cabin there were brochures and pictures promoting ports of call you just had to visit! Extraordinary sites not on offer anywhere else and from your cruise line that has negotiated unique experiences that simply beckon to be sampled!

Cruise lines marketing future cruises to an audience already primed to be responsive isn’t unique to just this industry, and ensuring their message is communicated as widely as it is while you are their guests isn’t limited to just this industry. On a much smaller scale, every Friday I produce a brief commentary on something I observed during the week as a way of ensuring that my company, Pyalla Technologies, LLC ., remains in the consciousness of my clients as they head into the weekend and the responses I receive let me know that even on this scale my marketing efforts are not going unnoticed.

It’s all about producing “more ink” – finding as many channels as you can that can carry your message as you pursue marketing at its most basic. When I first posted to the blog I asked Randy Meyer, head of Product Management for the HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED), of my intentions and his response has stayed with me through the years. “As long as you generate a buzz around NonStop and there’s more ink ‘out there’ on NonStop, then I foresee no issues,” was how I recall Randy responding. And for most of five years generating a buzz and producing more ink has become central to what I pursue these days in my business life.

Fortunately, I am not alone in this respect. Routinely, there’s new issues of the Availability Digest coming from Dr. Bill Highleyman, like me, a former ITUG Chairman, who has spent even more time working with the NonStop community. Each issue provides considerably insight into what is happening in various marketplaces and his tracking of outages, and the fallout from such outages, remains a “must read” for anyone running NonStop Systems. Likewise, very few of us miss reading the monthly edition of Tandemworld.net; Dave Barnes has worked so hard at ensuring it gets delivered to perhaps the largest NonStop audience of all.

The NonStop community’s The Connection magazine, too, is gradually stretching its legs and attracting a wider following and anyone who has not seen the most recent issue, November – December 2011 will have missed reading perhaps the largest issue I can recall ever having seen. With more than 50 pages on the topic of “Guarding your Data, Protecting your Business” this issue of The Connection most definitely tapped into a message that contributors were only too happy and willing to make public their own views and opinions!

It was while spending time with clients over the past couple of months that the topic of generating more ink for a product or company was raised, on more than one occasion. All vendors appreciate the value that comes through publicity and promotion and welcome every opportunity that arises. However, with the surge in interest in social media channels and the many new outlets that have been created, this time around the topic of more ink has developed further to embrace the concept of a fabric of ink. Simply expressed, this is the appearance of a related topic in many channels almost simultaneously, including many of the more traditional channels, including those referenced above.

Earlier this year I wrote a white paper for HP on NS SQL/MX. The paper, “NonStop SQL - The path to the always-on, easily administered, out-of-the-box clustered, database server!” available online, as a download from HP’s web site, was complemented with a post to this blog “It only requires a few steps!” as well as became the centerpiece of discussions started on a number of LinkedIn groups, including the groups Real Time View and NonStop SQL Professionals. In other words, the topic addressed in the white paper was marketed via many channels, so the potential touch points where the NonStop community may come in contact with the material was greatly amplified.

More recently, in the work undertaken for my client, Attunity, simultaneously with the appearance of a feature article in the November – December issue of The Connection, there was a white paper, “HP NonStop Data Replication” made available on Attunity’s web site, a complementary post to this blog “Reminiscing …”, as well as discussions started in several LinkedIn groups, including the group Attunity and Fools for NonStop, with a number of tweets blasted to the world. There were even links as to where to go to download the white paper provided by Attunity on Facebook!

For the NonStop community the benefits are clear – there’s little likelihood that they will miss out on anything. Whether in operations, development or a line of business executive, in their pursuit of information about NonStop Servers there will be articles and features about their favorite platform appearing in one media channel or another, whether it’s in more traditional publications or online. The fabric of ink in support of NonStop is turning the old adage of NonStop as a stealth technology on its head!

For vendors – middleware or solutions oriented - nothing of what I have covered here should come as a surprise. Marketing is a well understood discipline and as messages are crafted and promotion begins, there’s tried and true ways to inform an audience. However, in the past, there was never any simple manner by which we could be sure this audience really did see these messages. Social media, as a complementary marketing channel brings with it a far easier way to ensure our messages reach our audience, as well as encouraging follow-up via specific web landing pages.

A fabric of ink takes this even further to ensure all likely touch points whereby we intersect with audiences are covered and where we can be sure our message is seen. Today even products such as the HP NonStop Server can reach audiences that would have proved difficult to address only a decade ago, and for the NonStop community it is now a lot easier to find, and forward, relevant supporting information on just about any topic related to the essential mission-critical applications that drive our businesses.

For a community that for so long has been starved of concrete information about what others are doing, what new products have begun to ship and what marketplaces are warming to which solutions, seeing as much publicity today about the NonStop Server marks a positive turn that is welcomed by all who make a livelihood from a platform close on four decades old! As relevant today as it ever was, and as modern as anything else we care to consider! Watch for even more news on NonStop as we head into 2012 and keep checking what’s happening on your favorite blog or at your trusted online group!

Today, we have but one luxury!

At a time when lines are becoming blurred and where the very definition of what we consider luxurious is changing it’s encouraging to read of yet more vendors enjoying success on the NonStop – a rich bounty for all within the NonStop community. And a great feeling as well! But what truly is the biggest luxury of all?

It was barely six weeks ago that I posted from Atlanta, Georgia, and yet here I am today in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Pretty much a straight line diagonal from where I was only a short time ago. When I pull into the driveway later this weekend, I will have added 10,000 miles to the SUVs odometer. But the trip up here didn’t follow a direct path, as I squeezed in a weekend in San Diego and the picture above is of me admiring the view from the hotel alongside San Diego’s famous harbor.

While I have no emotional bonds with the Cadillac Escalade and I abuse it so frequently, it is still an effective way to soak up the long distances I cover. The thought of it being a luxury ride long since banished from all the wear and tear that comes with the miles it has accumulated, even as Cadillac is marketing the brand under the slogan of “we don't just make luxury cars, we make Cadillacs!” Nevertheless, almost ten years old with more than 130,000 miles on the odometer, there’s not a rattle to be heard from anywhere in the car.

I returned to the topic of uLinga in the most recent posting to comForte Lounge, that should appear shortly, if not already - check out the post "uLinga! Turning the corner?" that has just gone live for more about the recent wins! I am really enjoying watching uLinga show early signs of acceptance within the NonStop community. After initial success with an American supermarket chain it has now found success at an American service provider and before the New Year holidays get under way, it will likely win out again at a third site, and with each success it has provided support for mission-critical applications that are at the very heart of these companies’ operations.

All the more exceptional, given that the company behind uLinga, Infrasoft, has been in business a very short time and where the development of the product has occupied all of the “volunteers” time, as it demanded some pretty exhaustive coding schedules be met.

It may only be more infrastructure, and yet it is highly symbolic of what is happening across the vendor community of late. The NonStop Server platform marketplace remains sizable enough to attract even the newest of software endeavors to commit long hours, and potentially risky investments, all for the purpose of providing the NonStop community with choice. While many within the NonStop community long to see more solutions vendors working on the platform, it is the availability of critical infrastructure components that really are the key to future success of the NonStop Server. After all, if the platform continues to look proprietary, demanding skills not widely spread throughout the community, that’s not good for any of us! No, the trick today is to essentially hide all that is “proprietary NonStop” behind a veneer of openness that ensures any product in any market segment can take advantage of the NonStop Server platform.

It should be no more difficult to get running an application on the NonStop Server than it is to run it on any other platform. To paraphrase GM, HP doesn’t just make mission-critical servers, it makes NonStop! And this is an important differentiation in today’s crowded server marketplace. One very recent comment made in a discussion “Hi, Why Tandem Technology has (been) used in all Banking areas …” to the LinkedIn group, Tandem User Group, was in response to the challenges NonStop Server platforms have been facing in the Stock Exchange marketplace and it asked “the solutions you propose are incredibly good and efficient where downtime and data integrity are not priority (however) the need for speed has become a VERY EXPENSIVE game, who will pay for it? The clients?” And in following the complete thread in this discussion, it struck me of how luxurious a feeling we all enjoy from running our solutions on NonStop!

In the cover story in the Money section of the December 2nd, 2011, issue of USA Today the topic was that the definition of a luxury car has changed, and participating in the review were American executives from Cadillac, Hyundai, BMW and Lexus. What intrigued me with this article initially was the comment from the Cadillac executive who suggested that in the past “the definition of luxury was size, space, comfort, presence” but now luxury is defined more by “the feel of the vehicle”. While it may not be immediately apparent to everyone within the NonStop community there are certainly those of us who do understand that with NonStop Servers in support of their mission-critical applications, we do enjoy a luxury shared with very few in IT. NonStop Servers are just more robust and reliable than any other platform you may elect to nominate! And we can feel it!

Commenting on the opinions expressed by these auto industry executives, USA Today then quoted “luxury specialist” Pam Danziger, president of Unity Marketing, who observed that there were “blurring (of) the line between mass and class.” The paper added how Danziger had said “there’s a lot of it going on in the auto industry, making meaning differentiation tricky.” In particular, recent entrants into the luxury segment, Hyundai, “the higher-end cars even share the brand name and showroom with mainstream models …. undercutting the exclusivity” that is another attribute often associated with luxury. Again, there will be many within the NonStop community who can sympathize with this observation – yes, NonStop shares the same HP logo as the other servers on the “showroom floor” and even when addressing the needs of mission-critical applications, the same brand name can “blur the line between mass and class!”

Revisiting the discussion thread from the LinkedIn group, Tandem User Group, and already referenced above there’s considerable inference that with the commodity technology we can access today, it’s not too much of a stretch to consider building our own NonStop System – wrack up enough server instances, throw redundant fabrics underneath it all and hive off the storage to a self-managing SAN. Sure looks like a NonStop to me, right? Yes, it even has the HP logo! However, it’s not that simple.

It’s the age old issue of unintended consequences that ripples through these configurations that cause the outages we hear so much about – even in the marketplaces that pride themselves as much as they do on speed, Stock Exchanges. It simply takes a lot of time from a select handful of highly knowledgeable folks to assemble it all and then, as they roll onto more exciting projects, it’s all left to regular IT folks to maintain and support. Not an engineer on the planet will tell you that “adding more leads to something simple”, and the frustrations that are beginning to be expressed from the clients of some of these exchanges is beginning to be recognized by others – regulators, agencies and competing exchanges are all prepared to act.

Perhaps it was the sidebar commentary towards the end of the USA Today cover story that caught my attention. Hyundai’s executive suggested to all participants that “there is only one true luxury, and that is time.” Yes you can roll-your-own NonStop by pulling together the servers, network fabric and storage from commodity offerings at hand. But not only is it not simple, it takes a lot of time to sort through all the potential failure points, and to put together the complicated test plans that are needed to ensure you can truly determine if new applications properly take advantage of the architecture embraced by “the knowledgeable few” who put it together. Time that is often wasted by the unintended consequences from very minor oversights! Compare with the time that is freed when the system can be brought up pretty much as the packing crates and boxes are cleared away and returned to the shipping dock!

Yes, the showroom floors of auto dealers and computer companies share much in common. The branding spreads across a variety of products, from the most utilitarian to something much more desirable. In today’s business world, time continues to be a luxury commanding a premium and I have to wonder, when did it all happen that we thought we could steal some time back by doing it all ourselves? Perhaps not every markets for NonStop Servers will come back, as there remains a lot of other outside influences, but the more we understand the fragility of what we are making up today as we try and do it all ourselves, the more the robustness of NonStop and the time it give us, will feel like true luxury!

Reminiscing …

I love to travel. I like to observe what's going on at new places. And when I return to places I visited in the past, I like to check out what's changed. When it comes to work and the tasks I pursued, there is still much I can learn from reminiscing!

My third time to Rome has proved to be better than I can recall past trips having been – a much more relaxed pace, and my business pursuits turned out to be easier than I anticipated. The first time to Rome, I joined a tour that hit all the main tourist draws whereas the second came at the end of a longer stay in the Mediterranean, and during the height of the summer tourist season where the heat and wind made the stay anything but pleasant. The picture above is of me taking a brief pause along the Via dei Fori Imperiali!

Following a brief exchange, before I left, with Randy Meyer who heads HP NonStop’s Product Management group, and on his recommendation, with days to spare between meetings in Venice and Rome I elected to fill in the time by taking a small cruise ship that made the trip via the Dalmatian coast – and it’s definitely something I can recommend to anyone else. Look closely at Randy’s photo on Facebook and you will see the sister ship in the background!

However, not for the first time, the itinerary was changed and we skipped our stay in Sorrento and its passage to the Amalfi Coast, pulling into Naples instead to take on much needed fresh water. Readers may recall that in a post to this blog written in the summer of 2008, “Roman Holiday!” I regretted that the plans to visit Florence had been cut short as a problem with that vessel resulted in us skipping the port of Lugarno completely. Florence, along with Positano, is among my most favorite places in all of Italy, and it will now be left to future visits before I get another chance to see either of these marvelous townships.

Reminiscing about this with my wife led me to the above post, and as I looked at what I wrote back in May of 2008 it featured commentary on my former employer– GoldenGate. In that post, I looked at the topic of innovation and highlighted how “even though GoldenGate had its origins in NonStop, we deliberately went after a number of key folks from other vendors who brought with them special skills in other areas of data. We also bridged the generation gaps by recruiting a broad mix of age groups to the company," was a quote I pulled at the time from GoldenGate’s then VP of Marketing, Sami Akbay. He then acknowledged that looking at the marketing of GoldenGate that was being pursued “we have moved to where data itself is what's strategic! Access in real time to operational data allows companies to innovate in ways not thought of, or even considered possible, before."

Returning to the theme of GoldenGate for this post shouldn’t come as a surprise. After remaining quiet on this topic for the past two years, it may be hard to miss how it was the subject of a feature in the November – December 2010 issue of The Connection, as well as the backdrop for an opinions white paper on replication that I recently developed for Attunity - follow this link to obtain the pdf: http://www.attunity.com/campaign.aspx?campaignId=167 After two years as an integral part of Oracle GoldenGate may not be the automatic choice for everyone any longer, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the NonStop community will be able to enjoy greater choice in product offerings than ever before.

The lead-in anecdotes I provided as introductions in both documents looked at the need to replicate as well as how well other vendors have performed in terms of cutting into the considerable lead GoldenGate had once enjoyed. Even the most proactive champion of NonStop is aware that truly providing 7 X 24 X forever availability mandates more than one system, indeed, more than one site, to ensure such levels of availability, no matter what. Without revisiting all that I covered in both documents I have to acknowledge that perhaps there is no other infrastructure market segment as well served as is that of replication. The arrival of Attunity’s solution only further cements this observation and represents another example of the investment vendors continue to make as they bring to market innovative and lower cost offerings.

When I started the discussion “Latest on GoldenGate – are you feeling the need to change?” in the LinkedIn Group, Real Time View, one of the comments posted came from Jeff Boyer, head of sales for all of the America’s. In his response to this question he highlighted how “Oracle has retained nearly all of the development, support and product folks from GoldenGate. We have a product road map for all databases and Oracle is investing in the product. In addition staying current with the HP NonStop databases - we are adding new databases for capture and delivery in every release of OGG (Oracle GoldenGate!).” In stark contrast to what all of us may have thought, Boyer then explained that “OGG is not going away or being pushed aside - since being acquired by Oracle we have increased our customer base and installs by magnitudes - hopefully this increase is based on the value OGG brings.”

And yet, the activity from vendors anxious to plug the holes generated through customer dissatisfaction over Oracle’s support of GoldenGate, particularly when it comes to pricing and, even more specifically, when it involves upgrading to the latest HP NonStop Blade systems, is quite visible. It will require significant investments in marketing by these competing vendors, but it is hard to ignore the steps that have already been taken. There’s rarely a NonStop user event where there isn’t coverage by one vendor or another about how far they have come to addressing all that GoldenGate had been providing.

As I worked on this post I had the good fortune to catch up with Sami Akbay, now CEO of Altibase Inc. and we revisited some of his earlier comments. “Marketing certainly was instrumental in elevating GoldenGate above competing products and in helping the company gain the broad marketplace acceptance that it did,” Akbay observed. “From the time we added key industry influencers to the company’s board of directors, as well as how the Customer Advisory Board was populated, to simply how the company conducted itself at some of the premier events in support of databases and enterprise warehouses, and not forgetting how we managed to convince many of our top tier, blue ribbon customers, to participate with the company in promoting the products,” Akbay added before concluding with “there was no mistaking the amount of energy that went in to ensuring GoldenGate was perceived as the premier company in this market.”

Today, none of this has been lost on vendors like Attunity who have just released their Attunity Replicate product. Marketing is extremely important for vendors as they wrestle market share away from the incumbent, GoldenGate. “It is very important to recognize the investment Attunity continue to make in marketing – the message we provide is very simple,” Itamar Ankorion, Attunity VP, Business Development and Corporate Strategy, explained in a recent exchange on this topic. “In Attunity Replicate, all any user needs to know is that our implementation on most platforms comes with zero footprint (on NonStop, there will be some code), that configuring any replication can be easily done with our new ‘Click-2-Replicate’ and perhaps most important of all, we bring to the market a solution with a competitive licensing model.”

Perhaps reverberating even more loudly with the NonStop community today was Ankorion’s closing comment that “there will always be a requirement for alternate offerings and with what we have today Attunity, along with other well-known vendors already established in the market place, may indeed tilt the playing field even further in favor of product offerings apart from what was considered in the past! Indeed, from our perspective, the NonStop community will certainly have plenty to consider going forward.”

Reminiscing about anything, whether it’s places we like, sports teams we watch, or technology we embraced so enthusiastically in the past is always done through rose-colored glasses. What we seem to remember is often embellished and the capabilities, indeed conquests, live more colorfully in our memories than perhaps they did in real life. Maintaining the status quo can often produce unintended consequences if not routinely revisited, and the playing field that was tipped so heavily in favor of just one vendor can be nothing more than a figment of our imagination. As Ankorion so rightfully noted yes, with the arrival of new product offerings, the NonStop community certainly has never had it so good!

Inevitable transitions – will we see changes?

HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman has hit the deck running and it’s clear to see HP is in transition – yes, today, they welcomed a new director to the board – one who could agitate for even more change. But will this generate good news for the NonStop community?

In the weeks before I left Boulder, Colorado, winter had sank its teeth deep into the land. After three sizable storms that saw the temperatures drop rapidly from the 80s to the 30s and worse, the citizens were finally adjusting to the transition, although winter came this year much sooner than they had expected. Shedding shorts and Tee’s for layers of warm clothing brings with it realization that the transition has only begun, and that by the end of the year we will have seen much worse weather descending on us all. The picture to the left was taken at first light, as we headed to our local Starbucks!

However, this past weekend has seen me conduct business in Venice and board a small vessel for a run down the Adriatic Sea, stopping in ports alongside the cities dotting the Dalmatian coast, including those belonging to Croatia, Montenegro and Greece. The distances aren’t vast and in a few short days I will be back in Italy once again where I hope to conclude the business aspects of my trip with a short stay in Rome. While the scenery has been terrific and the weather proving helpful the headlines of the newsletters pushed under the cabin’s door each morning have been hard to miss.

It is apparent that we are right in the middles of transitions of a completely different kind. Greece! Italy! Both countries having witnessed the arrival of new governments and the region is alive with discussions over the transition of power and what the likely outcomes will be. Perhaps, as far as this trip goes, nothing more clearly demonstrates transition than the old town of Dubrovnik that I visited only a matter of hours ago. Once heavily shelled in the wars that raged throughout the Balkans in the early 1990s, some twenty years later the city has recovered and the once magnificent fortress-city is as sparkling as it ever has been. A quick walk down its main thoroughfare brought with it little evidence of any of the tragedies that had befallen the city barely two decades earlier. The repairs undertaken had made any changes to the city difficult to find – it all looked just as it had always looked in photos I had seen decades earlier.

The picture above captures the transition from the winter in the Rockies to the more blissful early fall of the Mediterranean, with the walls of old town Dubrovnik providing protection to the small fleet of fishing boats that ply the calm waters just outside the city. The picture to the right, taken only a day or so ago,  captures the scene better than words can describe.

I am often drawn into conversations about where I would like to spend my time, and if I had any opportunity to take up residence outside of my home town of Boulder, the coastal areas of Croatia would certainly place very highly among the regions I would consider. And this would include areas to the south, as well as the fjord leading to the city of Kotor, Montenegro – all among the best landscapes I have ever witnessed in all my time sailing the Mediterranean.

However, the papers being pushed under my cabin’s door also included snippets of business news and in the library there were older copies of business magazines and newspapers. Among them was a feature by Reuters published in the November 9^th, 2011, issue of The International Herald Tribune – a paper I thoroughly read every time I visit Europe. The article featured the headline “For HP, deal advice proves costly” and it wasn’t so much what was featured in the story as it was a reminder of the transition HP is going through today.

There has been much published of late about the arrival of Meg Whitman to lead HP and of the expectations that, at best, she will simply be leading a transition team and that she is simply holding down the fort as the next leader of HP is unearthed. I have been among the many commentators who have viewed her presence more or less as a place-holder   following the exit of Leo Apotheker, who himself hadn’t quite completed a year at the helm of HP following the exit of more operationally oriented Mark Hurd. But in hindsight, I may have been a little too quick on reaching this conclusion, and perhaps I should have been a little more prudent and let the events unfurl for themselves. After all, even though she had lost her bid to become California’s governor in the last state elections, much of how she campaigned had impressed me. I have observed it rather closely, living at the time in Southern California. She was open and straightforward, and told California exactly what she would do should she be elected.

One of the aspects of the Reuters story was how they catalogued the series of acquisitions HP has made in only the past few years. The list is quite lengthy, and the first that comes to mind is the highly successful bidding war it waged against Dell to secure 3Par (for some $2.35 billion), and with it the company’s intellectual property (IP) involving online storage systems. Then there was the $1.4 billion purchase of ArcSight that brought to the table IP associated with cyber security. Last year, HP paid out a further $1.2 billion for Palm and with it, not just the IP behind former market-leading mobile devices, but a new operating system, WebOS.

However, deals of this magnitude where the money involved was in the one to two billion dollar range palled when we all read of HP’s intent to purchase Autonomy for $11.7 billion. A British software vendor that very few within the industry knew all that much about and where early responses were generally along the lines of “you have to be kidding!” Yes, HP relied upon prominent internal leaders to help, but they also relied heavily on “an army of bankers to help (HP) decide whether to pursue Autonomy,” as Reuters was to report. Now, there’s still value that may emerge from all of these deals and yet, the sheer brashness of them surprises many within the executive ranks.

As she hasn’t been able to reverse any of these decisions as she pushed ahead in her transitional role, Whitman has been forced to face the irreversibility of much of this. And she has had to put as best a face to it in public as she could. However, the fate of some of those who were a party to the acquisitions haven’t fared as well. A number of the decisions made in the final hours under Apotheker’s leadership have been retained whereas others have been overturned and I fully expect there will be more that changes with the transition.

The decision to drop WebOS and to abandon the tablet and mobile device business was one that stayed but to add salt to the wound, there were no attempts made to retain WebOS’s most experienced advocate, Richard Kerris, when he elected to leave the company. From all I can gauge, this pretty much ends any possibility of HP resurrecting this aspect of Apotheker’s ruling. And while the news of their departure raised an eyebrow or two, it was nothing when compared to the earlier news that Shane Robison would be leaving, and with him the role of HP’s highest-placed CTO would vanish. The technology giant would now have no central CTO but rather would shift to a model where the key groups, including Enterprise Servers Storage and Networking (ESSN), would have their own CTOs. Robison clearly wore the fall-out from his passionate support of the acquisition of Autonomy.

What does this mean for the NonStop community? Will the decisions being made at the highest level prove beneficial to NonStop, or will the fate of NonStop suffer even more ignominy? This time, I am not as prepared to pass judgment as I had been earlier when I first heard the news of Whitman ascending to the role of leadership. I now view her not so much leading a transition team, rather she seems to be leading a transition of HP itself. There’s no question whatsoever that the most recent attacks by Oracle have hurt selected server models and that HP hasn’t done enough to defend itself – there’s not an airport I visit these days where there aren’t huge banners proclaiming just how much faster Oracle’s hardware and software offerings are when compared to models on offer from HP.

Yes, HP is hurting at the top end. But the decision by Whitman not to get out of the PC business and to put an end to any further divestiture of products is certainly telling us all that she definitely wants to fight on – I suspect there will be no actions taken lightly now under Whitman. And this could prove decisive for NonStop and for the integrated hardware and software that today is part of the very modern NonStop Server platform. An earlier opinion paper I wrote on NS SQL/MX where I talked to users of Oracle’s database has left me in no doubt that in select markets HP has in the NonStop platform a highly competitive offering. But will that be enough?

HP could do well to lift its investment in NonStop and in its promotion across its vast array of solutions vendors. There’s not a single commentary of late in the more popular blogs and group discussions that doesn’t raise this item at least once – and it could be simply executed with few repercussions on other well established groups within HP. The game has changed. HP is under pressure. And HP needs to respond, and in this context, I don’t see it being too difficult to anticipate somewhere along the way NonStop enters the conversation.

Should HP’s services group set up service bureau style operations featuring NonStop? They certainly have the resources and skills to do this. Should HP’s software group invest in a couple of solutions vendors to bring additional products for NonStop to market? They certainly wouldn’t go backwards with such decisions. There would be nothing better for the NonStop community to witness than HP “eating its own dogfood”! None of this would be simple to do and none of this is without its own set of problems, but I suspect that there will be changes nonetheless. But as the NonStop community continues to migrate to Blades then as that program wraps up, where will new NonStop sales come from? Yes, according to the roadmaps, there will be more improvements to come as HP rides the Intel roadmap but I have to believe as the costs continue to drop – even in critical emerging markets – pressure will again be on marketing to pull together plans for additional verticals. Yes – there could be good news for the NonStop community as Whitman continues with the transition she has already initiated.

In any transition there’s usually not an automatic expectation of change for the better. Transitions of themselves often don’t lead to change at all, but rather focus on a smooth crossover to something completely new. However, with what I have been seeing coming from the new leader, not only do I not see this as being the moves of someone who is not in transition themselves but rather by someone more focused on transitioning the company, and along with the transition, changing it. I am waiting for Meg to stand up and tell us what her plans are for HP - and I expect her to tell it as it is. And on this basis alone, I think that there is every chance of better things to come for NonStop!  

Social networking etiquette …don't forget to wave!

While I am out travelling and meeting folks, it gives me the opportunity to revisit the topic of social media and for the HP NonStop community, activity has picked up with more engaged in discussions than I have seen before. And yet, there's always opportunity for even greater participation - join in!

As I prepare this post I am wrapping up my brief stay in Venice and I am about to head to Croatia. Not by car, but by the only easy way to see as much of the coast of Croatia as possible – a rather comfortable small vessel able to pull into the smaller ports. However, the downside is that I am often left to make small talk with others – something I completely avoid doing when I take to America’s interstates and byways.

Invariably, when I am with other travelers, the conversations turn to “and yes, what do you do?” Of course this is a reference to the vocation I pursue and when it comes out that I write and that I provide commentaries and opinion papers, the response isn’t always one of comprehension. “Fair enough, but what do you really do?” becomes the all too familiar response! If I try to steer the conversation to marketing and business development, eyes quickly glaze over and the conversation turns to something more topical and of interest to others. And talking about steering the conversation, it would be remiss of me not to remind everyone of how cold it remains in Boulder, Colorado and the picture above was taken a few days before we left. Any questions now as to why we gladly accepted the offer to meet with folks in Italy?

Even though I had business interests to distract me in Venice it was hard not to appreciate the history of the place. After all, this was where the adventurer Marco Polo began his journey that took him to China, and even today there is an air of adventure still present. The type of ships visiting port has changed and there’s little evidence of the great trading halls that dominated the scene, and yet even as tourists continue to wonder at the sites you have to be impressed with all that the city has witnessed over the centuries.

It was to be twenty five years before Marco Polo made it back to Venice, but before he could even talk about his adventures, somehow he found himself in jail and it was while he was waiting to be freed that he dictated details of his travels to his cellmate. As a result, information about Asia and China only trickled down to a select few and it took more than a century before Christopher Columbus was able to convince the court of Spain to return to China. But yes, taking a different route this time, as he thought he knew of a short-cut! And yet, the community that is today Venice is looking fragile with every potential of succumbing to the elements that seem determined to have done with this magnificent city.

How things have changed. It was only in January, 2010 that Astronaut T.J. Creamer tweeted “Hello Twitterverse! We r LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station – the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your?s” Evidently, according to comments that followed this tweet, astronauts aboard the ISS had received a special software upgrade, such that during periods when the station actively communicates with the ground … the crew have remote access to the Internet via a ground computer. The crew views the desktop of the ground computer using an onboard laptop and interacts remotely via their keyboard touchpad. Everyone associated with the space program, including the extended community, can follow every step of the journey these modern day’s adventurers take.

The emergence of social media and with it the opportunity for social networking ensures information is disseminated more rapidly than it has ever been in the past, and among communities sharing a common purpose, it encourages the development of strong community ties. As everyone becomes aware of changing circumstances at about the same time, there’s ample opportunity to explore what will follow. And through these interactions and support, the community becomes stronger as it continues to bond. Yes, communities that have staying power are often those that attract strong individuals but with shared experiences their opinions are often important catalyst for further growth.

My experience on the board of ITUG taught me the value that comes with community and the value those positive interactions up and down the community fostered. No opinion was ever discounted or relegated to second-class, but rather helped ensure what we all felt was the essence of Tandem, the fun that come through networking, beer-busts, First Friday’s and even for the lucky few those crazy TOPS gatherings, has been preserved and carried to a younger generation. I can’t recall a single instance at any recent events involving the NonStop platform where there hasn’t been someone who has approached me and asked about what it was like all that time ago. And now, social networking has opened the doors to an even bigger audience and the community is the stronger for it.

Forget about the negativity that crops up in some forums, or the put-downs that some members are subject to. For the most part, all forums and discussions continue to add to the “buzz about the NonStop platform” that has been at the root of why so many within HP have enjoyed the grassroots emergence and development of so many social media avenues focused on NonStop as exists today. However, I would like to encourage even more participation. There’s simply no better way to ensure balance than to have as many opinions expressed as possible, for if we all are not vocal, the risk of repetition increases and the message eventually is diluted to the point where communities gradually drift off in pursuit of other interests.

I take a broad mix of magazines with me when I travel and as I read the back page editorial, Exhaust Notes, in the December 2011 issue of Motorcycle Cruiser, the author raised the issue about the decline of “the wave”. From the first outing Margo and I took on our junior motorcycle cruisers, more than a decade ago, every person riding a motorcycle that we passed, whether simple commuter or tricked out sports-bike, or even hard core biker on a heavyweight custom Harley, lifted his left hand and gave us a wave. (Interestingly enough, there were very few women motorcycle riders when we started whereas nowadays we see a lot of them out on the open road!) “Historically, motorcyclists have always been part of a breed characterized by fierce individualism,” the editorial began. “This difference in personal choice (to ride a motorcycle) led bikers to feel a strong sense of community … (and this) feeling of connection was often manifested in ‘the wave’.”

However, on our most recent outing just a few weeks back where we rode to Golden, Colorado, for coffee and where the return trip proved extremely painful for Margo as she dropped her cruiser literally outside the house, I was taken aback by how few riders today were still supporting the wave. The editorial reflected my own observations and the author went on to say, as the popularity of the wave appears to be declining, “the whole myth of individualism that’s so strong in (America) is leading many people down a miserable path of alienated lifestyles and social isolation.” This is followed a little later with “our social networks have become smaller as the tentacles of individualism have taken over our lives. We are not the richer for it. We are more alone.”

Yes, social networking is important for the NonStop community. As we take stock of who really supports the platform there are plenty of individuals out there and that has been the nature of NonStop from the earliest days of Tandem. In past years, it was a lot easier to go with IBM, perhaps Digital or even with Data General and Prime – but Tandem? For many years it did mark us as a breed apart. We were the individuals who really had firm opinions about better ways to process transactions. And yet this does place an obligation on us all – participate! Become visible! Post from the edge of the universe! Talk about what we have seen and the adventures we have had! We may not be facing rising tides and the prospect of annihilation, but our community today is fragile nonetheless. Yes, it’s worth protecting and yes, it is easy to grow.

There are rules of course, and there are many sites on the web that describe social media etiquette. Most of them can be ignored as the NonStop community is more mature. Two observations I do like and remain valid even for us include “your actions show you what a person you are, but that is not as important as showing what kind of brand you are. One thing we do know, we hate knowing that these brands are trying to be something that they are not – this comes across as fake and will mean that you will not believe in them.” And then there is “depending on your blog’s purpose, be wary of over-selling. Make sure you’re still providing great community value. (And yes) you can post as often as you want on your blog. It’s your blog!”

These observations came from two well-known bloggers (Peter Chubb, blogging on the site product-reviews.com and Chris Brogan, an individual blogger) and do address concerns I often hear. It shouldn’t need any further commentary from me, but across the NonStop community your voice is very much needed. And appreciated. We are all individuals and continue to prove that with the technology pursuits we make – so yes, no need to be fake or to over-sell. In my post of October 9, 2011 “Enough is enough!” I wrote of how NonStop should not be losing and about how the NonStop Server has turned a corner. This observation should provoke many within the NonStop community to write about – there’s many opinions out there and yours may just be the one that tips the scales further in favor of NonStop!   

As we all know, the NonStop community welcomes fresh, positive input on almost anything NonStop Server related. Have a go, and have fun! And help keep the community thrive – your opinions are just that important. The author of the editorial in Motorcycle Cruiser closed with “remember community as that next rider waves to you; feel it, relish it, embrace it and be proud. And don’t forget to wave back.” And I can’t think of any better way when it comes to encouraging you all!      

What price availability?

For me travel is always educational and a time to catch up on the news - magazines, newspapers and the internet. And so, yes another stock exchange goes down - this time, closer to home. The Australian Stock Exchange. It sure does beg the question when it comes to staying in business - what does it truly cost when you're unable to support your clients?

Road trips represent time to reflect and on my recent drive to Atlanta this proved to be the case. I am passionate about driving and this year has seen me driving to Northern and Southern California with stops in Las Vegas; to Phoenix, Arizona through the back country to the north east of that city that also took in Albuquerque; to Chicago as well as to Minneapolis (two separate trips but via Omaha both times) in addition to this recent escapade. Throw in separate weekend trips to the wine country of western Colorado as well as excursions to Aspen and Telluride to catch the fall colors that make Colorado the colorful state that it is and yes, I have had more than enough time to reflect! And the picture above was taken of me, standing under the sign advertising BB King's cafe and blues club on Beale Street, Memphis!

Nearly all of the cars we have safely parked in the garages today (yes, winter offers little respite for top-down cruising through the canyons) have been involved in my travels but as I wrote the article just posted to Buckle-Up, my social site, “Taming the Dragon?” I reflected on how I would have much preferred to have driven our Corvette to Atlanta but with it undergoing service, it wasn’t an option. I remarked on how “even with two Corvettes and as passionate as I am about Tandem and NonStop in my business life, the ‘back-up’ Corvette is just configured differently and doesn't lend itself to long trips where there's shared driver responsibilities. Yes it's a manual whereas the big 'Vette is an auto!”

It was as I completed my feature article for the November – December 2011 issue of The Connection that I followed a similar thought as I worked on the story line. The theme for this issue is to be “Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery/Availability” and I elected to open up, more than I had done previously, on my thoughts about the likelihood of increased competition following Oracle’s acquisition of GoldenGate. It’s been just over two years since that deal was consummated and it has opened the door for other vendors – middleware and solutions – to rethink their options. However, as I began this feature, I opened with something similar to what I wrote in my social blog, Buckle-Up!

“Shortly after Margo and I wed, we built a house outside of Boulder, Colorado. At the time we chose to replicate every major appliance – combining two previous homes made this a rather straightforward decision,” I began. I then added “However, when we added a basement bar, we purchased an ice-maker that could generate a lot of ice very rapidly, arguably a mission critical application where failure would be intolerable during Colorado summers, particularly after 5 o’clock! Can’t recall exactly what our logic was at the time, but with our heritage in NonStop and the critical role this appliance would play, today that logic looks pretty flawed.” Yes, this critical appliance has failed totally and “having an ice-maker that no longer provides ice is a nuisance and results in many trips back to the refrigerator in the kitchen”!

As I wrapped up the feature, along similar lines to what I had said about having two Corvettes, I noted that “it’s not a real solution as I should have duplicated the ice-maker with a second ice maker of the same capacity as the first one, even if I do not need it all that often; impromptu parties and other social occasions may place unexpected strain on something of lesser capacity should it fail again! However, this is a far cry from the fallout that would result should an organization fail to recover from outages in a timely manner.”

It is with both of these stories in mind, that news broke yesterday of yet another stock exchange unable to process trades. “Australian bourse red-faced after 4-hour trading shutdown,” was the headline on the web site of CNBC, perhaps the most-read business site in the world today. “Australia’s stock market suffered an embarrassing shutdown on Thursday, as technical failures halted trading for four hours … the technical glitch and the duration of the shutdown is a blow for bourse operator ASX Group especially as this comes ahead of rival bourse operator Chi-X’s launch on Monday, ending a two-decade monopoly.”

According to the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), in a larger expose on what happened, published under the headline “Timing is everything, as ASX painfully discovers”, on Friday, October 28th, 2011 they reported that “yesterday should have been a happy one for most people with money in the sharemarket … but when the market maker – the exchange that facilitates the trading of shares – stops operating, the blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the ASX. Yesterday’s four-hour closure of trading on the AX was nothing short of a shemozzle.”

My own experience with the ASX dates back to my earliest days with Tandem Computers when I worked in the Sydney offices, and we lost the deal with ASX to Digital Computers a fairly rare occurrence back then. When it came time to upgrade, however, ASX elected to switch to solutions and platforms supported by NASDAQ OMX. So now we have the story on the CNBC web site, “ASX said the outage was due to a connectivity issue with the exchange’s trading system, which in turn hampered participants’ connection to the ASX trading engine (and that) ASX has worked with NASDAQ OMX to resolve the glitch.” Ouch! Sure would have been nice to have something more reliable. And a back-up, that worked!

It was observed by Winston Prather, in his editorial in the September – October, 2011, issue of The Connection that as “we take a more in-depth look at how this strategy has helped us deliver significant performance improvements … a few words about where this does and does not, apply.” While not specifically singled-out as a market segment, it’s clear that the current challenges facing stock exchanges today was what was being addressed as Prather then added “there are some areas of the market where performance is the highest priority, and users are willing to trade data integrity and resilience to achieve it.”

Perhaps even more relevant with what we are seeing in the fallout from the ASX shemozzle, “In some cases, NonStop may not be the right answer – while we continue to deliver significant performance improvements, we will never sacrifice our core fundamentals and value to achieve them. NonStop delivers competitive performance under the philosophy that the integrity of the message has value.” And yet, in what is becoming a highly competitive marketplace, there are Stock Exchanges who are using NonStop and getting performance that is quite remarkable!

In her post of August 18th, 2011 to the web publication realtime.ir.com, “The Instant On Enterprise is Here. All Modern. All Standard. All NonStop” blogger Sue Bradshaw, much more comfortable with the world of telecoms than NonStop, was impressed all the same as she listened to a keynote presentation at the recent OzTUG event in Sydney. “We received a fascinating insight into the Hong Kong Stock Exchange upgrade that increased throughput tenfold and reduced latency by 15 times, she began. Bradshaw then remarked of how “this is where I first heard the term ‘single digit millisecond’ and as someone who has focused for many years on monitoring voice quality, I found that achievement fascinating. When you consider that the transaction latency achieved was less than 10 times the minimum required to achieve the highest voice quality, I was very impressed.”

The metrics are indeed different when it comes to comparing trading systems in place with NASDAQ in America versus what’s in place in Hong Kong and when it comes to the very biggest of exchanges, what Prather describes is pertinent. However, many other markets may want to consider other criteria than simply speed alone. I have heard it described somewhere as thinking in terms of whether you heed a dragster or an F1 car – each will outperform the other on tracks where they were designed to compete. And perhaps the big hit ASX took at the most inopportune time (where business will likely be lost to a competitor about to open their doors) will be a wake-up call for others.

Availability will always be an important requirement. Being able to rely on a platform with the resilience of NonStop, particularly when configured with a second-site backup that has become so important today, will continue to appeal to many responsible CIOs. When the alternative is to see headlines appear globally in a matter of minutes and where financial commentators went so far as to suggest, as reported by SMH, “the ASX breakdown cemented the need for more than one operator in the market. The new exchange (Chi-X) will now become the back-up and a potentially meaningful competitor.”

Not exactly the outcome ASX had in mind, I suspect, but then it takes very little these days to tip the tables in favor of others following just a couple of hours of downtime. The price ASX will now be paying will leave many involved scratching their heads and rethinking whether speed remains the sole requirement. This may have little in common with my failed icemaker or having differently configured Corvettes but in the end, those involved may come away just as frustrated and when there’s easy solutions on hand, probably the same level of regret at having not considered all possible outcomes.