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I think I'm having stress!


Plans are made, tickets are booked, and Mother Nature plays havoc… Yeah, I was booked on a flight to Baltimore on Monday, October 29. Who knew? Of course the flight got cancelled and plans had to be changed. Could have been a lot worse, I know…

Click on Richard's picture and check the T Shirt he's wearing. Yes that's him behind the helm of Chardonnay II off Santa Cruz, California.

I have been getting nostalgic lately, looking at what happened over the years – how technology changed our lives and our careers evolved trying to catch up.

Oh, yes, I remember 1989 Tandem Computers Annual Report – and for those who long ago have forgotten the specifics, I was featured in it, with an artist-rendered likeness.

The SNAX/CDF product had been released, and for me, having been a part of this then modern development project felt fantastic! I was a part of something significant, it mattered, customers awaited it ready to deploy!

Fast forward to 2012 – yup, 23 years later. Time flies! Again, I am feeling great to be involved in a new, modern effort of putting NonStop on the clouds map.

I feel it may be a significant step toward enabling mission critical applications to access affordable and flexible computer power without a fear of ever losing a transaction in the process!
 
As the CRN (on-line magazine for VARS and Technology integrators) reported just this past Monday, October 29, 2012, “Google (NSDQ:GOOG) App Engine, Tumblr and Dropbox worked on ensuring the availability of their cloud-based services Monday after each suffered outages for several hours Friday.” The reporter, Jack McCarthy, added “Google said App Engine, its platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers, went down from 7:30 a.m. PST to 11:30. a.m., PST, as it experienced slowness and errors. As a result, 50 percent of requests to the App Engine failed.”
 
Even though Google reported that no data has been lost, all of us associated with Payments Industry see the scary picture of lost opportunities. Transactions that couldn’t be completed and customers forced to turn to competitors.
 
The article concluded: “This shows the cloud industry still has work to do to improve on overall availability and performance," said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of Thinkstrategies. "There are inevitably going to be disruptions to service availability, and it's key for service providers to minimize these occurrences and for cloud consumers to mitigate their risk by having a backup and recovery plan in place and by exploring ways to take advantage of offline service options."
 
Clouds dotting the sky can be highly photographic at times and have been captured beautifully in many paintings. However, as we have witnessed this week, they can also generate lightning and thunder and indicate the presence of highly disruptive winds.
 
Coming on Monday, as Hurricane Sandy ruined my plans and made me stressed – it was great news.
 
No, not that Google lost its cloud, but that it clearly demonstrated a need for the presence of NonStop to guard the applications from the capricious nature of the clouds!

Comments

Thomas Burg said…
I have been posting on LinkedIn "wouldn't it be nice if Google/Facebook etc. run NonStop" a long time ago. I don't see that happening (as they are much to locked in to their current, proprietary cloud implementation).

I think the key question is how to make NonStop attractive to small startups. The main benefit would be to scale up linearily with practically no limits.

The issues I see right now are:
- entry price still too high
- thinking of Google and Facebook there probably *is* a limit as to where NonStop could scale.
- one also needs to think which scenario is *not* right for NonStop.
Richard Buckle said…
This week I talked to an ISV who will be using a NonStop as the server supporting an offering of a SaaS ... so let's not rule out NonStop just yet ...

At less than 100K NonStop is appealing to small start-ups ... where would you like to see the price point be if not at this level?

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