Real Time View

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

2012-01-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

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 …

2012-01-13T04:14:00.000-08:00

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!

2012-01-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-12-25T14:14:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-12-14T10:26:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-12-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

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 …

2011-11-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-11-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

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!

2011-11-10T05:45:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-10-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Solely focused on technology? That’s not a strategy!

2011-10-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

With all the talk and discussions around Cloud Computing of late, it seems that it is all that today’s CIOs are prepared to consider as a strategy for their business. But it is a technology and this may not be the right thing to do …

Walking the streets of Atlanta, just outside the hotel where I had been staying, I came to the Peachtree 200 Conference Center and while the building held little architectural appeal what was outside, parked on the road, caught my eye immediately. Curbside was a 1960s era Fiat 500 flanked by a new 2012 Fiat 500, and the picture above was taken by the Fiat event manager overseeing the launch program for Atlanta – yes, he just walked up to me and asked if he could take the photo I was trying to shoot by myself.

A crowd had gathered alongside the cars and someone asked if the new FIAT 500 was a hybrid, and then another person asked whether it was FIAT’s plan to offer an all-electric version. Among the responses I heard coming from the FIAT crew was the simple explanation that the strategy was to successfully launch the FIAT brand in the U.S. and that decisions about the powertrain options to be introduced would follow. As for the immediate future, all talk was about the FIAT Abarth 500, a performance version of the car to better compete with the Mini Cooper S and planned for U.S. enthusiasts early next year.

Marketplaces continue to evolve and no more so than across the world’s auto industry, and strategies evolve to keep pace with the fluctuating and often fickle priorities of the market. With the global economy continuing to struggle, the price of hydrocarbons remaining high, consumers’ tastes are proving difficult to predict. Strategies have to look beyond technologies and products and address more important issues like doing everything necessary to simply stay in business! However, with the news that even Chevrolet is dropping its iconic pushrod V8 engine from future open-seat race cars in favor of a much smaller V6 albeit turbocharged, is further tangible evidence that responding to the marketplace remains a priority for the company.

I have been in Atlanta in support of Margo who is a new conference organizer for an association event where rehabilitation researchers shared their results with practitioners, and we elected to drive from Boulder, CO, the thirteen hundred or so miles to Atlanta. I had always wanted to see more of the countryside east of the Mississippi and this trip gave me the opportunity. In so doing I elected to drive our thirsty V8 SUV and while it offered considerable comfort for the many interstate miles we covered, it wasn’t hard to miss just how few SUVs are on the highways these days and how the marketplace is showing its appreciation for domestice auto manufacturers' change of heart.

FIAT will likely do well with its new 500 car, as will Chevrolet with its line of smaller, more powerful powerplants and yet, it will only take the slightest of external influences to set off yet another round of changes and drive planners back to the drawing boards. Strategy after all is never absolute and is framed within the markets a business operates, and just like technologies and products, have distinct and measurable lifecycles.

It was against this background that a discussion was started within the LinkedIn Group, Fools for NonStop. A recent addition to the LinkedIn Groups, this group was founded following comments made about how foolish it is it stay with NonStop and that, given my own support for the NonStop Server platform, I was perhaps more foolish than others. However, the group continues to grow its membership and the discussion that began this week simply asked “Cloud computing: ‘The cloud is not a strategy ...’ food for thought” and a reference to an article shared with the community of the same name that can be found at:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/the-cloud-isnt-a-strategy/6838

Very early in the paper posted to the web publication TechRepublic, it observes “ask a CIO about their technology plan or strategy for the coming months, and their eyes light up and in hushed awe they reverently whisper: ‘The Cloud.’” A little later, author Patrick Gray writes “unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely been beaten over the head with the wonders of cloud computing. It will slash your costs, alleviate all management pain, store your music and movies, and bring about world peace in our day.”

However, perhaps Gray’s best observation comes when he states “while the superlative machine in the marketing department of most cloud vendors has been working overtime, ‘the cloud’ is nothing more than another incantation of make vs. buy or rent vs. own. We’ve been down this road before with everything from outsourcing to contract manufacturing, and the risks and rewards are identical.”

Without giving away the complete story line of this article I will end with perhaps the punch line; “the cloud is nothing more than a tool that should be accomplishing some business objective … (and) in most cases where a tool was substituted for a real strategy, the results were disastrous. Cloud will experience the same fate unless you build a true strategic plan that just happens to include cloud services, rather than trying to build a strategy around a tool.”

In recent weeks I have been working with Attunity VP, Business Development and Corporate Strategy, Itamar Ankorion, following their acquisition of RepliWeb and their subsequent entry into the data replication marketplace with Attunity Replicate. As I listened to Ankorion explain the key differentiators of the Attunity offering versus already established products, he talked of how one “huge advantage we see over what users have experienced with (other implementations) is the ‘Click-2-Replicate’ design. The imperative today is all about ‘quick time to value!’”

The significance of this wasn’t lost on me. When it came to strategy it wasn’t the technology behind the Click-2-Replicate feature as much as it was how it addressed the user experience. Just as Apple has so successfully demonstrated, get the user experience rich and satisfying and all else will follow. An oversimplification perhaps but nevertheless about as revealing of IT as anything else that’s been presented of late. Yes, a product that simplifies administration, whether initial set-up or ongoing maintenance, slots nicely into the strategy of bettering the user experience.

FIAT had a strategy clear and simple – it needed to break through into the U.S marketplace and to do so, recognized the opening that came with its retro-looking small car, the FIAT 500. Choices of powertrains, electric, hybrid or otherwise were clearly product decisions and not to be confused with strategy. Whether or not FIAT will prove successful as it pursues its strategy needs a lot more time before the results can be truly assessed, but such a focus bodes well for the vendor.

In the post of August 11th, 2011, “GuardianAngel? NonStop revels in Clouds!” and what has now become the most read post of the blog Real Time View, I wrote of what the Team involved demonstrated at HP Discover. This included the ability to “burst” into Clouds both private and public. Quite the achievement and to some extent unexpected by many attending the event! Here were NonStop Servers actively participating in the utilization of Clouds.

However it was very clear, with what was being demonstrated, that the Cloud was simply a tool to show how modern Pathway (TS/MP) implementations could “distribute instances of an application within a single CPU, across multiple CPUs and in particular, to any CPU within any node within a cluster … (to where) instances of the application could be invoked on platforms other than NonStop.”

It was Team member Keith Moore who later commented on how “Pathway’s Serverclasses (that) are instantiated on Linux (or Windows) under PATHMON control as if they were local to NonStop. This allows TS/MP to manage creation / deletion and recovery of business-level application services running on or off the NonStop platform.” The Cloud was simply a tool to highlight what could be achieved in the business world in terms of achieving more for less while the demonstration was clearly about a bigger role for NonStop.

There’s much discussion of late about where NonStop hardware and software may be headed – a new discussion “Where should NonStop go now – Now?” on this very topic was just started this past weekend on the LinkedIn group, Fools for NonStop. At a time when there’s elements of the community considering NonStop as potentially a strictly software play, while others, myself included, see opportunities for NonStop being present in every BladeSystem cluster as a “supervising OS” the strategic significance of GuardianAngel takes on a whole different light. Yes, it will play well with Clouds, as a product option, but it will also play well with Linux and Windows – capabilities paramount for the life of NonStop untethered by hardware and solution requirements.

Will all of this be aggressively embraced as part of the strategy for NonStop? Or, perhaps, none of it? It’s still very early days but the marketplace is enamored with Cloud Computing and the promise it holds in terms of cost savings and flexibility and so seeing NonStop embracing a strategy that capitalizes on what we have today on NonStop as a very modern TS/MP transaction monitoring subsystem will go a long way to stir the imagination of others.

It is such due consideration that has kept NonStop alive for almost four decades with every potential for being with us for many more decades to come. From what we have seen to date and it’s just the tip of the iceberg in some respects, then NonStop may very well get to play that bigger role after all. And that’s a strategy that sits well with all of us within the NonStop community!

Enough is enough!

2011-10-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

It was just a report in the local paper over the mishaps by the gridiron team but it summed up how I felt about much that’s been written about NonStop of late. The good news is that users remain happy and continue to support the community!

I like to travel, a topic of another post this week, but I also like sports of all types; having played Rugby League and Rugby Union in my youth, and approached while at High School with a contract to join the junior squad of a professional team (Balmain “Tigers”, as I recall), paperwork my parents refused to even acknowledge (and thankfully, as I look back, as I followed another team, Manly “Sea Eagles”, which just won on the world’s biggest stage – the National Rugby League Grand Final). Football of all codes continues to interest me, and yes, I like to drive cars and ride motorcycles, and the picture above is of Margo, enjoying the colors of fall outside Telluride, Colorado, taken during our most recent outing in the San Juan mountains.

Deep in the Southern Hemisphere, the Rugby World Cup is being played – and much to the chagrin of my English friends, this weekend saw England knocked out of the competition while Australia made it through to the semifinals. As a Rugby fan from the antipodes, I will keep my fingers crossed for a good result from the Wallabies, Australia’s national team. However, after winning their match against South Africa and champions from the last World Cup, the Wallabies now face New Zealand, this year’s favorite to win it all, and that will be a match for the ages!

Here in the U.S. temperature has begun to fall and autumn colors have appeared, it’s a different code of football being played. A few miles down the road we have the University of Colorado, home of the mighty CU Buffalos, with Ralph, a real buffalo mascot. Apart from winning the local derby featuring the teams from the neighboring universities of Boulder and Fort Collins, the mighty CU Buffs haven’t found a way to defeat any other team, and last weekend they imploded and threw away the game. And the headlines in the local paper were worth a second look as the teams’ coach finally “spat the dummy”, as we would say back in Sydney if the contest was Rugby!

“When is it going to be enough? When is enough, enough?” was how the coach began his locker room outburst. I asked them, he later was quoted as having said, “When are they going to get tired of losing? When are they going to get tired of finding a way to lose?” While not everything that takes place in sport has relevance in the business world, as I read this story I couldn’t help thinking about the NonStop Server and about the NonStop community. For those who check into discussion forums, blog sites, and other community groups, it seems that negativity is all that garnishes the headlines.

But isn’t it time we, as a community, stopped accepting the worst and begin to speak more openly of all that’s positive about NonStop? In one group I step into occasionally, I was even chastised for not being technical enough and for embracing shabby tactics! My sin? I suggested that some customers hadn’t completely moved off NonStop and that yes, there has been some growth in selected markets and yes, there’s new applications appearing on other NonStop Servers. Being positive about the prospects of NonStop apparently is not something a couple of NonStop communities are all that interested in hearing.

And all the time, the lament continues. Why isn’t HP marketing the NonStop Server platform more aggressively and why isn’t HP beefing up their sales teams, all the while, bringing new solutions to market? And why have so many users elected to change direction and pursue alternate offerings? At a time when Larry Ellison is at his most vocal (and yes, he is now going after IBM based on one presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld ,where he was reported to have quipped “There'll be nothing left of IBM once I'm done”), why aren’t we hearing more from HP executives?

The reality of it all is that it’s been a tough decade for NonStop. During my term on the board of ITUG it was clear that the first order of business for the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) was to return the NonStop product line to profitability. Even back then, all those years ago, huge tectonic plates were in motion beneath the NonStop Server – commodity hardware was outselling all other hardware platforms and the move to open source was shocking the industry as it continued to find acceptance even with the biggest blue-chip corporation. No, returning NonStop to profitability would necessitate a transition to commodity hardware, a sharing of peripherals and connectivity products with other family members within Business Critical Systems (BCS) and a more concerted effort to embrace and accept software from other parts of HP, as well as from partners.

In the previous post to this blog “My passage to India!” I promoted the idea that some key initiatives within HP need to be broadened, and should embrace NonStop. There was no point in just one group within HP pursuing a Mission Critical initiative, without embracing NonStop, just as it made little sense to promote Cloud Computing at the expense of NonStop. In both situations there is just so much to be gained by including NonStop and following numerous emails and phone conversations, it appears that within HP the message is beginning to percolate closer to the top levels of HP management. And this is very encouraging and appreciated by all within the NonStop community as a good start!

None of this would have been possible, of course, if NonStop hadn’t returned to profitability or so readily embraced packaging in use by the rest of the BCS product family. But it does beg the question – why aren’t we hearing a lot more from users? Why aren’t customers today speaking out more loudly and sharing with their CIO peers just how well off they are from running NonStop. Just in the database arena alone, returning to Larry Ellison and Oracle for a moment, the benefits of an integrated stack so coveted by Ellison, and the savings in DBAs as a result are surely items every CIO can take substantial pride in having, should be enough to kick-start a conversation during a round of golf!

There have been occasions of late where my support of NonStop has generated considerable debate within the community. There have even been times where my opinions led to others expressing open derision and scoffing at the very thought that there could be a future for NonStop! Yet it’s hard to miss the enthusiasm for the NonStop Server platform from major companies like Chase Paymentech, AOL, Visa, Boeing-CDG, VocaLink and many others, all of which I have interacted with this year and found their support for NonStop unwavering – and they are proactively and visibly supporting the user community and its events.

It’s also hard to miss the most recent comments of Jim Johnson, Chairman of the Standish Group, posted to the LinkedIn group, Fools for NonStop. Moving off NonStop? "It is not easy to unhook a NonStop System. It is both costly and risky. In some cases it can take years. The migration failure rate is also very high … So making plans to get off NonStop is not a casual decision.” This remark comes at a time when Jim knows full well that there are CIOs with more than just plans to migrate, but the going is extremely difficult and ultimately, for these CIOs, simply not worth it.

So when is enough, enough? The problem that develops within losing teams is that it can become routine – oh, we lost again! That’s a shame … But when it comes to NonStop then we, as a community, should not be losing. Yes, there are markets where deploying a system that doesn’t go down, and that can scale to accommodate growth, remains a stellar option. HP has turned a corner, users remain loyal, and the options remain expensive and risky.

On the other hand, clusters continue to be complex and with complexity there will always be fragility – there’s no short cuts here. Wire a bunch of stuff together and you don’t add to stability, but rather simply lessen the stability. It can be addressed, of course, at the application level where all the “intelligence” has to be crafted as part of the solution – but the commitment to support for years to come has to be financed. A good TP Monitor will help, as will a “cluster aware” application and a good RDBMS – but again, adding multiple good technologies together doesn’t make a 5 X 9s system.

So let’s shed our conservative clothing and let’s move out from the shadows. NonStop is a winner and continues to win. Yes, markets have shifted as if on huge tectonic plates that push and collide, but opportunity abounds. However, we will miss out on a lot of it if we continue to believe that it is our fate to lose. Become unnecessary, perhaps irrelevant. Nonsense!

Yes, when are we collectively going to say enough is enough! And push back hard! When will we begin to push the bar a little higher and begin stretching, once again? When are we going to pen-in the naysayers so quick to provide their “evidence” of further failure? For me, the message is very clear – yes, enough is enough! It simply has to end and as the story in the local paper about the CU Buffs, paraphrasing Jack Nicholson’s speech in the movie “A few good men” - the truth? Not everyone out there can handle it! And in this case, NonStop will prevail, of that I have little doubt!

My passage to India!

2011-09-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

When the invitation arrived from HP India to speak at their InNUG user event there was absolutely no way I was going to turn it down. And after spending time with the NonStop community in India I was so pleased that I had elected to go!

There has been one country I have somehow missed visiting during all the decades I have been in IT. I landed there once on a flight from Paris to Bangkok, but never left the plane. And yet, whenever conversations turn to IT, the work being done in this country rarely escapes a mention. Of course, I am talking about India. And the picture above is of me poolside, very early in the morning, in the town of Kovalam, pretty much at the bottom of the Indian peninsula. About 8 degrees north of the equator, I later learnt.

I had been fortunate enough to have received an invite from HP to speak at the Indian NonStop user group event – InNUG. Coming right after the successful event for the Australian NonStop user group, OzTUG, as well as following the good news I had received about the most recent gathering of the Vikings at VNUG, I just had to accept. Following a whirlwind couple of days as I secured my visa, I found myself airborne and on my way to the subcontinent of India.

As an Australian with some familiarity with the geography of the region, I had assumed that I would be flying across the Pacific and changing planes in Singapore, and I was looking forward to the journey. The chili crabs served at restaurants along the south east shoreline of Singapore are a treat never to be missed. There’s never been a post to this blog about Singapore without some references made to this delicacy, as spicy food from the Far East has always been something I have enjoyed immensely.

But no, not this time. So much for my knowledge of geography and of the relative distances between the continents! India was a lot closer to the east coast of the US than it was to countries on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. So this would be an opportunity to broaden my knowledge and see things from a different vantage point – I would be travelling east to visit a land I always had pegged as being to the west of the California!

Departing out of Denver, through to Frankfurt and then on to Mumbai for a 1:30 am arrival. An overnight stay at the spectacular Leela-Kempinsky Mumbai (the 6 Degree bar off the lobby cannot be ignored) and then it would be a couple more hours in the air before I would be checking into the Leela-Kempisky Kovalam. And in the early hours of daylight, I recorded my first impressions of a place I had only ever heard others talking about :

I am sitting in my hotel room in Mumbai where ceiling-to-floor glass windows are providing me with a panoramic view of the many mid-rise apartment and office blocks crowding the hotel. In the distance I can see a number of hills pushing up into the low-hanging monsoonal clouds that continue to bring more rain. The humidity remains high and my glasses immediately fog each time I step outside. And everywhere, that distinct pungent odor that you only ever experience in the tropics – that strange mix of aromas that comes from the rich variety of exotic plants combined with the smell of decay that is ever-present.

Directly beneath my window there is a highway overpass under construction. Or perhaps a railway overpass. Or both; it’s hard to tell from the concrete support pillars already in place what it is that’s being built. However, what’s easy to see is that labor continues to be inexpensive in this city as close on a hundred construction workers are laying reinforcing bars (rebar) over a section several hundred yards long. Another concrete pour must be planned sometime soon, and as I look across the tops of the buildings and take in the scene it is reminiscent of what Singapore looked like thirty years ago.

HP India didn’t hold back when it came to organizing this year’s user group event – the location was terrific and the number of participants was as impressive as the locale. By the time I post this I will have already provided commentary to posts I have made to the web publication, realtime.ir.com, as well as to the blog, comForte Lounge, both of these are worth checking. However, the theme that stayed with me throughout the event was of removing limits and of broadening horizons.

In other words as I listened to the keynote speakers whom HP and the user group had lined-up, and as I heard first hand of the variety of solutions being run in support of the business, the more I came to appreciate how short-sighted I had become when I think of where NonStop Servers can be best deployed. There are so many discussions of late about the appropriateness of NonStop in this market segment or perhaps that market segment, when in reality, whenever there’s something a business values, whether it’s a type of transaction or simply data, then where the price is reasonable, there is a very legitimate role for NonStop Servers to play.

With so much talk about Cloud Computing and of enterprises embracing clouds, particularly private clouds, I have become concerned that our definition of Cloud Computing has become too narrow and needs to be broadened. The Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defined Cloud Computing in a paper published late 2009. It listed the essential characteristics as “on-demand self-service,” “broad network access,” “resource pooling,” “rapid elasticity” and “measured service.” And it described deployment models as “private cloud,” “community cloud,” “public cloud” and “hybrid cloud”.

In the preface NIST began with defining Cloud Computing as a “model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provide interaction.” Which all leads to suggest, among the NonStop community familiar with the loosely-coupled, shared nothing “Pathway” environment to go, yawn! So what? Nowhere in the definition was there a mention of x86 servers, virtualization, or Linux / Windows.

Picking from the NIST definitions broad network access, resource pooling and rapid elasticity together with deployment as private and / or hybrid clouds shouldn’t limit our imagination but rather broaden our appreciation for just how well NonStop Servers can support this growing business need. All the time, the pricing is coming down while the fragility of current implementations continues to be documented and their users left disillusioned. Perhaps the new message for NonStop should center on the “frustration free” NonStop Server based Cloud Computing!

And while on the topic of messaging, why are we limiting the message of Mission Critical to specific platforms and relegating NonStop to some other, albeit more-mission critical where zero downtime is mandatory (than just the basic-mission critical) marketplace? I am sure we are only seeing the early stage of Mission Critical messages from HP. When I revisited the slides Martin Fink, Senior VP and GM, HP Business Critical Systems, used at HP Discover two slides in particular stood out. Right there in the slide “Best fit solutions for critical workloads” was the Integrity NonStop systems shown as the participant in Mission Critical computing when “zero application downtime with extreme scalability” – yes, it wouldn’t be making such an appearance if the other servers in the chart could provide either!

Further into the slide deck, in the slide “Delivered versatility with common modular design” all of the BCS product line is included as participants within Mission Critical computing and where HP NonStop BladeSystem is qualified as being the “ultimate in availability and scale” – again, it wouldn’t be appearing on this slide if this requirement had already been satisfied by other servers. Sharing the slide with the NonStop Server are the HP BladeSystem (ProLiant and Integrity Blades) and the HP Integrity SuperDome 2, so this at least gives us a clue as to how valuable a participant NonStop is when it comes to the highly visible message from HP on the portfolio of products it has in support of Mission Critical computing!

There is no reason at all to limit or constrain our perspective on products and technologies when it comes to the NonStop Server – it’s an ideal place to start when it comes to clouds and it really is the premier offering in support of mission critical computing. There has been much said of late as to why HP isn’t talking about NonStop or why NonStop isn’t a participant in Cloud Computing. Yes, I think there is agreement all round that HP can improve its marketing message but it’s not like the NonStop Server is being overlooked! For me, it all comes down to education and it comes down to you and me – we simply aren’t broadening our imagination or communicating as passionately as we once did. It’s almost as if the can-do attitudes we once cherished have simply been relegated to the past, overtaken by an almost bunker mindset.

My very own passage to India, and indeed my participation in this year’s InNUG, will certainly be among the highlights of the year and I will remember the experience for quite some time. Travel this time did broaden my mind and the opportunity to meet with so many end users, perhaps more than I have seen at any other recent NonStop user event, was a real surprise. At a time when technology is shifting underneath us and attributes that were once sacrosanct seeming less important, let’s ensure we broaden our vision and open it up as wide as we can because even with what we are now witnessing all around us, NonStop remains as relevant today as when it first appeared, 35 plus years ago!

Information-centric world!

2011-09-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

Do we ever fully comprehend all the capabilities of the NonStop system? The question has been floating in my mind, particularly in light of the discussions taking place in LinkedIn and Yahoo groups of late. But before continuing with this thought, last weekend proved to be eventful and by now, some of what transpired is already appearing in cyberspace.

The picture to the right was taken last Sunday outside a Golden, Colorado, coffee shop. Margo and I had awoken to a typical picturesque Colorado mountain morning, as you sometime do late summer, with temperatures dropping, and it was time to jump on the motorcycles again. We had spent Saturday touring the continental divide in our ragtop roadster, stopping for lunch in Aspen, all the while checking to see if the aspen trees had begun to change color, so taking motorcycles for a ride seemed the natural thing to do.

However, only minutes after leaving the house, Margo pulled alongside of me at a stop sign to ask where she could find the turning signal switch. And I should have been more concerned, as it was a little odd that she didn’t remember. After all, there are only a small number of controls on a modern cruiser – particularly the more popular “metric” cruisers from the better known Japanese manufacturers.

The trip to the coffee shop was to be slightly more than 30 miles, or about 50 kms – and the route we chose was one we had often taken in past years. Margo was a little rusty, so we took it rather casually, and for most of the ride I simply pegged the throttle a little under the speed limit and took time to enjoy the scenery. I was trying to relax as on the Friday of that weekend I had taken the Corvette to the local road circuit to unwind over a few quick sessions, but early into the day I lost the Corvette in a very big way and ended up far from the track, buried in dirt! The result of poor decision-making, no question, as I had changed-up a gear while my wheels were not exactly straight in a vehicle developing upward of 700hp.

Yes, this past weekend had been fraught with decisions that were not the wisest, considering the eqipment chosen at the time. There had been times past when we knew intimately all the controls, what they managed, and the results we could expect when interacting with them at the right time and in the right manner. However, distractions and just the everyday activities that so occupy much of our time pushed our knowledge of critical properties far into the background, and a very strong argument could be made for us to never pursue the activities we chose that day as poorly informed as it turned out we were!

Very early in the discussion “Does TMF usage places a burden on system resources ??” within the LinkedIn Group “HP NonStop Tandem Professionals” it was Keith Dick, in response to a very good question posed by a developer, Jayendra Upadhye, who said “TMF provides full ACID transactions (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability). If an organization's applications update a database but don't need such a guarantee of reliable updates, I wonder why that organization bought a NonStop system in the first place.”

The discussion has since raged across a number of deployments from stock exchanges to banking applications, from human to machine, as well as machine to machine, interactions as well as about the pros and cons of related NonStop middleware. However the bottom line is that arguably, if you really need the NonStop and part of the reasoning behind deploying applications on NonStop is the integrity of data, particularly across an environment that is fault tolerant the way NonStop is implemented, the usage of critical supporting NonStop subsystems and components is very important. And you need to stay on top of the capabilities they support, revisiting them on a regular basis.

Designers, even those revisiting older applications that are in maintenance or sustaining mode, need to realize some of the design objectives embraced by the original design team to ensure that they are taking full advantage of NonStop middleware that may have come to market well after the initial application was completed.

You need to remain familiar with the controls no matter what, as running applications and not being cognizant of what a modern NonStop supports can put your business unnecessarily in peril. What is needed to control a 700lb bike is essential to know, after all! Yes, understanding all that is a part of a modern motorcycle cruiser is important and there is a down side when we simply forget. Fortunately, Margo will recover and none of the injuries was life threatening and there will be no scars.

It was only a week or so that an article I read in the newspaper, USA Today, included remarks made by former Microsoft executive, and now CEO of VMWare, Paul Maritz, of how he envisioned “consumers getting mountains of information from whatever device or cloud-based application (that) is best for them.” For some time now, vendors have been promoting the value that comes with better integrating the data we collect and through various machinations, turning it into useful information.

“We inexorably are shifting from a device-centric world to an information-centric world,” USA Today further quoted Maritz. For example, USA Today reported, “we still have mainframe (computers); they just have a new role. The same will happen with PCs. They may end up being used for PowerPoint presentations!”

The more attuned we are to the capabilities and functionality of the systems we rely on today, it now appears, the better positioned we will be to use them again in exciting ways in circumstances that may at first appear alien. Understanding the controls and the results of the responses we provide certainly carries over from what I witnessed last weekend and are as applicable to how we view the servers we deploy today – even the NonStop server which many of us place on a similar pedestal just as mainframes are elevated by those who use them.

It truly is becoming an information-centric world. For those who may have missed the remarks made earlier this year by HP CEO, Leo Apotheker, it is worth repeating. “Information technology is the fabric of the global community,” Apotheker explained in the HP press release of March 14th 2011. “Data is the world’s most valuable raw material and information is the most valuable commodity – created, consumed and delivered in always-on connectivity.”

Yes, this includes NonStop! And yes, NonStop has a tremendous future ahead of it as an active participant in information technology serving up the world’s most valuable commodity. Almost four decades on, NonStop server remains relevant and a serious contender for a strong and visible presence in cloud computing!

Yet I still wonder, for those businesses that depend on NonStop and are aware of the dramatic changes occurring in the marketplace, and have been become sensitive to the transformation under way as we move inexorably towards an information-centric world, how familiar are they with the technology and how appreciative are they that today, they already possess technology that lends itself to the journey? And will the knowledge of NonStop pave the way for even greater participation as the world does become information centric?

Foolish aspirations!

2011-09-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

Social media may not hold all the answers and may be a poor substitute for actually meeting face-to-face. And yet, it's proving to be a powerful lightening rod in terms of attracting those anxious to learn more! As for the future of NonStop then check out what these fools predict ...

Last weekend all across America people celebrated the Labor Day weekend – the traditional end of summer. Margo and I were no exception, and we headed across the continental divide to spend a relaxing weekend on the western slopes. We elected to spend the weekend in the small town of Palisades, Colorado, just a little to the east of Grand Junction.

I had driven past it many times during the years we commuted between Boulder, Colorado, and Simi Valley, California, and never given it a second glance. Actually, it is not possible to view the township as you pass it by as it is hidden below the Interstate, but a few billboards are high enough to let you know that should you take the freeway exit, there would be plenty to do. The photo above is of the Wine Country Inn where we spent the weekend, spoiled rotten by the attentive staff.

I have to admit, I was apprehensive at first as there were many attractive destinations nearby – Telluride, Durango, Crested Butte not to mention, a little closer to Boulder, Aspen and Breckenridge. Wasn’t it foolish to give up a long weekend just to stay in something that might end up being rather mundane? But now that I am back in Boulder, it turned out not to be a foolish choice after all. The wine! The peaches! The delightful inn and the great food! Turned out to be a great place to spend time, after all!

Following such an introduction it may not come as a surprise to readers, or indeed to members of LinkedIn groups I manage, that I am about to launch into my latest endeavor - the formation of the LinkedIn Group, “Fools for NonStop.” So soon after my first post of my fifth year of blogging, there’s almost a sense of inevitability that the subject of foolishness should be raised among those who are fervent supporters of all things NonStop. It’s not a subject that doesn’t cross our minds at some point – surely, after all the years we have been associated with the NonStop Server platform, there’s some truth in us being different, a little odd, perhaps. Even elitist, as I was once called!

The creation of the LinkedIn Group, Fools for NonStop, came about when a contributor to one of the online forums where I regularly participate quickly dismissed one of more upbeat predictions for NonStop as “there is one fool exists in LinkedIn whose name is Richard Buckle!” Clearly my passion gives me away. However, it’s scarcely a new accusation or a surprise. Back in my days working for InSession Technologies, it was suggested in a management meeting that my opinions should be weighed in the knowledge that, after all, I wore Tandem underwear. Certainly, if my passion for all things NonStop suggests that I am a fool, then yes, I will wear that insignia with pride – and continue to welcome the more than 100 members who have now joined with me as Fools for NonStop.

In fact, with all of the groups that I have started, or have witnessed growing, this group is proving to be the fastest growing of the lot. At the time of posting to Real Time View, membership has continued to climb and now sits at some XYZ members – placing it ahead of all other NonStop-specific vendor groups and raising the question of whether it will grow in membership to the size the LinkedIn Group, Real Time View, that today has more than 700 members. There’s still no substitute for the face-to-face time and general networking opportunities that come with participation in real user group gatherings, but could this be a sign, as one new Fool for NonStop went so far as to suggest – “is this the real ITUG?”

There is a difference between foolish behavior and simply being a fool. Particularly, for no apparent reason – when tagged as a fool for something, it usually implies that there are others not as convinced as you are about your beliefs or values, and that perhaps, you have moved too far from a central, popular point of view. When it comes to the NonStop Server platform, and its adherents then yes, our knowledge of what it can provide and the value business can derive from its presence separates us from the pack. For flying in the face of such obvious and overwhelming popular support for commoditization and the technobabble that surrounds it, as a community we certainly look foolish.

In medieval times, the role of the court jester was important. Royalty of the day would not only look upon them for amusement but for information. Free to wander from village to village, these entertainers were the source of much intelligence about what was really taking place within the kingdom. “Who are a little wise the best fools be,” was what 16th Century British poet, John Dunne, observed. Or perhaps more widely recognized, from the Bard of Avon himself, Shakespeare (about the same time John Dunne was writing his poems), “the fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

Today, we are much more aware that tides can turn and that what was once valued as important can turn out to be fleeting disappearing as quickly as it appeared. Indeed, the term fashionable has come to mean something that barely lasts a season. And yet, when it comes to technology and to systems anchoring mission-critical businesses, populist perspectives and opinions continue to weigh heavily on the judgments made by many CIOs. NonStop Servers continue to dominate in situations where business values the inherent properties of availability and scalability.

In a recent set of responses to question “Generation Next of HP Nonstop Tandem Professionals - What would you advice?” posted to the LinkedIn Group, HP NonStop Tandem Professionals (certainly, catches all the keywords), longtime expert and a former key architect for Tandem, Keith Dick, wrote “I will say a little about the future of NonStop in this post and about what someone new should learn in some following posts. The future prospects for NonStop are a bit unclear, but there are reasons to be hopeful. Let me give some history to explain that.”

Keith Dick then suggested that NonStop “is a very good system on which to build applications that have as one of their requirements that they have no downtime, or extremely little downtime, and the main competing systems could not match that characteristic in NonStop's early years … Although the clustering approaches of other systems have continued to improve slowly, they still do not match the ease with which a large, fault-tolerant application can be built and run on NonStop. Now the cost of NonStop is comparable to similar Windows or Unix clusters, so the stage is set for NonStop possibly to win more business.”

Yes, tides do turn. What was once fashionable, particularly when it’s out there on the bleeding edge, requires little outside influence before it crashes and burns, relegated to the distant depths of the closet. Commoditizing all the hardware needed by the major HP Integrity server offerings to the point where all that is left is ServerNet is materially affecting the costs – they are coming down. As Keith Dick points out, declining to the point where on paper, there’s not much separating the hardware costs of a Integrity NonStop blade system and Unix, or even Linux, clusters and when these better known systems often run fowl of software license fees, particularly when it comes to databases, NonStop begins to shine.

There are clearly some anomalies remaining with the pricing of some middleware offerings, as well as with some solutions, but even here, current market conditions are seeing vendors revisit their models much to the benefit of the user community. Is it foolish to consider deploying a very modern NonStop Server? I don’t think so! Am I a fool for continuing to lobby hard for further usage of the NonStop Server? Again, I don’t think so!

I found the time spent in Palisades, Colorado, riding through fields on a bicycle and sampling fresh peaches while tasting some pretty wonderful wines, the detour well worth the effort. I may very well have been viewed as a fool for sidestepping a weekend in Telluride or Aspen, preferring to be distracted by the simple life within a small Colorado village but then again, I came away a lot more relaxed than I had at first anticipated.

There’s much that can prove distracting when it comes to social media and it’s a challenge to find a path to those sites providing value. For many, too, there’s the issue that corporations block access on a routine basis and it’s left to quiet periods at home before there’s any opportunity to check out what’s being discussed. But if the speed with which membership in Fools for NonStop grew is any indication there’s very little that’s foolish when it comes to deploying NonStop.

Stories we could tell …

2011-08-30T14:56:00.001-07:00

So this is the first post of my fifth year and what better topic to pick to celebrate such a start than what we take with us from user events - regional as well as global. Times are changing and the web is playing a bigger role, but I sure do look forward to any opportunity that comes my way to join with users ...

“Talkin’ to myself again
Wonderin’ if this traveling is good
Is there something else a doin’
We’d be doin’ if we could …”

Today, August 30th, has been celebrated in my family since I was born. Both my parents were born in the same day, different years. In 2009, my father passed away but he is survived by my mother. In the neighborhood where I grew up, my father was the first anyone knew who had spent time living in America. Following in the footsteps of my grandfather, my father was a printer.

I was reminded of this when I walked into my library and came across a framed original of my grandfather’s indentures signed in July, 1902, that bonded him, as an apprentice, for six years into the family of a master printer in Woodbridge, East Anglia, England. It was counter-signed by my great grandfather and the picture above is of me with the signed indenture. I only reference this as yes, I am a third generation newspaper man at heart, but for two years I was a computer “apprentice” indentured to the Australian Steelworks company, John Lysaght in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia.

My father participated in a revolution in Australia’s printing industry as he was responsible for the very first “electronic” typesetting machine brought into the country. Long before the Murdoch’s, the Packer’s and the Fairfax’s my father was involved with a newspaper that elected to switch from metal type to film. The machine installed in 1965 was manufactured in America by Mergenthaler and called the Linofilm. It was an electromechanical device that produced the “film” required to feed the new web “offset” presses of the day. Once installed, productivity went through the roof and the newspaper company expanded from three papers a week to more than twenty five suburban and provincial publications!

More relevant today, when viewed in the context of IT, was how the Mergenthaler Linofilm came with no local support other than a traditional pre-sales professional. This necessitated my father to “learn” electronics at age 50, down to the functionality of vacuum tubes and mechanical relays - a requirement that saw him spending three months at Mergenthaler’s campus in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. Many Sundays were spent with father absent from the dinner table as he performed major maintenance routines to ensure all was up and running when the first shift of operators arrived Monday mornings.

As I look back on my own career there has been considerable travel. I’ve relocated internationally seven times and I have paid the price – replacing furniture, electronics and cars. Yet the travelling has been my primary source of education – what I observed and what I was taught, proved vital in developing and expanding my knowledge of IT. This is how I took what I had learnt as an apprentice and became a professional.

However, perhaps more importantly, it’s been as much about the people I met along the way! In time, I valued nothing greater than what I took with me from user group meetings. User groups and the sense of community they fostered is how my education continued and proved a powerful catalyst for all the career developments that followed. And yet, with the rise in social media and web publications, I am now seeing some of the same sense of community developing. Next week I will be involved in another webinar so if you are interested in hearing of what new I have to say about modernization follow this link to register: http://bit.ly/nJR6ou

At the start of this post I opened with lines from the Jimmy Buffett song, “Stories we could tell” and readers may recall several posts from the past where I have included lines from other Jimmy Buffett songs. Buffett is a troubadour, and as such represents a continuation of a tradition dating back to the middle ages, perhaps earlier. He communicates current events in ways we can all relate to:

“If you’re on the road trackin’ down your every night
Playin’ for a livin’ beneath the brightly colored lights”

The lines above reflect the singer’s pain and yet suggest inevitability. As a third generation newspaper man, now working in a media unknown to previous generations of the Buckle family, writing these posts gives me as much enjoyment as I’m sure performers like Buffett experience every time they are on stage.

At their height there were 30+ regional user groups focused on NonStop. Many were outside of America and I had the opportunity to participate in events with nearly every one of them. And I hope to continue doing so in the months and years ahead. Even as I write this post, I am working on my travel plans for the upcoming InNUG user meeting to be held in India next month.

My first event was Nice, in 1992, and up until this year I can only recall missing a couple. If I had have behaved myself, I may have made it to New Orleans back in 1986 or 1987 as I was working in Raleigh, North Carolina, for a company Tandem Computers invested in, but my boss felt that the company would be better served if more mature colleagues made the trip down to the ITUG event held that year.

The starry-eyed expressions when they returned and the stories they told made a huge impression on me, so much so that in talking to Tandem newbies, Suri Harish and Steve Saltwick, as well as to old-hand Andy Hall, convinced me that I should return to Australia, join Tandem Computers, and lobby hard to get back to Cupertino. Looking for a career change and opting for Tandem Computers, came with a surprise – I was standing in the offices of John Robinson, CEO of SDI (NET/MASTER) when I received offers from both DEC and Tandem and today it seems as though working on the fringes of HP was pre-determined!

As the ITUG Summit Chair (2000 to 2002) it became a tradition for me, that stayed with me for all my time with ITUG, that early Monday morning I would walk the exhibition floor and just chat with everyone attending to last minute details. The lads in the NonStop support center, Jack Mauger’s crew, were always wringing out the last possible cycle from the NonStop servers installed. And everywhere, the vacuum cleaners were busily removing the last traces of construction.

It was quite a buzz, and as the Wednesday evening wound down you could find vendors crowding around bars and restaurants retelling the stories of what had just transpired. As the evening progressed, the livelier these conversations became. Walking the floors, catching the discussions, they all became familiar routines that I followed with every event.

User group meetings were always the source of many anecdotes that would be liberally sprinkled through vendor presentations for the rest of the year! There was always that one bar where you would find Jimmy, Gerry Peterson, Bill Heil, Randy Baker, Pete Schott and a collection of developers, vendors and volunteers all intensely competing for the undivided attention of all present. And nearly always, failing to do so, amidst the merriment of the occasion. Yet the competitive spirit fostered became a key characteristic of all those passionate about NonStop!

ITUG was rife with stories as well that were passed down from one event to the next. The time Jimmy rolled up his sleeves and helped pull LAN cable beneath the booths when ITUG was held in San Francisco! And was it true – did Jimmy cut the legs off his custom suite for one user event (Finland?) turning a nicely finished pair of pants into shorts? Just so he could better fit-in with others present! And did the last Stratus replaced by a Tandem ended up being thrown into the Baltic? Perhaps Buffett knew all too well:

“All the stories we could tell
If it all blows up and goes to hell
I wish that we could sit upon the bed in some hotel
And listen to the stories we could tell!”

Yet, for many of us, this is how we gained the knowledge we have today of NonStop and of how users deploy NonStop, and of vendors providing solutions. Customer presentations provided powerful reminders of just how good the NonStop platform really is and guest speakers never missed an opportunity to extol the virtues of the modern architectures and technologies they espoused! But oh, the travel!

Metal type gave way to strips of film, and perhaps events will give way to social media communities. I’m not a Jimmy Buffett but troubadours exist in all walks of life and there’s times where my musings meander down similar paths. And in so doing, knowledge and experiences continue to be shared with those who maybe just entering the IT industry.

I sure hope we haven’t seen the last event – and the recent OzTUG certainly has helped move the bar up a little higher –I’m all for them! And the opportunity they provide for all us to expand our knowledge! However, changes are taking place and I am skeptical we will ever see a return to those times we so thoroughly enjoyed.

But in the near term, and for the audience with a preference for instant access, I will continue to blog and enjoy reminiscing on how it once was done - it’s my first post of my fifth year, so it is appropriate to get nostalgic, just a tad. And yes, keep posting those comments as I enjoy reading every one of them!

Fourth Anniversary!

2011-08-20T22:13:00.000-07:00

For many, four years may not represent a lengthy time span. Many have worked on projects that spanned many more years! On the other hand, when it comes to my own handicraft, who knew! And yes, who could have guessed … and now I’m kicking off my fifth year of blogging!

There have been many postings to this blog where I have included pictures of cars. On more than one occasion it’s been of the blue Corvette coupe in which I have tried my hand at driving on different circuits in Western United States. Pictures that I have included have clearly shown the number 116 affixed to the car. More astute observers may even recall a picture of my SUV with the same number affixed high in the rear window.

The choice of number for the Corvette, required by clubs before the coupe can turn a wheel on any circuit, took very little time to determine. After all, January 16th is my wedding anniversary and having forgotten (just once, in 2009, mind you) every time I walk through the garage now, I cannot help but be reminded. Anniversaries are extremely important and their celebration is always a joyous occasion in my house.

Perhaps not every reader goes this far to post reminders of important dates, but my track record (no pun intended) since posting to the Corvette, and to the SUV, the vehicle we use to tow the trailer carrying the Corvette to distant circuits, has proved to be more reliable than all previous methods that I have tried – so, for the foreseeable future, I plan to stick with this way of reminding myself of important occasions. As for the picture above, this was taken of me at our daughter’s wedding reception in Minneapolis, anniversary zero!

It only occurred to me this month that with this post I am embarking on my fifth year of writing posts for this blog. It was only a few weeks ago, in the post of June 28th, 2011 “Responsible CIOs show restraint!” that I remarked about it being the 200th post, but for me, entering my fifth year represents a significant milestone. In that first post, way back in August 20th, 2007, “Introduction”, I wrote that I was starting (this blog) with the expectation of presenting a slightly different view of NonStop and that I am writing it to generate further discussion. And these past four years has proved that, as a community, NonStop users and vendors were not all that shy about passing comments on pretty much every topic I raised despite the perspective I took.

How vocal?

When I combed through the 200 posts, as I did last weekend, I found more than 330 comments posted – a handful from myself, of course, and in response to questions directed to me - but in general, a remarkable achievement in the world of blogging where the majority of sites generate very few comments. Combine this number of blog comments with the extensive discussions built around each post on the LinkedIn group by the same name as this blog, Real Time View, you’ll see that, yes, the NonStop community isn’t only “not shy” but is very dedicated in ensuring “the message of NonStop is not lost” on the broader HP user community.

There was a time when the value from blogging and participating in social media channels wasn’t all that well understood. In general terms, those who “got it” were the exception and it’s only been this year that I have seen vendors and consultants working within the NonStop community come to appreciate the value that a direct pipeline into the user community provides.

I have seen little evidence that the ratio, developed in the early days of blogging, of 1:9:90 (where, for every 100 readers 90 will read sparingly, while another 9 will read regularly, and where 1 will routinely provide comments) has not changed all that much, but for the few that do participate it makes the exercise of providing the information well worth the effort.

Blog sites continue to evolve and of late many of them have become repositories for short stories, descriptions of features and product, and marketplace analysis. These blog sites are being complemented too by a presence within LinkedIn, a social media communication channel readily accepted among the business community.

LinkedIn members may not be always aware of postings to blogs but they can quickly tell from discussions that are initiated, and that draw quick responses, which blog postings they may want to take a closer look at – the LinkedIn discussions created around posts to this blog site are now attracting the majority of readers. Where comments posted directly to this blog site tend to be between four and ten, LinkedIn discussions have drawn upwards of 50 comments, with a discussion on Cloud Computing attracting more than 125 comments!

In combination, the discussions on LinkedIn and the posts to blog sites, provide the NonStop community with a wealth of opinions along with candid insights and in many ways, have become the home to a virtual user community that shares much the same enthusiasm that was always evident at traditional gatherings of users. Perhaps the modern events that major vendors like HP are keen to sponsor lack much of the informality and networking those former summits provided, but much of that original spirit lives on in the virtual worlds supported by social media.

Viewed as a complementary channel for marketing, and as a vehicle when used wisely and free from a barrage of sales messages, it can attract an avid following. While I will stop short of suggesting it as a virtual replacement to other ways of meeting, as NonStop users we should openly participate in as many social media outlets as our daily routines permit.

For me there’s still no substitute for sitting down with a colleague over coffee, or an adult beverage, and listening to what they are doing, but in today’s ever-shrinking global community reading of how they are faring is often the only way to find out what NonStop users are currently pursuing in support of their business.

As you scroll down through this post, I am sure you will not miss the sidebar summary of the popular posts. This is a new feature added only a year ago and so doesn’t reflect the results from earlier posts where the data had been managed via a different tool. However, when I combine the data from both sets of figures, I see that the most popular post to date was “Tough Neighborhood”, with close to 1,000 page-views, followed by “ACI Strategy - it's all about choice!”, “More new engines for NonStop!” and then “Starting with a blank …”

Essentially, any time I wrote about my former employer, ACI Worldwide, or HP, readership spiked. Not surprisingly as the issues covered were of paramount importance to many at that time. Today, interests are spiking whenever I address the topics of cloud computing, databases, and likely future directions of user communities and user-run events. As for the posts that have drawn the most reader comments, there’s been some clear-cut winners through the years.

The most ever comments followed the post “ACI Strategy - it's all about choice!” followed by “Is it time we folded our (big) tent?” and “The club at the end of the street …” and all comments shared one thing in common: concerns over where NonStop was headed! In particular, there was interest in knowing more about the benefits of the new HP Blade servers, how competitive they would be compared with other traditional platforms such as the IBM mainframe, how much support they would attract from solutions vendors, as well as the venues and forums HP would elect to support as part of promoting the message.

There are many commentators who believe that the creation of virtual communities based on participation in forums and blogs, or membership within groups, is a foretaste of what’s to come. With a new generation of technologists preferring to network online than face-to-face, the popularity of events of all types is in jeopardy. However, I hope that I’m not a part of the community when that time comes as I still enjoy interacting with real people.

As much as I enjoy writing and as fond as I am of jumping into discussions pretty much on a whim, I value even more greatly any chance to sit back and watch a lively conversation produce the level of evangelical enthusiasm so many of us can recall from times past. No, as much as commentators may predict the rise of virtual communities I, for one, will approach with caution and even as I blog and comment, I look forward to the next user event wherever it may be held.

As I look back over the past four years, I have made a couple of poor calls in terms of what to expect to see in future products, as I have strayed into areas where some NonStop community members found it difficult to “connect the dots.” However, the overall response from those who continue to read these postings have been favorable and encouraging and I am hopeful that what interests me continues to find an audience.

There’s definitely no lessening of headlines that catch my attention, or of products and solutions that I find promising so there’s little likelihood I will run out of material on which to base my stories. So again, in case I wasn’t as forthcoming earlier as I could have, thank you for the time you have spent reading my commentaries and opinions over the past four years and I look forward to continuing to develop even more in coming years!

GuardianAngel? NonStop revels in Clouds!

2011-08-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the biggest surprise for many at HP Discover, was the demonstration of GuardianAngel – NonStop, capitalizing on cloud resources – and for Enterprise users, a whole new way to view cloud computing!

Business took me into Omaha last week, and then I headed off to Minneapolis. Rather than driving an American car, I drove an import on this trip and though this has little to do with the immediate story, when the return trip took us through Sturgis, South Dakota, during the annual motorcycle festival, there were moments when I had second thoughts about the wisdom of what I had done.

The picture above shows me standing in the center of the street surrounded by motorcycles stretched out as far as the eye could see. And the overwhelming choice of the rally participants was American-made bikes and the older the better. Surprising, there was even an exhibit by the motorcycle vendor, Indian, who I thought had long since left the scene following a brief resurrection a few years back.

And of course, there’s no escaping the unique looks of the very modern Victory motorcycle, with its distinctive V-shaped tail lights! Looking at these bikes that are representative of what had been developed in the past was pretty cool, but still, there wasn’t anything I was anxious to own any time soon.

Picking up a copy of Road and Track last night I turned to the editorial only to see the headline stating “The shape of things to come” where editor, Matt DeLorenzo, quoted current Renault chief designer, Laurens Van der Acker, as having said “cars should be a symbol of progress!” The background for this story had been a car show at Lake Como’s Villa d’Este featuring cars of the past and yet, “when you look at the levels of performance available relative to what cars have historically cost,” DeLorenzo wrote, “we are living in a golden age.”

In the post of November 30th, 2010, “Nothing seems to last ...” I wrote of how readers “may have missed some commentary I provided in NonStop – A Running Commentary in the October issue of the eNewsletter, Tandemworld.Net and the slight variation I made on my earlier forecasts. Gone is the pursuit of a hypervisor capable of supporting NonStop, and the availability of hybrid clusters in a box … New are the observations of a NonStop server becoming a smart controller!” Could we see NonStop as a participant in a new golden age?

The fact that I continue to speculate about the future of NonStop is a clear sign that I truly believe there is a future for NonStop. Of late, I have a strong sense that the industry is turning ever so slightly and pursuing a course where the capabilities of NonStop will come to the fore. As Road and Track editor, DeLorenzo, wrapped up his column, he suggested (and here it’s easy to substitute NonStop servers for automobiles), “the key to making automobiles once again the symbol of progress is being able to make these new-era vehicles different from what has gone on before.”

From the time I first heard of the demonstration that was given at HP Discover by members of the Americas’ NonStop Solutions Engineering Group (ANSEG), where NonStop was shown running a typical internet application (written in Java) – specifically, the Pet Store application – and where load conditions could be triggered that led to a CloudBurst: that is, selected transactions being pushed out and away from the NonStop server and onto commodity-based Clouds (both private and public, e.g. Amazon) I was shocked!

How could this be? NonStop providing oversight of transactions to the point where even when they were no longer present on the NonStop server, they were still somehow connected. As processing returned to normal levels on the NonStop, the processing of these transactions returned to the NonStop.

Pulling back the layers of software involved and talking to the Team, I was to learn that this new capability had a lot to do with what was now available with Pathway, or TS/MP V 2.4, to be more precise. As someone who has enjoyed a lengthy association with NonStop for many years, I have known of process pairs, persistent processes, and Pathway but I am the first to admit that I didn’t put it all together with quite the effect that some very clever folks within ANSEG did. As Justin Simonds, a member of this group, was to tell me later, “GuardianAngel was really just a combination of capabilities that leveraged an API that we developed, some standard open-source techniques, and, of course, Pathway.”

The new TS/MP V2.4 (Pathway) provides a Domain capability for load-balancing and distribution of workload in support of Pathway server processes across processors and server instances. With this added capability, Pathway can distribute instances of an application within a single processor or CPU, across multiple CPU’s, and in particular, to any CPU within any node within a cluster. But the way it went about supporting this opened the door for yet one more capability, and with the introduction of the API that was developed in support of the demo, instances of the application could be invoked on platforms other than NonStop.

The GuardianAngel API was crucial to the CloudBurst demonstration. A small, lightweight Pathway “Gateway server” where “half” the GuardianAngel API resides, pushed the selected transactions out onto two Linux systems. As part of the demonstration, even the resources available in this ‘private cloud’ (Linux) were exceeded, so Pathway, via its GuardianAngel Gateway server, called up resources on a public cloud (Cloudburst).

For the demonstration the public Cloud instances were pre-loaded to avoid public server start-up time (2-8 minutes) however I’m told they could have been started via Amazon or Rackspace API based on a NonStop threshold having been exceeded. As a final demonstration one of the Linux system ‘fails’ and its load is handled by NonStop till it recovers – so Pathway instances using the same code base are running on Linux, in a public cloud and on NonStop all at the same time under the control of Pathway – talk about hybrid!

For those attendees viewing the Pet Store application seamlessly shifting from the cloud to NonStop and back to the cloud, according to Tom Miller and another member of ANSEG “it was jaw-dropping for those watching and who were unaware of the capabilities of NonStop!” The promise this brings to the Enterprise is mind boggling, in my opinion. For some time I have been fumbling around looking for the right way to express some very basic concepts and the more I watched the demo, the more I saw how more advanced this reality had become.

Here is another key observation: all who saw the demonstration on the HP stand, on the floor of the very busy and noisy exhibition hall, stayed glued to the screens for more than half an hour and each came up with new implementation concepts pertinent to their own business. Looking ahead, the team within HP NonStop is seizing upon the early enthusiasm and holding workshops and developing deployment scenarios.

“We have had amazing interest in the capabilities of NonStop when it comes to integration with cloud services and also, for point cross-platform business applications,” explained Keith Moore, another member of ANSEG. “Since the 2011 HP Discover event, we do 2 – 4 live real time demonstrations to customers per week many of which lead to continuing discussions about how NonStop can help deliver ‘the fundamentals’ to off-platform current and future applications. ANSEG believes that the basic ideas and implementation that we have demonstrated can help in other areas across the greater HP product suite as well as with other common business deployments.”

For me, this is starting to look like hybrid computing done right – some configurations of NonStop with Linux, for instance, could certainly prove appealing even among the more hardened mainframe community! As more use cases are uncovered, perhaps nothing stands out more prominently for me as having a database on NonStop, as scalable as it is available with NS SQL/MX, and low-value transactions being dispatched into the cloud, all managed by Pathway.

This project didn’t just suddenly appear overnight; it has its roots deep into earlier projects within NonStop development. With many code names and with several early appearances, it really did take on a life following the release of the latest version of Pathway. But for me, it truly does tie-in with the thoughts I have been having for some time about NonStop becoming a smart controller. Perhaps not the most glamorous of tasks, but as enterprises hasten to deploy clouds, deploying NonStop as a controller overseeing it all, has a lot of appeal for me. Its Safety, and Assurance, with a capital S and a capital A!

There’s no escaping that this is a part of the NonStop history, too. After all, NonStop really did achieve its initial break-through when it was a smart front-end to mainframe computers, servicing large networks of ATMs and POS terminals. For me, GuardianAngel is a return to what NonStop has always proved effective at doing; shielding imperfection behind a level of availability simply not matched in any other manner. For business, this is something that’s exciting and is now out there, demonstrable; this genie will be impossible to put back in the bottle and with the strategy of HP so tied to clouds, will prove difficult to ignore.

Then again, it’s not quite like a return to the past – the commodity-based NonStop server we see today is far-removed from what we worked with two or three decades ago. Modern NonStop Server blades are proving that costs can be taken out of the NonStop Server platform and business is already capitalizing on this most recent development within NonStop.

The opinions expressed by Road and Track’s editor DeLorenzo remain as valid when applied to NonStop as they are to automobiles, and to paraphrase: “when you look at the levels of performance available relative to what (computers) have historically cost, we are living in a golden age.” For the NonStop server, GuardianAngel will become highly visible and our appreciation of clouds may never be the same!

It only requires a few steps!

2011-07-31T18:46:00.000-07:00

It took me longer than I had initially anticipated but the help users gave me, as did a couple of vendors as well as HP itself made the effort worthwhile. Want to know my opinions about NS SQL then read on …

I’ve spent so many years travelling that there’s part of me convinced I am a Nomad! Perhaps not, but having moved internationally seven times, and with opportunities to take up residence in England (London) and Canada (Edmonton), as well as in the US on four separate occasions (Dallas in 1977, Raleigh in 1987, then Cupertino in 1989, and Boulder, Colorado in 1996, If you add Omaha and Simi Valley into the mix the number grows to six!), I am still enjoying the journey and consider the destinations of lesser importance.

The picture above? It’s of my apartment building that I took on a return trip to Edmonton, two years after I had left.

These days I am reconnecting with so many old friends and the memories keep flooding back; of standing on empty beer cans to catch a glimpse of Australia playing England in a rugby match at the old Twickenham stadium, and cheering with my fellow Albertans as then-WHL ice hockey team from Edmonton defeated the world champions, Czechoslovakia. All of these memories returning with each new name that becomes my contact on LinkedIn!

Growing up in a newspaper family where discussing the news of the day occupied most of our time at the dinner table, I now realize how little real information I could access back then. Staying in touch with anyone outside of Sydney, let alone somewhere overseas was impractical for all but the few who were able to travel regularly. Today, with a modern business tool, like LinkedIn, I can chase down a former colleague in the time it takes to tap on a few keys of my keyboard. And yet, there’s still surprises occurring on a regular basis.

It was only a short time ago that I received a recommendation from a former manager, Lewis Cardin, for the time I spent working in a service bureau in Edmonton, Canada. In his recommendation, Lewis wrote “I met Richard when data bases were a new concept ... and yes, that is many years ago. Richard was one of the very few people who really understood the power and future impact that 'data base' would have on the value of technology. He was a true evangelist among a sea of skeptics."

There’s more, but I will leave it to you to check out the rest of what Lewis wrote. However, I am sure that this comes as a surprise to many who have worked with me over the past couple of decades. Certainly, for the past 25 years, I have been better known for my work with communications and networking products and yet, in the years where I transitioned away from the user community and staked out a life in the vendor world, all those years ago it was databases that held my attention.

At the time I was working with Lewis databases were just emerging from conforming to either a hierarchical or networking model, and embracing partial or fully inverted models. Indexes were beginning to take over – a fully inverted database actually didn’t have any records, or rows, as the data were spread throughout the indices themselves.

SQL was just appearing, but positioned initially as more or less an ad-hoc tool useful for pulling information from the database, pretty much on an exception basis. I recall participating in a user conference in Dallas in 1978 when the wraps were taken off an early SQL implementation only to be told that the IBM mainframes the service bureau were running were too small to be able to take advantage of SQL!

How far we have come since the late1970s! I have been engaged in preparing a number of papers and presentations on modernization and there’s probably not a chapter or section in any of the material I developed where SQL implementations haven’t been featured. They have come to epitomize everything we want to see today from a modern piece of software.

In a post to this blog on November 9th, 2010, “Papers? Papers, please!” I covered the subject of CI-Ready where I described what was required to be considered a participant. At that time, I wrote of how a solution or middleware offering had to use “one of more of the modern and open software infrastructure components on NonStop (e.g. Java, SASH, SOAP / Web services, SQL/MX, etc.) or, is capable of being installed with NonStop Software Essentials (e.g. can then be integrated into the installation repository for any NonStop system).

LinkedIn Contacts hasn’t been the only place I have spent time recently, corresponding with people I know, used to know or want to get to know; LinkedIn Groups have become a regular destination for me of late and they are definitely coming into their own; a number of the groups featuring NonStop are drawing quite a crowd. And among the topic is the oft-raised issue about the future of NonStop and of the marketing effort HP is putting into promoting the NonStop platform.

Sharing equal billing with these subjects, however, have been the many discussions about the future of NS SQL/MX and it’s not that hard to miss the connection between the two.

Today, the future of NonStop is very much paralleling the future of NS SQL/MX – and from where I sit, it’s looking pretty good. In a speech to attendees at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, declared “if you engineer hardware and software to work together, you get a much better overall system and the overall experience is better.” Hello, Larry! Where have you been?

Actually, it’s highly encouraging to see such a prominent advocate of SQL like Larry Ellison giving the NonStop such a glowing endorsement. A couple of weeks back, HP should have painted it on a fleet of taxis ferrying the crowds around Las Vegas. And all this brings me back to the subject in hand – I have been a big supporter of databases in general, and of NS SQL/MX in particular. The very first trip I made to Cupertino was at the time NonStop SQL was being announced and the sense of euphoria about “at last, someone is doing database right” was hard to escape.

For the first half of 2011 I have been engaged in interviewing NS SQL/MX customers – MX users running native with MX tables as well as MX users still utilizing MP tables. Either way, the results were pretty phenomenal. Yes there are some really big deployments out there, in both the private and public sectors. I also interviewed a number of solutions architects as well as a couple of solutions vendors.

And the picture that formed reminded me why I became a database evangelist more than thirty years ago – the power from what it can provide and its impact on the way we process transactions well into the future is an inescapable fact and one proven on a routine basis by many innovative businesses. The paper I wrote following the completion of these interviews, “NonStop – the always-on database server!” can now be downloaded from the HP web site.

You can visit the HP Portal directly at:
www.hp.com/go/Nonstop/ and scroll down to What’s New?

Or, as NED Product Manager Ajaya Gummadi just advised me, you can use this link to directly open up the paper: http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/downloads/NonStop_SQL_The_path_to_the_always-on_easily_administered_out-of-the-box_clustered_database_server.pdf .

It is also posted on the SQL Pages under News & Articles: http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/cache/81318-0-0-0-121.html

Early reviews are in; I provided a “sneak peak” to a select audience just to reassure myself. Lewis Cardin, my former manager, may have thought that I was “a true evangelist among a sea of skeptics” – but after three decades, had I lost my touch?

I love to travel and I probably will do so until there’s so much metal in me I can no longer pass through airport security! The journey, after all, is what it’s all about – the people you meet, the cities you explore, and the events you join. So too, today is modernization a journey and there’s many steps that need to be taken – but they are well worth the effort. Modernization is not something pursued in isolation, as with modernization comes the ability to use standard products and services and a reduction in the dependency on proprietary, often legacy, code, with all the costs associated with it.

Again, check out the paper and watch for new discussions about the paper being posted to the LinkedIn group, Real Time View. SQL is not some lane, poorly illuminated and off of the path that few businesses will turn into but rather, one of the very large, highly visible, steps right there on the main path that simply must be taken.

Productivity! Innovation! Competitiveness! Difficult goals at the best of times and yet, well down the path of modernization, and with SQL in place, they will prove to be a lot easier to reach!

Nostalgia; comfortable and seductive! And yet …

2011-07-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

An email exchange last week with a client provided the storyline I was looking for to introduce subjects covered in a recent interview with HP NED’s Martin Fink. Take a look to see what’s peculating to the top of his agenda …

A couple of years ago I vacationed in the south of France. It was May so I was able to pull into Cannes and watch the fun that surrounded the Cannes Film Festival, and draped over one of the waterfront hotels were banners promoting Brad Pitt and the film, Troy. I was fortunate to be on a commercial sailing boat, operated by one of the more popular cruise lines, and one of the benefits was that we shared the same dock with many of famous patrons.

It was a little further west along the coast, at St Tropez, however, where I came across a yacht that was truly a delight and the picture above captures what caught my eye. In today’s world of composites and carbon fiber sandwiches, this stunningly maintained timber yacht was a thing of remarkable beauty! I have spent much of my formative years sailing along Australia’s eastern coastline but I have never seen anything this gorgeous.

I picked up this month’s edition of Motor Trend and I have to believe the editor (who is an Australian, by the way) was thinking much the same thoughts as I was having. He had headlined his editorial with “the nostalgia trap – were they really the good old days?” He then suggested that, “the old cars are cool to look at and fun to drive if you have nowhere to go and all day to get there.”

“Nostalgia is a seductive thing,” the editor finally concluded. “View today’s world through the prism of the past, and it seems less certain and more confrontational. Nostalgia is comfortable and cozy; emotional cashmere. Don’t get me wrong; I love classic cars, vintage cocktails, and old watched. But I’m with Will Rogers: ‘Things ain’t what they used to be, and probably never was.’”

For readers who follow NonStop related groups on LinkedIn it’s been hard to miss comments posted by many of late, lamenting the changes they are seeing with Tandem, and missing the days when all they wanted to do was to write code. But today, we have the very modern NonStop server and it’s as though the very mention of these NonStop servers raises the hairs on the backs of some folks’ necks.

Change has come to NonStop alright, and from where I sit, with my tinted glasses put to one side, it’s not looking all that bad! This week I attended a client’s annual America’s sales kick-off events and I was one of only a handful of participants that showed any grey hairs – the room was packed full of enthusiastic and youthful industry professionals!

And just the week before, with HP Discover well and truly over, I was able to catch up with Martin Fink, HP Senior VP and General Manager, Business Critical Systems (BCS). Fink had become leader of the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) at the time I was ITUG Chairman and not surprisingly, our conversation opened with his perspective on the recent organizational changes that took place within HP.

“The view is that the time is right for change and that they (Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services, headed by Dave Donatelli, as well as Software, headed by Bill Veghte) are large enough business units that they need to report into the CEO,” Fink began before adding that “these changes are all goodness for the NonStop community as NonStop is near and dear to (Donatelli’s) heart!”

There was another positive outcome from this reorganization that Fink was as quick to point out to me. “Bringing in the ES (services) business and combining with ESS&N is important. What was becoming clear was that there was a need to strengthen the ties between products and services.”

There was more to talk about than organization changes and divisional restructuring, of course even if this represented a real change from anything we had seen in the past. With HP unveiling its vision just a few months before HP Discover, my conversation with Fink moved onto something vastly different from anything that had ever been addressed in those “good, old days” – Cloud Computing.

“There will be a significant move to Clouds and with the move, the necessity to look at how many core applications move across,” Fink explained before adding, “however, there’s always going to be a set of customers who will chose to run their own infrastructure and within that set of customers, there will be those who need NonStop.” No, despite the different ways I asked the question, I sensed that it was probably highly unlikely that NonStop would be participating inside the Cloud.

Large users, I am sure, may elect to deploy NonStop in this fashion, but when it comes to products supported by HP, NonStop would continue to be a specialty server and with the observations I have made about how slowly enterprises change their major servers, this should ensure NonStop server’s relevance for at least the next five and possibly ten years. With the changes I fully anticipate appearing in the near term, NonStop Server’s relevance should extend beyond those horizons. Converged Infrastructure (CI) after all has firmly embraced the NonStop Server as a mainstream participant!

Front-ending Clouds, offloading low value transaction to clouds both private and public, and taking advantage of Clouds as a go-to resource in times of crises, and where traffic peaks unpredictably, I can see as possible outcomes from responsible CIOs looking to further right-balance their operational budgets.

We will surely see these CIOs pushing transactions out into Clouds just as they will architect their solutions to continue operating, should the Clouds simply fail. As Fink was keen to highlight for me “it’s always our responsibility (as CIOs) to plan for how we will operate our business if a utility disappears; we need to plan and provision accordingly.” Clouds will be a utility to be treated no differently from any other utility we depend upon.

HP has changed its organization, restructured its divisions, and unveiled its vision and strategy for the future. There’s serious work underway to converge infrastructure, and today we can all see a common architecture in place, with a small number of different implementations done to satisfy different customer requirements. Still, NonStop remains at the pinnacle of the product curve as depicted in the Leadership Roadmaps, now common to all product groups within ESS&N participating in the HP Converged Infrastructure initiative.

As admiringly as I looked at that yacht tied up in the harbor of San Tropez, and longed for the days when I could set sail on almost any weekend, the more I came to realize that yachts like this no longer provide the performance or experience they once did. As much as I liked the way it was decked out, there was no way I was going back to scrub the paint and work on the varnish. Every weekend? No thanks!

Even more memories returned but as I let the effects of selective memories subside, I just as quickly recalled the many days sailing in the rain, spending most of my time below deck packing sails, and nights spent with very little sleep. Yes, nostalgia is a seductive thing after all.

Routines? We all have them ....

2011-07-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me just how well the NonStop platform performs and yet, as we talk more freely of how modern it has become, why aren’t we working just as hard to get the message up to our bosses?

I’m sitting in an airline lounge waiting for a flight to Frankfurt. I’ve been able to mix in a little downtime while pursuing business opportunities in Paris, and of all European cities there’s probably none better than Paris when it comes to just filling in time. The picture above is of Margo, enjoying the ambience of the street outside Les Deux Magots, the famous former hang-out of such literary luminaries as Hemingway and Sartre!

On arrival in Paris, early Monday evening of last week, I headed down the Champs Elysees towards the Louvre and I stopped briefly at a stall to pick up a hot dog and a bottle of Orangina. While it may not surprise my readers, all the same it was Parisians who invented the hot dog and there’s nothing better than snacking on a frank covered in spicy hot mustard wrapped inside a warm baguette.

The pavement along the Champs Elysees is being turned into grandstands as the Tour de France is under way and will shortly finish with a sprint up the famed boulevard, but this temporary seating notwithstanding, the famed Parisian skyline is hard to miss. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Grande Arch, the Palais du Louvre and the rather tacky Ferris wheel could all be seen.

I first visited Paris in the early ‘80s and I have found my way back to the city many times since then, and with each trip there’s a routine that I seem to follow. The same buildings, the same cafes and the same streets – I just love the familiarity that comes from taking to the streets. At this time of year its well into the evening before the sky darkens and the city of lights is less a spectacle than it is at other times of the year, but the evening warmth more than makes up for having to turn in before the sky is truly dark.

Routines are something I have developed when returning to cities I have grown to like, but perhaps it’s just in Paris where they have become such an integral part of my interaction with the city. And yet, I am not a slave to routines and am only too happy to make adjustments as the situation dictates. Over the years, I have learnt to grow with the city and to embrace the changes I see taking place. Change is ever present, even in Paris. The city has become as modern as any other nation’s capital and visitors new to the city remain just as much in awe of what they see as I was all those years ago.

When it comes to business, following routines and the familiarity that they produce says a lot about our affinity for predictability, and our desire for simplicity and often just avoiding conflicts of any kind. Many in business that I talk to are cautious of change and openly lament the direction their business is taking, but survival offers few alternatives to change, if staying in business is the necessity and business executives simply must do their best to adjust.

Computers change as well. On reflection, there’s probably no other industry that reinvents itself as often as does the computer industry. For many decades those of us who have remained students of technology have watched the pendulum swing between centralized and distributed models. Big systems with intelligent front-ends, single multi-system data centers and more recently, geographically dispersed server farms – the model keeps on evolving and yet resembles many of the deployments we have seen in the past. With each swing of the pendulum, routines followed for years are quickly disrupted and what was once familiar, overturned.

For the NonStop community specifically, this is beginning to take on an ominous tone. Yes, we need to change, too. What was once rated so highly by business executives seems to generate no more than a shrug of the shoulders! Computers are no longer valued according to the level of availability provided and, amidst the general dumbing-down of the industry that is taking place any familiarity we may have attained from working with such robust systems is proving prejudicial to our longer term prospects of remaining in the industry.

System outages no longer seem to generate as much fear among business executives as they once did nor do today’s managers view the inability of their customers to access critical applications as anything other than an annoyance. What would have been headlines in the afternoon newspapers only a few years ago now rates barely a line or two of commentary further back in the paper!

Yet I have to wonder whether we are about to see the pendulum swing back? Are outages and disruptions to services becoming too hard to cover up? How many stock exchanges today will remain content to take outage hits of one or two hours and even longer? How many hospitals will accept the inability to access patient files as minutes turn into hours? And how many business executives will wait quietly in airport lounges as their flights are cancelled because reservation systems cannot be brought back online?

When exactly did we give up on availability and when did we all come to accept that what we had to deal with in our private lives, as our PC’s routinely required re-booting, would find acceptance in our business environment? Was I asleep at the time as I don’t recall ever seeing the message proposing critical computer systems that no longer worked 24 X 7 would be tolerated!

For the NonStop community, are we (who know most about the value proposition from running NonStop) ultimately the party at fault? When all is considered, has it been our failure to keep our business executives advised about the options open to them? For the past year or so, how effectively have we communicated to these same executives just how modern NonStop has become?

I am seeing little evidence that we as a community have pushed back hard enough on the many misleading assumptions about the importance of availability, or championed the arrival of modern infrastructure on NonStop such as Java, Application Server support – including the full support of the SASH run-time stack - and SQL!

In the coming weeks, I will be publishing my first marketplace white paper on NonStop SQL and I will be reinforcing the message of its importance to NonStop. For some time now this message has been hidden within other messages and yet, its role in ensuring modern NonStop deployments remain as available as they have been at any time in the past, shouldn’t be overlooked. Just as we shouldn’t be passing up the opportunity to market its value to the business executives we interface with on a daily basis.

“Customers need to be using NonStop SQL to leverage all the investments HP has made in modernizing the NonStop platform,” was what Harry Scott of Carr Scott Software told me recently. “Being an industry-standard database, NonStop SQL opens up many possibilities for customers to leverage, rather than having to build, components and tools as they (continue) to grow and maintain their applications.” A powerful message and yet, how many of us have changed out routines to ensure this message is being propagated deep within our business? Or has our voice been stilled and the initiative passed to others!

For NonStop to continue to participate in the data center and provide the value it’s famous for, we need to be vocal and yes, we need to change our routines. Scott is not alone with the comments he expressed, as talking to vendors who have recently ported their solutions to NonStop and have elected to leverage NonStop SQL all were impressed, and as they pursue a greater presence in their marketplaces with a NonStop based solution they will be anything but quiet.

I really do love Paris and have never experienced a less than wonderful time whenever I visit the city. The routines I follow help me get in synch with the rhythms of the place – the sites I like to take in and the restaurants I so enjoy visiting. This time I had to adjust and change my usual dinner venue: the restaurant I’ve learned to like was no longer. I tried a new place, and the fish was exquisite! To think I was forced to change my routine only to be really grateful that I did!

Responsible CIOs show restraint!

2011-06-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

The HP Discover event is now history but the arrival by chance of a photo from an earlier ITUG event together with a posting in HP’s web site has me rethinking where NonStop is headed …

Mark Faithful forwarded me a photo this week that was taken at the ITUG event in San Jose, late October, 2002. It is of a luncheon held in honor of that year’s guest speaker, Gene Kranz whose book “Failure is not an Option” included a detailed account of the 1970 effort that went into rescuing the Apollo 13 crew. The photo above captures Kranz and his wife with the ITUG Summit 2002 committee.

Shortly after this photo was taken, Kranz addressed a full house of community members and he reflected on the events that led to the successful recovery of the crew. I have always enjoyed attending user events and have found participation highly rewarding. No matter where they may be held or how big or small an audience they attract, they have proven to be the best way to pick up on the latest trends concerning NonStop.

This post is a kind of milestone of sorts. Depending on who is doing the counting, this is my 200th post, and shortly I will begin my fifth year of blogging. No longer is this my sole presence in social networks as I now blog for a number of clients as well, but this blog remains the one that allows me to cover topics focused on the NonStop community and, much like The Connection magazine, I try to cover user deployments as often as I can - how many readers recall how this blog traces its roots back to the column, Real Time View, that for many years was a feature of The Connection magazine?

ITUG is now a part of the much bigger user community, Connect, and HP has steered the annual user gathering towards a much richer, multi-platform experience, where all of its products are showcased. While some attendees were confused to find sessions and group meetings in conflict with general sessions and keynotes, HP Discover still managed to pull together several lively Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings.

I was reminded of this aspect of HP Discover while scrolling through discussions on LinkedIn groups where one such entry pointed me to the report filed by Kevin McDowell of HP’s Total Customer Experience (TIC) group. McDowell posted a summary to the Mission Critical Computing blog, hosted on HP’s web site and can be found at:

http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Mission-Critical-Computing-Blog/NonStop-Special-Interest-Group-SIG-Report-from-Discover2011/ba-p/94071

“This year’s HP Discover NonStop SIG meeting,” McDowell opened with, before observing how “most (of the) discussion was around the marketing of the NonStop brand and offerings. NonStop has made significant in-roads in becoming an open / non-proprietary system and it appears we need to get the word out more effectively.”

If this doesn’t grab your attention, or have you raise an eyebrow, a little later McDowell asks “do you have examples of situations where NonStop was overshadowed by other marketing efforts? Or perhaps situations where NonStop was misrepresented as a dead-end product?” Now McDowell does admit in the post that he has been involved with NonStop for 23 years, which is about the same length of time as was my own involvement (I joined Tandem Computers in March, 1988), but even so, I think he may be onto something.

Could NonStop benefit from a greater marketing profile? Is the NonStop community becoming frustrated at seeing very little promotional activity in support of NonStop? And what’s this about NonStop being misrepresented as a dead-end product? Before it looks like I’m being a little too negative on this subject, dwelling too long on perceived failures from within HP, after reading McDowell’s summary I have to admit I like it that someone has at least started to think about how to bring better focus on to the NonStop product line.

For me, NonStop will never be general purpose ,and of that I have no reservations. It’s a specialty system as much as IBM’s mainframe, or even HP’s own SuperDome. And there’s a place for specialty systems within company data centers for many years to come, I believe, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of my readers.

As I look at general purpose systems today, they are all dumbing down to run on inexpensive x86 chips supported by Windows, with some Linux and even Unix thrown into the mix. As workloads have grown and their users have tried to keep up by scaling out, they have become increasingly harder to manage. As one HP executive reminded me recently, have you ever tried to upgrade the firmware on a thousand Windows servers? Not cool …

It is this sense of despair (and failure) from trying to patch together clusters of inexpensive systems that has led to these very same users declaring that there must be a better way and they are now rushing to cloud computing, just the latest variant, or the service bureau of time sharing model many of us grew up with in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Sorry, the bits and pieces may be new with cloud computing but the model itself is pretty dated. And there’s only so much make-up you can apply to cover the wrinkles and hide all the blemishes.

CIOs will take advantage of the cloud computing model as, and when, it suits their needs and there will be a sizable move to cloud computing as a result. However, with the introduction of clouds, the necessity to look at how many core applications will move across will generate restraint on the part of responsible CIOs. There will be companies who will simply chose to run their own infrastructure and within this set of companies, specialty systems will retain a home, and among them NonStop will prevail.

Drilling deeper into this demographic, there will be even those companies where the history of NonStop in OLTP may encourage the pursuit of NonStop systems being deployed as essentially smart front-ends to clouds, private as well as public, in a manner not too dissimilar to how our early ATM networks were created, and for those attending HP Discover, a demonstration of configurations not too far removed from this model proved a popular draw card for the NonStop booth. Don’t rule out, either, the inroads NonStop will make into the high-end Oracle marketplace as HP further distances itself from the product offerings of a vendor it has long supported.

No, NonStop will not be general purpose and if this is the case, what then of marketing? What then of reversing any perception of NonStop being a dead-end product? Should we expect to see the new management team at HP get behind NonStop with a big-budget marketing campaign?

I recently watched the 70’s movie, 24 hours of LeMans. Apart from the comments coming from my wife, Margo, about how dreadfully boring the film is – no dialogue for the opening 40 minutes - it’s still one of the best motion pictures that captures the spirit of motor sport. In the film, the character, Michael Delaney, played by Steve McQueen, observes “racing’s important to men who do it well. When you’re racing, it ... it’s life. Anything that happens before or after... is just waiting.”

And I couldn’t help but see the similarity between these observations and what McDowell is trying to whip-up support for, when it comes to the NonStop server. “NonStop customers have always been a passionate group,” was how McDowell began his report following HP Discover and we are often accused of not having a life outside of NonStop! There are those companies after all, running NonStop and with the mission-critical applications they run, their companies are very much alive. And competitive, and with time to innovate.

For those companies, yet to understand the value proposition of NonStop, and who move from one model to the next looking to capitalize on the next big thing then no amount of marketing will deter them from going down that path. With little comprehension of what they are missing out on, well naturally, all I can suggest is that they too … are just waiting!

Detour’s Ahead? Stay Cool!

2011-06-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

Driving through the desert I’ve been forced to take detours and it’s been hot. Following Las Vegas and HP Discover, focus has shifted to Palo Alto where the heat has been turned up! Will relief appear with the gathering of clouds?

This week I yet again took a road I just simply had to take a few weeks ago, as snow blocked the highway I had originally intended to use. High in the Rocky Mountains, even at that time of year, an unexpected downfall of snow had proved too great to risk tackling in a rear-wheel drive car.

Now my destination required me to go down the same road I had chosen as a backup before, but this time I was forced off it, taking yet another detour onto a secondary highway because scorching heat had brought with it raging fires that closed the road. Driving an all-wheel-drive SUV in case the snow returned, I found fire instead; welcome to living in a mountain state!

The temperature is already 108 degrees, there’s little humidity, and in the higher elevations it continues to be windy. Settled into my hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, I can understand why the authorities in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado are so concerned about the coming summer months and the risks they face. The picture above was taken on the way to Scottsdale and is a tangible reminder of the risks travellers face in this desert area and why it’s not advisable to detour too far from the road.

Only a few miles away, in the city of Las Vegas, a major HP event – HP Discover – had been held. While all involved last week are now back at their desks, the feedback and observations continue to roll-in and with each new email a clearer picture of the value this event provided is forming. Yes, it was worth attending as the networking opportunities appeared worthwhile. The key notes and the subsequent drill-down sessions all seemed to have scored high points with those present – yes, Converged Infrastructure is important and is beginning to flex more muscle than some of the previous initiatives.

Whether you are a big supporter of open, industry-standard solutions such as Windows or Unix, or are drawn to the world of Linux, or appreciative of the highest availability platform in HP’s server arsenal, the NonStop server, Converged Infrastructure lays the foundation for a kind of future, plug-and-play, choice of platform where consideration of trade-offs depending upon costs, value, and even reputation (with your users) comes into play in a more manageable fashion. Yes, retaining key infrastructure components supported across a variety of platforms allows well-architected solutions to enjoy choices in platform hosting.

Even as I reflect on all that took place in Las Vegas, Monday’s announcement of organizational changes within HP are cause for us to refocus on Palo Alto. For the NonStop community the move of Ann Livermore away from the day-to-day operations of the Enterprise Business and onto the board at HP, and greater responsibilities given to Dave Donatelli, didn’t come as a complete surprise.

For the news release of June 13th, 2011, check out HP’s web site: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110613b.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

In case you missed reading my article, “NonStop – A Running Commentary” in the February 2011 issue of Tandemworld.net, these changes were expected. At the time I wrote “last month I made a brief reference to the HP strategy update to be given by the company’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker. There’s a lot of anticipation over what it will address and while I suggested in my last article that it was too early to speculate, some early indications have already surface.”

Following this opening remark I then suggested, as a community, we “don’t rule out Servers (including the more complex hybrid variety), Storage, and Networking continuing to play an important role, or fail to see how quickly Dave Donatelli consolidates his position at the top of the HP technology tree in the post-Ann Livermore era! This is worth watching of course as it is being rumored that Ann Livermore will join the board (is it already a done deal?) and take up the post of Vice Chairman. It’s also worth watching as this is the group where Business Critical Servers (BCS), of which NonStop is a part, resides and where the future of NonStop will be determined.”

For the full article in Tandemworld.net, check out the web page: http://www.tandemworld.net/newsletter%20feb11.htm

However, some early feedback that I have received requires me to clarify why I like these changes and while I don’t necessarily want to detour too far from the HP storyline, I do see potential for renewed focus on the enterprise – their servers, their software, and the services. For many weeks I have been fielding questions about why isn’t there more focus on NonStop within HP and if the company’s strategy, as described by HP CEO Apotheker in March, is centered on Cloud Computing and Mobility what precisely will the NonStop contribute to Cloud Computing?

There have also been some concerns over Livermore’s election to the board and view her departure from day-to-day role at HP as potentially bad news for NonStop. While Livermore has been a supporter of NonStop through the years attending many user events, all the way back to ITUG, including the support of programs that were built for C-level executives where she participated, I cannot see the support for NonStop lessening in any way with her departure.

Dave Donatelli has expressed, many times, his support for NonStop and his position couldn’t have been made any clearer than when he included a slide on NonStop in his presentation on Converged Infrastructure at HP Discover. According to one HP participant, as Donatelli introduced the slide:“(he) asked for a show of hands from people who had used their cell phone, or credit card, that morning (before adding) that (the transaction) probably went through a NonStop.” Yes, we have seen this approach pursued by others but hearing it afresh from the new guy, tells us plenty!

What may surprise some in the NonStop community even more is that with Donatelli’s arrival at HP there is now a group of R&D executives that meet with Donatelli on a regular basis and NonStop is part of that group! Indeed, as conversations among the respective heads of development continue, more and more interest about NonStop capabilities has arisen. In a classic case of diving down a couple of levels to interact with the folks responsible for building products, Donatelli has quickly familiarized himself with the reality that is today’s modern, open, NonStop server. Yes, it’s an old approach adopted by the wise but it demonstrates to me that Donatelli gets it!

Whether we are a fan of Apotheker or not, for the leading IT company in the world, change was needed. While I do understand the attraction from becoming the world’s number one printer, and then personal computer vendor, for enterprise users HP’s continued pursuit of these markets did appear to be a detour. Just as IBM was exiting this marketplace, for instance, to refocus around much higher-margin software and services businesses, HP appeared to relish the opportunity IBM’s exit represented. Now, HP pushing much deeper into software and services is being seen as a prudent step for HP to take.

It’s still very hot here in Arizona and as I prepare to leave for Southern California, I can’t imagine that there’s any less heat in Palo Alto. And yet, I feel very optimistic which may surprise some of you! With Donatelli in a new role and with what I have heard about him to date, I can only see positive outcomes for NonStop. As I scan the heavens for signs of clouds, and the relief they bring, so too many in the NonStop community are looking for evidence of clouds and while I’m not seeing any here in the desert, NonStop may soon be engulfed by them … Cool!

Missing the good old days?

2011-06-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

Is it the free beer and soda we miss? Or is it something else? HP Discover will reveal much about HP’s plans for NonStop and news will travel quickly in cyberspace!

Saturday morning saw the parking lot adjacent to one of our favorite coffee shops sprinkled liberally and colorfully with sports cars. With the coming of the warmer weather, an impromptu car show takes over the locale the first Saturday of each month. So we backed the Corvette into one of the vacant spots and joined the festivities!

The cars included some exotic machinery and the photo above I took of Margo as she passed by a Vette, a Viper, and an early ‘80s Lamborghini Countach with its six dual-throat weber carburetors sending shivers down my spine. Tucked back behind Margo, astute car aficionados will recognize the sleek lines of a modern era Ford GT, still looking like new and that hasn’t seen a single snow or rain day in its life.

This posting however, is not about cars or about car enthusiasts and yet, after spending a short time walking past owners prized possessions, it was difficult not to make comparisons. The same warm greetings, the same sense of shared camaraderie, and that passionate intensity that draws a crowd to check out the latest technology. It may have been a warm and sunny morning in Boulder, but already my thoughts were about Las Vegas!

HP Discover will kick-off in a matter of hours. I for one am quite happy to see HP putting on a big-tent style marketing event, as it opens up the opportunity for everyone to get an update on the company’s vision and strategy and to see the latest product offerings. Major vendors have every right to hold these types of events and participants fully expect to be subjected to the marketing full-court press as soon as they arrive. Yet there will be detractors and those who yearn for the good old days.

Ignoring the obvious that no, the old days weren’t all that good, as one party recently commented on a LinkedIn group, what cannot be missed is that perhaps the world of user groups and events has moved on. It has itself morphed into a hybrid with coverage of all of HP’s product lines and where I expect the mix of exhibits, presentations and face-to-face meetings with HP executives will outweigh other considerations. The availability of free beer and soda, a hallmark of the free-spirited days of the past, has been scaled back, returning sparingly to attract attendees onto an event’s exhibit floor.

However, for the NonStop community the success of this upcoming event will all hang on what is promised for NonStop and the role NonStop will play in HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker, strategy centered, as it has become, on Cloud Computing and Mobility. Ruling out Mobility it only leaves Cloud Computing and while I have my own thoughts on roles NonStop could and should play, I am very interested to hear what transpires during the week as the lead-up to this week has been eventful, to say the least.

The commentary posted to several LinkedIn discussions of late has been particularly lively – whether part of my own Real Time View group, or within the Enscribe to SQL Migration Forum, or even within the recently formed NonStop SQL Professionals. With the HP Discover event in Las Vegas only hours away from starting, I am sure there will be very few participants from the NonStop community who haven’t heard about some of the postings.

It probably doesn’t surprise too many readers that I became the target for some of the strongest admonishments!

“It looks like Richard that you are in full denial mode!”

“Humor is good. It helps the grieving process. But hey guys you are grasping at straws …”

“Hey Richard, maybe your wife can beat some sense into you. You are confusing the last gasp of dying man with fresh breath!”

And my all-time favorite:

“You guys don’t get it. Richard, you are such nerd!”

What triggered these outpourings were the observations by Jim Johnson, Chairman of The Standish Group, and well known throughout the NonStop community for his many white papers advocating NonStop for deployment in many mission-critical scenarios, supporting these propositions with reams of data showing the superior TCO over all other contenders. In an apparent about-face, Jim suggested that drastic steps needed to be taken to save NonStop!

At first, I was pretty fired up over some of Jim’s remarks but as I watched the engagement with the NonStop community that these comments sparked, I was encouraged to see how quickly and intensely community members came to my defense. I just don’t believe the end of the NonStop era is imminent any time soon!

While the NonStop community was cautious and not quite as optimistic as I was, all the same, there were few among the community that shared Jim’s belief that without something dramatic occurring to propel NonStop into new, explosive markets, the NonStop platform would cease being relevant in a couple of years. Quite the opposite, questions began being asked about what had caused Jim to have turned a full 180 degrees over the value provided by NonStop servers!

Each new day saw me spending an hour or so checking some 40 plus groups just to see what had been posted overnight. Social media channels were really beginning to attract a crowd and the NonStop community was proving none too shy about joining in. And it was easy for me to put up with Jim’s barbs seeing so many of the NonStop community participating.

The immediacy that social media is providing is beginning to make an impression on the NonStop community. Bricks-and-mortar events, such as the HP Discover event, have their place and address the needs of those within the NonStop community that want to know more about the complete HP product set. There will always be those within the NonStop community who simply must get their information in face-to-face meetings and in a setting where there continues to be free beer and soda.

There are, however, many within the NonStop community who are just as happy to pull their information off the web. Number of NonStop attendees may appear to be smaller than in previous years but don’t rule out the many NonStop users that will be online following the posts, tweets and wall messages from users and vendors alike who will do their best to keep everyone informed.

As for the big issues – NonStop servers participating within Cloud Computing – will we see the outcome from application transformation and converged infrastructure, together with hybrid delivery, pointing us to where NonStop will fulfill such a role? Will NonStop servers look similar to what we see today or will there be tweaks proposed for some hardware components and will future blades packages look the same for all operating systems? Will NonStop simply ride the software wave and become a pure software play? Will HP gather a number of vendors together to build a more comprehensive software stack?

In the past we all had to wait until we read about the outcomes of big events in magazines, and newsletters. No longer! With the social media channels it will only be seconds before the rest of the NonStop community becomes informed. And debates will rage anew, just as we have all witnessed this week!

When a group of NonStop users come into contact with each other in cyberspace, the effects are no less passionate than if we had gathered in a coffee shop or at a bar somewhere within the cavernous arenas that today are the venue for big-tent events. Opinions are expressed, questions are raised, and information is quickly shared. Not unlike the impromptu car show that I stumbled across this morning. It may not be the good old days, for sure, but if I am any judge of history, no less important or effective.

I will pull together the highlights of the event in a few days’ time. I can’t wait to see what’s announced and I can’t wait to respond to Jim. To all those present in Las Vegas, enjoy the event!

Now for something unorthodox …

2011-05-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

With the HP Discover event imminent, and with headlines about outages showing no signs of ebbing, it’s solely up to those of us within the NonStop community to convey the real story on NonStop’s place in business …

I don’t have explanations and I can’t fathom it at all! The rain continues to come down here in Boulder and in all the years I have lived here I can’t recall a cooler, wetter, spring! If this rain keeps up then the countryside will be more reminiscent of England than it is of California, or Tuscany, or even parts of Australia, where the predominant color for much of the year lies somewhere between gold and brown. All summer we usually have to deal with humidity levels around ten percent, but this rain certainly alters that metric.

The picture above is of irises in full bloom outside my back door. I haven’t paid all that much attention to them in the past; perhaps I was out of town when they last blossomed. In fact, only a few weeks earlier the landscaper had suggested we remove them, indicating that they weren’t fairing all that well.

Irises have a history dating back to Greek mythology and where, given their blooming in a rainbow of colors, Irises have always been associated with courage and with hope. The association with rainbows, however, can also be considered as just another way of depicting change and with the weather we have been having, it’s reaching a point where I am scanning the skies and looking for a rainbow!

In Greek mythology, Iris was the personification of the rainbow, bridging the world of the gods with humanity – essentially, a messenger of the gods. A quick check of any encyclopedia will bring up a wealth of stories describing how Iris traveled with “the speed of the wind, from one end of the world to another.” Perhaps not intentionally an agent of change, but certainly, the image persists as humanity couldn’t escape change once the messenger of the gods departed!

Change has been a reoccurring theme of my blog posts and this is because I see us living in tumultuous times with respect to IT. Without any further resorting to clichés, it’s becoming hard to escape the rhetoric of influential technology leaders pitching their view of IT as they move quickly from one developing trend or fad to another, and leaving us to wonder where we should focus our attention.

We should be installing x86 products! We should be virtualizing everything! We should be embracing cloud computing!

These discussions haven’t been helped by the postings to the many social media blogs, groups and forums, particularly for those of us within the NonStop community. Participants have been playing a little lose with the facts to ensure their point of view is communicated, just as thought-leaders and highly opinionated columnists have shouldered their way into dialogues often at the expense of better known industry analysts.

In the game of cricket there are times where one team’s bowlers fail to curb the enthusiasm of the batsman – their ineffective bowling allowing these strikers of the ball to score runs at will. When it comes to international competition, where the game is played over five days, this situation may continue for most of a day with the attacking team’s captain becoming increasingly frustrated by his bowlers’ failure to break through the batsman’s defenses.

At these times, creative and somewhat unorthodox captains bring into the bowling attack a participant previously unseen by the batting team – often one of the bowling teams own batsman – and with this change, the very unpredictability of what the new bowler may do, can force batting mistakes that contribute to the opposition’s downfall.

A cursory look at some of the more recent postings would suggest that unless something dramatic occurs to turn around observed trends, the NonStop platform will cease to remain relevant for the majority of its users in just a couple of years!

The data points presented look ominous – solutions providers in healthcare and public safety certainly have begun building products targeting Windows. Even Stock Exchanges have moved off the NonStop platform, when for many years they were a stalwart of NonStop commitment. The biggest vendor in the financial services marketplace was switching vendors, pursuing the market with packages designed for the IBM mainframe. In some circles it’s even been suggested that there could be as many as 50 users, perhaps more, leaving the NonStop platform just this year!

And yet, the story I hear from customers is quite different. It’s always hard to get the real numbers as HP doesn’t split out the numbers for NonStop, nor can we easily reconstruct a set of figures comparable to how we used to see them presented when Tandem was a public company.

However, anecdotally, based purely on conversations and interviews I have had in association with other papers I have been writing, when you look at this past quarter there has been considerable growth! Without putting any firm numbers on just how much growth, I have heard that on a year over year basis, it was pretty spectacular. Perhaps more than 50% and possibly as high as 75%!

This time last year business was slow, and that is unquestionable. The effect of the recession was felt by everyone and business was reluctant to invest in infrastructure. But today, transaction volumes in financial services together with the building out of the 4G networks, has seen considerably uptick in business within financial services and Telcos.

A strong, if not dominant, position of the NonStop within these marketplaces continues just as after several years of aggressive marketing by the payments solutions provider who switched to IBM, not one NonStop customer has migrated off the platform and onto IBM. Quite the contrary, from what I have heard, up until early this year there has been a net gain of one to NonStop following three years of concerted efforts!

All told, as I continue to poll folks and check as many sources as I can, I have to believe that HP’s NonStop business is on track to report a full year of operations that shows growth beyond 20% and possibly as high as 30%! This is not a business that shows any signs of losing ground as best as I can tell – it’s being reshaped certainly, and the NonStop sales teams are being laser-like in their focus on new business (yes, there’s new business being created) addressing win-able opportunities in adjacent applications and customer spaces.

NonStop remains as relevant today as it ever was – there will always be a marketplace where “little to no downtime” remains unacceptable and where “the server failed over seamlessly and began running on the other (server) with very little downtime; about a minute” as I just read in a competing vendors white paper, carries with it enormous risk for business with no tolerance for failures of any kind.

Amidst all the changes, this requirement hasn’t lessened as a concern of business. There’s still no hiding from the headlines whenever major outages to services occurs and the past couple of months have seen more than their fair share of such headlines on outages!

What the commentary posted to blogs and forums of late has highlighted is that if we continue with our current approach, there’s little we can do to unsettle the competition and they will continue to amass a big score. However, even the greatest of batsmen have been known to stumble and fall when facing something unexpected.

This year’s HP Discover event, only a few weeks away, could prove to be the place for the NoNStop community to consider something creative, perhaps a little unorthodox. In Greek mythology it took someone special to bring the message to humanity, but this time around we don’t need anything that spectacular - let’s just change the perceptions on our own. I for one am hopeful.

Even without a visit from Iris, there are still many of us with the courage. Let’s promote the facts! Let’s speak out and evangelize NonStop to the greater HP! There are still rainbows, aplenty!

Check-Book IT!

2011-05-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

In this follow-up to what was last posted, where I expressed some surprise that after 35+ years, there still wasn’t a platform that challenged NonStop, I now chastise those CIOs who believe they can spend their way to success!

The other weekend while enjoying the opportunity to take the Corvette to Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, outside of Pahrump, west of Las Vegas, and lapping the large 3.1 mile circuit with other enthusiasts, I had the misfortune of blowing a major seal in the car’s supercharger. The effect was terminal and the ‘Vette will now spend several weeks in the shop either undergoing costly repairs or, hopefully, being fixed under warranty.

While I sat by the car, a little shaken by the experience and not immediately coming to terms with the impact it would have on my plans for the coming week, one of participants tried to comfort me with the sage advice it’s only money! The picture at the top of the page is of Margo alongside the ‘Vette as we completed the transfer to the U Haul trailer we rented in Las Vegas, very unhappy that yet another weekend of driving for her had been lost due to my early morning enthusiasm.

Yes, it was only money but it reminded me of how often I have heard the phrase check-book racing and of how, no matter the event or track, there are those who arrive with toy-haulers and some amazing cars only to circulate the track behind less-powerful, underfunded, drivers who simply can work wonders on vehicles that, for many of them, are their daily drives. Local knowledge can compensate for much!

Rarely does the participant with the biggest check book prove successful; the odds favoring them can be tilted only so far and eventually, the skills required truly play a big part. Knowledge of the requirements of the car as well as the circuit, together with the experience gained from having driven many hundreds of laps, often prove hard to replicate and these big-budget participants end the day frustrated with their inability to achieve better results.

During the past two weeks there’s been a definite lift in the number of readers participating in discussions in LinkedIn groups - Real Time View, HP NonStop Tandem Professionals, NonStop SQL Professionals, Tandem User Group, as well as a number of vendor-specific groups such as comForte, Attunity, etc. The subject of my last post to this blog, “I’ll give you ‘what’s changed!’” created lively debate about the future of NonStop, what more can HP be doing to promote the platform, what more can HP do to develop a larger community of solutions providers, as well as a continuation of the discussion over the merits of TCO and ROI numbers routinely thrown around and that favor the HP NonStop server.

When I promoted the previous blog posting to these groups, I did so with the candid observation of “what really surprises me is that, even after 35+ years of market presence and there being no viable alternative solution that you can drop into a data center with the levels of availability and scalability NonStop provides, NonStop continues to be overlooked and even marginalized as often as it is!” I suspect that the many discussions that followed probably took exception to the provocative nature of the observation. However, the observation proved tough to discount – there is still no real alternative to NonStop for those applications that carry the responsibility of keeping the company in business.

Just as those turning up at the circuit with check books in hand so, too, have many CIOs found that simply approaching the support of applications critical to running the business with check books in hand, has rarely gone the way that they expected. Over the decades we have witnessed those large projects where enormous budgets were allocated to a new strategy and where a major vendor was brought in to rectify the perceived ailments within IT.

Whether it was banking core systems in the 1990s, or government department overhauls in the 1980s, after the initial headlines grabbed our attention, very few of these initiatives ever delivered on what was promised. Check book IT simply wasn’t the quick-fix many in management had expected.

Today, everything can be supported on commodity platforms and with open software. Or so we’re told. Smart individuals can quickly develop impressive prototypes and even more-impressive pilot deployments. However, in time, there’s either a scaling issue or unexpected consequences from changes in business focus and market conditions. What looked good on a whiteboard often fails to deliver the expected results, no matter the investments!

A single Linux server may have cost very little, but 250 of them (with their software licenses) trigger significant heartburn and often stunned silence when the checks are finally cashed! Yet check book IT continues to persist. Let’s give every business unit their own big budget! Let’s consolidate all the servers and give the CIO a bigger budget! Let’s pursue Cloud Computing and set aside an even bigger budget! And so it goes …

In a recent article in The Connection magazine (May – June, 2011) I quoted Dr. Richard Hackathorn, an authority on EDW and BI, who suggested that running a typical data center these days had moved dramatically from being like steering a large ocean liner to where it was more like landing an airplane at a very busy airfield. Opportunities open up quickly for pilots and if missed, they are forced into holding patterns awaiting a new opportunity!

No matter whether they are flying small aircraft or cargo planes, the experienced pilots know how to capitalize on the short windows they are given to execute a successful landing. Likewise, experienced CIOs have come to recognize that to retain flexibility, a key goal with today’s modernization projects, failure to leverage what they have can often result in not meeting the demands! There’s everything to gain from retaining NonStop!

The NonStop platform remains relevant as it provides CIOs with the opportunity to “land at busy airports.” It continues to do well integrating with other platforms and it impresses with the way it supports modern languages and programming interfaces. Yes, Java had it tough when it came to running on the older K-Series and S-Series servers, but today those who run Java on the latest Integrity servers experience none of the ill-effects of those earlier implementations. Indeed, the experience gained by those early users of NonStop is what is contributing to them competing as effectively as they are in the marketplace.

There is a lot of data that demonstrates the financial benefits from running NonStop; TCO and ROI figures remain as important as they ever were in the past. Just as experience and familiarity and the appreciation for what works (as distinct to what distracts) shouldn’t be discounted, neither should we be too quick to dismiss these numbers. It’s become all too easy to be swayed by the opinions of the broader IT industry and by the clever charts of analysts only too anxious to reduce IT to a single architecture and deployment model.

I ended the previous posting with the comment on how the strength of NonStop lies in the protection it provides – from unexpected growth, from unpredictable outages, from unwanted hackers. Perhaps I should have added that it also lies in the predictability of the outcome when it comes to reliance on NonStop. Yes, steps can always be taken to improve the ease of use and supportability of a platform, but these can be easily managed.

My message to the CIO? Put away the check book and just let your local knowledge kick-in and prove how beneficial you can be to the running of the business! Take a good hard look at the headlines of late telling of the Clouds that have failed and the scope of services disrupted. Don’t be too quick to take NonStop out of your Cloud Computing considerations. And don’t smile too broadly once discussions begin on deploying two or more Clouds as that’s what Tandem was about, remember, all those years ago!

I’ll give you “what’s changed!”

2011-05-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

Can a 35+ year technology be considered modern especially as it continues to have few peers in the availability stakes? Let’s ask plainly, what needs to change to attract a wider user audience?

Being in Chicago in spring is not a typical occurrence for me. Usually, Chicago is either covered with snow and miserably cold as wicked winds come in from the lake, or it’s hot and humid. There’s no denying the architecture, however, and no matter the time of year, I always like to take a short stroll and check out what has changed. The photo above is me alongside the river, directly opposite the latest addition to the stable of skyscrapers erected by Donald Trump.

In fact, while I was snapping this photo, I wasn’t too far from the location of a photo taken several years ago that I included in the October 30th, 2007 post “Our need for architects ...” and where the skyline back then only showed the rough skeleton of the Trump building as the only evidence construction was under way. The Trump building’s extensive use of glass, so visible today, is in stark contrast to the splendid stone edifices of the Tribune and the Wrigley buildings.

Contrasts like this aren’t limited to architecture and to city skylines. There’s no mistaking a modern windmill when so many are now dotting the landscape and there’s no mistaking the lines of a modern cruise ship as it pulls into port, turning effortlessly in its own length without help from old-style tugboats. It was only a few years back that I was on a very large cruise ship that navigated its way into the port of Gdansk, Poland, with barely inches to spare.

When it comes to technology and to labeling products as modern, it’s far more difficult. The term legacy is thrown around with little appreciation that every business application running today is, effectively, legacy. Reaching agreement on this point however, doesn’t automatically lead us to support the premise that every business application as yet unimplemented, is modern. The lines become quickly blurred with little opportunity to step back and appreciate what are business requirements that need to be addressed urgently. “Choice! Creativity! Flexibility!” could easily substitute for any modernization catch-phrase!

The issue with modernization is the assumption that we in possession of something that is old and that it is in need of rejuvenation in order to remain relevant. In today’s throw-away societies it’s as if any item we purchase, once removed from its wrapper, is instantly ready to be discarded. Walking around Chicago, there was much that had changed and yet, it was encouraging to see how much value was still begin derived from infrastructure developed over the centuries!

In the upcoming May – June, 2011, issue of The Connection, I revisit the topic of modernizing infrastructure and to illustrate the point, I referenced façade architecture – the process whereby older buildings are retained and reused in new and beneficial ways with the urge to rip and replace disparaged. The references I make in The Connection article pull from a feature story I developed for a client, but they reinforce the mistaken belief, common among today’s CIOs, that the data centers they are charged with maintaining needs to be modernized. Pursuing such a course of action, CIOs believe, is what will make their businesses more productive.

Irrespective of the technology in place, what fuel these beliefs has been the percentage of their budgets allocated to maintenance and how little remains for innovation. Surely, it must be a fault of the platform they are running! All too often it’s not a case of the platform chosen, but the advice that they are receiving from their architects; anxious about their contribution they often make recommendations based on nothing more than their favorite salesman’s latest Powerpoint presentation!

In the article in The Connection, as I wrote about façade architecture, I observed how for some time now cities striving to retain the value inherent with older structures while changing them to accommodate the needs of residents and business, have turned to façade architecture as a viable alternative to simply tearing down and rebuilding. From this observation I then suggest that a similar prospect can be envisioned today when it comes to application modernization, as many companies view the retention of key technology infrastructure as every bit as desirable as keeping a prized city building.

Nothing could be closer to the truth when it comes to NonStop servers. In recent commentary posted to the LinkedIn group, Real Time View, a complementary communications channel to this blog site, there’s been a lot of discussion on what to do with NonStop servers to better gain traction within companies and as one writer suggested, it’s time for some plain talk. Check out the discussion, “Does HP BCS / NED need to fund more apps on NonStop?” While I will not revisit the opinions that accompanied that blunt observation, all the same, it really is time for some blunt talk on NonStop.

What really surprises me is that, even after 35+ years of market presence and there being no viable alternative solution that you can drop into a data center with the levels of availability and scalability NonStop provides, NonStop continues to be overlooked and even marginalized as often as it is! It’s naïve at best to think that the knowledge learnt over these 35+ years can be readily (and reliably) copied using commodity servers, Hi-Speed LANs, and cabinets full of off-the-shelf switches.

NonStop, as a platform, is as modern as anything else around it in the data center, but when you really break it down, even when the modernization message makes it through to those running the business, there’s a concern over the cost effectiveness of NonStop. You cannot have a discussion on modernization today and ignore pricing, as for many of these architects and CIOs everything that’s inexpensive is modern, no matter what the value proposition!

For one reason or another, they only ever consider the unit price and seem dumbfounded and even confused when presented with the final bill! Too late; it’s now all waiting for them by the loading dock! Again, the architecture in support of the NonStop server leverages 35+ years of experience; it’s not old! It’s still the coolest product in the marketplace for all those who consider not having to front the press, or a government oversight agency, to explain why services are not available or so much information fell into the wrong hands!

As you look at a modern HP NonStop server today, what has changed? How can I suggest it’s modern? How can I consider it cool? At the heart of these questions, and again, to be blunt, lays a disbelief that is hard to overcome. If it is all that is now being claimed, why aren’t we hearing a lot more about the product? Why such little recognition by the press and industry analysts? And why such restraint by HP – yes, the hardware is commodity and is priced more competitively than it has ever been, but surely there would be more coverage than we see now?

Perhaps we have all developed selective hearing. Perhaps we are tending to dismiss some of the obvious – how many of us would consider payments processors worldwide offering up their services out of a payments Cloud for so many years! You think Cloud Computing is new? Well, something as basic as processing your ATM card has been done from within a cloud (can you tell me how it’s provisioned?) for decades, so no, there’s nothing very much new with Clouds. Yet, the issue persists.

The strength of NonStop lies in the protection it provides – from unexpected growth, from unpredictable outages, from unwanted hackers. Mission-critical applications leave no room for “we are sorry, the website and the ability to instantly watch movies are both temporarily unavailable” as Netflix subscribers ran up against just recently.

NonStop servers will never be general purpose, nor will they address all the needs within a vertical market, but they will provide a level of comfort CIOs have a hankering for even as they watch site after site come down. As the price tag continues to drop and as commoditization truly materializes, then the efforts of others to keep the message suppressed may disintegrate completely. The message will get out … and that’s some plain talk I’m only too happy to discuss!

Always on! Always connected!

2011-04-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

These days it seems I'm always connected - iPad, Blackberry and the ever reliable laptop! I may fuss over the complexities of keeping calendars in synch, but I wouldn't have it any other way! There's simply no going back ... oh boy!

I spend way too much time walking the floors of car service bays where there’s always the possibility of spotting something new or different. To me, these cars are works of art where I will pause and absorb the craftsmanship involved.

The picture above is of the work bays in the specialty shop, Dragon Pro Street Engineering, where high-end Corvettes, Vipers and Ford GTs are routinely worked on and where, in the background and a little out of focus, can be seen the famous “Yellow Skull Vette” that recently graced the cover of Vette magazine.

There was a time when you would simply park your car at any car dealers’ service center, tell them what was required, and hand over the keys. It wasn’t all that long ago either that the service staff would call to advise you of what needed to be done, the parts that had to be ordered, and provide you with a projection as to how much it would cost. But not anymore; today we live in not just an always-on world, but in a world that increasingly is “always-connected!”

Readers of this blog will recall a few weeks ago, in the post of March 28th, “Control, choices, and options!” I wrote of the difficulties I had with the AWD Skyline in dealing with the snow and ice that accumulated as a winter blizzard hit the Sierras, east of Sacramento. Taking the car in for service last week, they found the tires had worn out. Later over latte, I simply went on to the Internet, checked out the tire wholesalers, and picked a set; selected the two-day ground delivery service and paid using my PayPal account.

Returning home Friday night from an afternoon lapping at the local race track, Margo suggested it was time we upgraded the brake pads to something better suited to the speeds we were now reaching. An hour or so later, even though it was early in the evening and the start of a holiday weekend, parts were ordered and would be delivered in two to three days.

It’s an always-on world that allows me to be always-connected and I’m finding myself doing business at any time of day and whether it’s from my iPad, my Blackberry, or my laptop. I am always able to respond quickly to whatever situation arises; and it’s changing the way I do business.

Initially I had been concerned about the reception I would receive from the car service centers as I dealt directly with national “warehouse style” chains. However, these local businesses knowing that they cannot compete with the purchasing strength of the larger chains, have made adjustments. In both cases, installing new tires and replacing brake pads, they simply asked to have the items delivered directly to their parts operations and then yes, reduced their charges!

Were they worried about the loss of the revenue opportunity? Not entirely; in a way, it simplified what they needed to do and gave them the opportunity to service more cars! Equally as important, it helped them scale back on their inventories. They were fully aware that their customers were turning to the Internet to enjoy the savings it provided and these service departments could see it was a change that wasn’t going to go away. Their “end users” were now a lot savvier and it was better business to work with them than to steer them elsewhere.

Being always on, always-connected, as is the case these days, has its challenges certainly, and becoming disciplined to ignore the unnecessary invasions into what you may be dong is one practice I am slowly embracing. However, I view this as a significant advancement in terms of my own modernization and in the way it’s changing my life. Yes, I consider myself a modern user as I sip a latte at my favorite coffee shop and then complete an order for a new set of tires on my iPad all while scanning USA Today for catchy headlines I can leverage in future blog posts!

For the past three weeks, I have been covering in posts to the blog comForte Lounge the subject of changing users’ (as well as vendors’) expectations as users’ mobility increases and I wrote about the channels it is creating. In the post last week, “My finger on NonStop!” I referenced Jim Tomaney who proposed that “in 2011 your online film service (indeed any of the services of this type) needs to be as robust as a 1980s ATM system!” Two weeks earlier in the post, “Shorten these lines!” I referenced an announcement from Gartner, “by 2015, companies will generate 50% of their Web sales via their social presence and mobile applications.”

At a time when always-on, always-connected, brings with it so much anticipation for yet even greater developments, it’s also producing major shifts in the tectonic plates that underpin the major vendors, HP included. In a twist to what HP CEO Apotheker covered in his strategy unveiling in late March, THINKsrategies Managing Director, Jeff Kaplan was reported as having said “the theme of (Apotheker’s) talk, and HP’s new mantra, is providing ‘connectivity’ to the Cloud, to move ‘Everyone On.’”

In other words, in a truly modern world, all of us will be active participants. And everything we need to know will be at our fingertips, just a few keystrokes away. However, for this to really take hold and deliver the usefulness that we believe it should, as Tomaney noted, “it needs to be as robust as 1980s ATM systems!”

In the discussions I have had with a number of you, this is where the dilemma arises. Can this be a clarion call to ramp-up our usage of NonStop? Should we all be dusting-off our NonStop programming skills and should we be picking up the phone to let the headhunters know we are ready to start right away! Could this be a bonus for anyone that has worked with NonStop? Perhaps not!

There is a potential role for NonStop in providing the robustness anticipated but its presence may be as transparent as is the delivery infrastructure for electricity, gas, and water. In this modern world where we all participate and where the infrastructure and services are indeed as robust as we mandate, the adoption of NonStop will only come about based on the ease with which it can be deployed.

Cloud Computing has come as an extensions to our pursuits of “X as a Service” and where today, we envisage everything as a service – whether Platform, Infrastructure, Software, whatever. But it will be the deployment of modern NonStop servers that provides the robustness we will depend upon, and where its very presence may be hard to recognize.

Perhaps running the data base, accessed through simple ODBC / JDBC calls? Perhaps running an industry-standard app-server? What is possible with NonStop is not the issue. How many of us really appreciate that the 911 emergency calls for the most part are routed through NonStop servers, or are aware that help is dispatched because the services the NonStop server supports are always-on, always-connected?

The issue that arises is one of simple visibility! Will HP showcase the fundamentals of NonStop in a manner where its contribution will be easily recognized? Will NonStop technology and products become fashionable, even cool? If NonStop is to avoid falling into the void that opens as tectonic plates move and collide, then none of us should remain quiet any longer. Yes, we are now always-on and always-connected!

I will still be drawn to auto shops as I am to art galleries and to the docks where beautiful yachts are moored, but I am left wondering what my fellow latte-drinkers at the local coffee shop make of me. There I am flipping through screens, responding to emails, checking voice messages (wave files) and for all appearances, enjoying myself even as I pursue business opportunities. As I look around, however, I am not alone and the number of similarly connected patrons is on the increase.

As we scale to accommodate everyone and every business, however, as we appear to be doing, and as we all become users connected with World-as-a-Service, wouldn’t it be good to know the World is NonStop!

Blossoms and clouds!

2011-04-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Would it come as a surprise to anyone following the HP NonStop Server that it’s making it into the Cloud Computing strategy? And would it be a surprise to any that it’s doing so on the strength of the data base?

Spring is finally making it to Boulder, and finally our snowberry trees are in bloom. For the past couple of weeks we have looked at the trees alongside our driveway through the glass doors of our kitchen nook every morning just to see if they had blossomed. The picture alongside this post shows that yes, they finally gave us the display of white flowers we had been hoping for as the weather had begun to warm.

It has been five years since we saw this display, as business had necessitated us being away from home for extended periods and no matter how hard we tried to schedule being home for this time of year, we had never managed to successfully sidestep commitments to be elsewhere. So the experience of this week has gone a long way to compensate for the distractions that came with almost continuous travel!

However, the picture isn’t quite as rosy as it may appear, and we lived through several false starts that had me wondering whether I would see any flowers develop!

Storms during the past two weeks, dumping several inches of snow and driving us indoors as well as forcing us to abandon taking the car to a track-day event at a nearby road circuit (yes, a Colorado facility with no snow-removal equipment), and it just appeared that winter wasn’t about to let go of its grip on us. Friends to the east of us swear winter will be with them for several more weeks and like us, are cautious about becoming prematurely optimistic!

However, the time indoors has seen me devoting a lot of time to database technology and to looking at the more popular implementations. My business colleagues are often amused with the enthusiasm I have for all things database – wasn’t I the manager of the product management team within Tandem Computers overseeing product roadmaps for communications and networking products and technologies? Wasn’t it me who was always quick to step-up and present new features in excruciating detail?

It was several years ago when in the post of June 5th, 2008 “My road to the vendor side …” where I disclosed how my first years within IT were spent working with data bases. From my earliest days I worked with data and file access methods, becoming a master of IBM’s ISAM and BDAM file systems. These were times when good application programmers, equipped solely with the machines assembler, could write file sorts that would execute entirely within the channel.

I moved to London to work on an early commercial deployment of the Cullinane database management system, IDMS, and then after a bitterly damp English winter, I struck out for North America only to land in Edmonton, Alberta where I parlayed my knowledge of IDMS into my first job as a DataBase Administrator (DBA). For the corporation I had just joined, I quickly dropped all enthusiasm for IDMS and pushed hard to try my hand at deploying an “inverted file” type DBMS, a new product from Insyte Datacom Inc, called Datacom/DB, a precursor of what was to follow with “relational” type DBMS (RDBMS).

Perhaps the only real memorable occurrence that the years I spent working with databases produced was that it gave me the ticket out of Canada. As I wrote in that June 8th post, what happened with all that Datacom knowledge – well, it turned out to be the key that allowed me to return home to Australia. For the next three decades, my focus switched to networking and communications; initially with TeleProcessing (TP) Monitors, before delving deeper into the underlying network architectures.

However, today we live with the Internet and with the protocols it spawned and networking has become comparatively dull; so getting an opportunity from my client to revisit the topic of data bases tapped into a lot of experiences (and late nights) that had lain dormant for a long time. Perhaps not quite on the same scale as the coming of spring, but tempered with as much anticipation certainly!

Before I paint too rosy a picture about data bases, they have seen their fair share of storms as well but we starting to see support begin to flourish and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone within the NonStop community!

This post is not going to cover the same material that I have developed for my client but it does give me the opportunity to segue nicely into describing a future I see for the HP NonStop server in light of the messages being developed within HP in support of the just-announced strategy that’s focusing on Clouds and Mobility. Obviously, “Mobility”, centered on mobile devices and the WebOS operating system rules out NonStop for the time being, at least. And with that observation the future of NonStop, as a thriving participant in the enterprise offerings of HP, implies a future within Cloud Computing.

With all the talk of virtualization and clustering NonStop SQL/MX database (NS SQL/MX), remains one of the best kept secret in the industry. Whereas every popular database product sits atop the operating system, often in conflict with the operating system when it comes to efficient resource oversight, NS SQL/MX is a part of the operating system. Years of development went into making the Tandem Computer fault tolerant and the pursuit gave us an n+1 technology built on a shared-nothing architecture – a copy of the operating system inside every processor in the system, or node.

The first byproduct from providing users with fault tolerance and the ability to run 24 X 7 was that from the very outset, Tandem Computers could scale linearly. Today, packaged as very modern HP NonStop servers, they have lost none of these availability and scalability properties. Why are we finding this is so important today?

Cloud Computing is coming after a period of server consolidation, and with it, the emergence of mixed workloads. Before we consolidated we had to come to terms with the fact that we have too many lightly used servers and the manageability challenge they presented was proving daunting – even for the biggest users. The growth in business needs fueled the popularity of this model and as we contemplate Cloud Computing there’s no evidence that we will not be growing further – so we need to be able to scale the cloud.

For many corporations considering building out their data centers with a super “private cloud” populated with as many servers as required to satisfy the corporations IT needs, means there will be mixed workloads. From all that I have uncovered talking to users and vendors alike, nothing runs mixed workloads quite like the HP NonStop server – and yes, nothing else includes the data base as part of the mixed workload the way NonStop does! No mysteries in how this is achieved after all, mixed workloads are just riding the coattails of the services within the NonStop operating system designed to ensure fault tolerance!

I wonder how long it takes before applications providers, targeting Cloud Computing recognize this. Or how inexpensive it is to utilize the data base that is part of the NonStop operating system, NS SQL/MX? And before you think I’m painting too rosy a hue on the prospects of NS SQL/MX here, over the past six weeks I have talked with a dozen or so corporations with NS SQL/MX deployed including the DBAs overseeing their maintenance, and the story really is very positive. However, there’s a lot more that is still required and there’s nowhere near critical mass in terms of solutions vendors opting for NS SQL/MX.

HP has a long way to go before everyone understands how the vision of Cloud Computing and Mobility will come to fruition and how this strategy will impact their own partnership with HP. For the users of HP NonStop servers, however, the steps into Cloud Computing and the reasons behind taking those steps are becoming clearer. And it has a lot to do with the merits of NS SQL/MX.

Time to dust off my database skills and to check out the latest analysts’ reports! Who could have guessed that after so many years, the industry would turn so markedly back to databases! As a colleague of mine was quick to point out today, the ball is squarely in HP’s court on this issue – if NS SQL/MX is that good, they need to build programs to attract partners; follow the Apple model, if you like.

It may be a stretch and HP may hedge, of course, but if I have learned anything from talking to NonStop customers these past few weeks, HP is not lacking when it comes to reference-able customers! And watching NS SQL/MX develop strong advocates, perhaps others apart from HP will begin to pay attention! Perhaps even … you know who!

A bad case of S&D!

2011-04-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

Paraphrasing local bedding shop in the west, “You’re killing me, Larry!” But it’s not so much his posturing as it is Larry’s presumption that he enjoys special relationships with every vendor up and down Silicon Valley!

It’s as if I can never escape infrastructure projects, or escape being embroiled in technology obsolescence discussions. Setting up offices for Margo and me in our Boulder home has been quite an ordeal and this morning we had a longtime audio / video specialist, Brian, return to oversee the pulling of Ethernet cables, some coax and other related components needed to support dual working environments. The picture

above is of Margo who bravely soldiered on while everything was in chaos for several hours.

Watching new networking infrastructure being installed and watching older equipment being carted away, I was reminded of how when I worked for Tandem Computers I used to enjoy providing the product management perspective on communications and networking to customers and prospects where often the message was to forget about what you had already purchased! It was already legacy! In full flight I could address issues to do with SNA/APPN, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and the OSI stack without missing a beat.

However, it was while I was so engaged that one day a good friend of mine from development, Brad, suggested I had become the master of S&D; in his words, “Substitution and Distraction” with a performance akin to that of an illusionist, but with a twist.

Whenever a question came up about Tandem capabilities not yet in plan I would transition to a different product or feature and in so doing, present an opinion so energetically and enthusiastically that I succeeded in distracting the audience completely. Rather than having a flaw exposed, I could be relied upon to substitute a related topic so smoothly that to all present, the original question was long forgotten!

Perhaps this is the perfect segue to the issue that’s arisen with Oracle’s CEO March 23rd, 2011, announcement that “Oracle has decided to stop developing software for Intel’s Itanium chip because it thinks the processor is ‘nearing the end of its life.’ Hewlett-Packard screams and Intel reiterates support for the Itanium” was how ZDNet “Between the Lines” blogger summarized Larry Ellison’s latest proclamation.

HP and Intel had every right to be upset and then it really hit me; this was Larry being Larry and facing some major issues himself he, too, was simply resorting to a little S&D!

Should HP NonStop server customers be alarmed in any way? Could the reliance solely on Intel’s Itanium chip prove to be problematic in the future?

“HP and Intel have a long standing relationship of developing enterprise solutions for the mission critical and high availability markets. Together, we have demonstrated our commitment to our customers and partners, with new chipsets delivering increased performance, lower power consumption and maintaining best in class technology,” according to Randy Meyer, Director of Product Management, NonStop Enterprise Division (NED), HP. “We continue to develop and innovate, exploiting the Itanium processor family and increasing the available options in our NonStop portfolio.”

I happen to be firmly in the camp of there being no immediate or midterm issues for HP NonStop server customers and prospects. I have sat through the product roadmap presentations enough times to understand the specific chips NED will use and the timeframes involved.

However, and possibly more relevant for HP NonStop server users, I am of the opinion that Larry, the master of S&D, has a lot to hide. And the more I talk to technologists, the more I am convinced that there are at least three possible issues Larry faces within Oracle!

Larry plans to sell the Sparc chip business and needs to generate more hype and demonstrate its future profit potential. Expressed as simply as I can, when it comes to chips of this complexity, where Sparc is trying to catch up to IBM’s Power chip, let alone Itanium, the potential to be “one-of-two” certainly looks a lot more attractive than being “one-of-three” – basic math tells me there’s something to be gained from this outcome.

Why should Larry sell the Sparc chip business? That’s the $5 Billion (maybe more) question and its roots are deeply tied to the cost for the next chip spin of Sparc which hast to happen sometime under his watch. Ever considered the price of a new chip fab factory, plus the associated R&D expense?

For a company like Oracle, doing well admittedly with quarterly net income hovering around $2 Billion, such a “roll of the dice” is a little too rich, even for Larry. So, Sparc just has to go, and it has to be sold with a premium because Larry has to win!

However, Larry also has a Plan B, and this is the second issue; should the thin veneer he has thrown up around Itanium be penetrated and his plans to sell Sparc crumble, then he will bring IBM into the ruckus as well and really go after both the Itanium and Power programs. If he’s to be left with x86 processors as his only future platform, then he has to start the heavy-lifting associated with neutralizing the oppositions chip sets!

After all, Larry is pushing hard to sell the full stack once again, as he envisions Oracle becoming a one-stop shop! It’s hard not to miss how envious Larry is of the old IBM. Perhaps the one comment he made as he took a shot at the Itanium chip that he would like to take back is when he expressed envy over IBM’s mainframe model from decades ago.

Readers of UK publication, The Register, on March 24th, 2011, could hardly have missed the commentary provided by Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting, when he suggested that “to me, this is the reality of what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s. Oracle wants to have the incredible margins that IBM enjoyed back then. It wants to have that lock-in that IBM had in the days when there were few alternatives and even fewer standards that would allow customers to easily move from vendor to vendor.”

Expressed a little differently, and with an admonishment, CNet.com writer Jonathan Eunice posted on April 1, 2011, of how “Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has described the mainframe era and model in glowing terms; if he's hell-bent on going there, and on pulling customers into Oracle's ‘full stack’ fold, then Oracle's traditional commitment to heterogeneous multi-vendor support goes by the wayside. If I were an Oracle customer running on any non-Oracle hardware, I'd be asking for long-term support and software update assurances, in writing, with clear and enforceable penalties for non-performance. Verbal reassurances would no longer be sufficient.”

Left with just an x86 chip then yes, to drive home the “full stack” where he doesn’t hold all the cards is not the typically “winning-hand” that Larry would want to hold.

Unfortunately, that’s not all that he’s facing; there’s more! There’s a very serious concern, and the third issue that I see – Oracle, as a data base, is flawed and it’s becoming increasingly obvious to large users.

At issue is the strong tie Oracle has to Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) architectures. It can be argued that it has been the exploitation of SMP that has helped Oracle to achieve the success it has enjoyed to date, but when data bases grow too big, and clustering is pursued, SMP really gets in the way! Shared nothing architectures, with the relationship they enjoy between processors, the disk processor (DP2) and the disks, support linear scalability whereas clustering SMP nodes usually peaks at around 3, perhaps 4 – certainly well short of the 100 you find in the text books.

Of late, several very large customers of Oracle have moved to NonStop and in the weeks leading up to HP Discover event I am sure we will hear a lot more about them. But I sense this is the start of a gradual shift in emphasis with NonStop as the answer to a secure data base that can simply scale practically without limit, and without Larry, will become extremely newsworthy! Perhaps these flaws in Oracle are really what have Larry anxiously practicing S&D!

In the meantime, as HP’s Randy Meyer went on to add, “NonStop customers continue to rely on HP’s NonStop Blade technology. The value proposition has been proven time and time again. Leveraging the RAS features that are fundamental to Intel’s Itanium chipset, NonStop continues to deliver world class availability and scale for customer applications that demand true 24x7 availability.”

As for my own home office data center, the installations have been completed and the systems are up and running and I am free to continue writing. I will keep watching the headlines though, as I have to believe we haven’t heard the last from Larry on the topic of Itanium. However, the shock value has now diminished and Itanium users are no longer uncertain about the future so I have to wonder, is it now IBM’s turn to appear in the cross-hairs of Larry’s sights?

Control, choices, and options!

2011-03-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

It was a cold and stormy night! This is not a parody of some dreadful work of fiction – it was true and I was no longer in control and I had few choices. For the NonStop community, this may hit too close to home …

It’s taken some time, but I have finally settled back into my Boulder home and the daily routines are being re-established. However, I made a quick dash back to Northern California and to the Bay area to participate in track event, but was caught out badly on the return trip when an unexpected weather change brought with it a fierce snow storm.

As the full fury was unleashed on the Sierras I became trapped for many hours on the border with Nevada, along with every other driver on the interstate at that time. I did get the opportunity to drive my all-wheel-drive Skyline, but it proved only partially effective as the summer tires struggled for control – a most uncomfortable situation. So much so, that the only real option I had was to return to Truckee, California, and ride out the storm. The picture above is of what the car looked like the following morning as I filled it with gas, outside Reno.

Sitting in the hotel lobby gave me the opportunity to scan newspapers and it was hard to miss the headlines surrounding HP. Ever since HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker, unveiled his strategy for the company there’s barely been a day when some aspect of it did not attract the attention of one journalist or another. Pursuing the cloud, embracing mobility, beefing up its software business and stepping up to the plate to deliver services around everything, so as to ensure a much better customer experience.

These announcements haven’t come without a little comic relief. Pursuing growth the way HP’s CEO intends will come at a cost for others already in the marketplace and the angst we have seen coming from some of them has led to some executives making unfathomable decisions. The good thing about these arbitrary decisions and the posturing that accompanied them, customers remain firmly in control, despite the prevailing conditions, and there really are plenty of options out there – IBM must be chuckling in the wings!

Earlier in the week I had received an email from Jim Johnson, Chairman of The Standish Group, who had posed the question “does supporting older technology (imply you) are right-headed or wrong-headed? Is it investment protection or long-term disaster?” Even more strikingly, Jim then suggested “wouldn’t money spent on enhancing old technology be better spent on modernization or in reducing customer cost?”

There’s not too much IT managers feel they control these days, and as they sit through one meeting after another it must get a bit depressing after a while. For many of them who have been in the industry as long as I have, there’s a mindset of just sticking with what they have and riding it out till they retire. Tough perspective, perhaps, but nonetheless, somewhat scary as sticking with old and expensive technology may only hasten their push into retirement.

A few days later I had a call with Baldwin Hackett & Meeks, Inc. (BHMI) founders, Jack Baldwin and Mike Meeks. Readers may recall that in the post of October 8, 2010 “Remove the warnings!” (one of the most widely read posts in all of 2010) I had written of BHMI developing an alternative solution for customers running ACI’s XPNET. What I didn’t address in that earlier blog piece was how BHMI has a reputation of doing really hard things, often under trying conditions and where situations called for drastic actions far outside the box! BHMI have definitely become a vendor toiling away at the coal-face of modernization and their observations carry a lot of weight with me even with all that I have been reading!

While BHMI still “takes on big, complex custom projects,” Jack Baldwin explained, “the corporation’s primary focus is on its Concourse Financial Software suite, a collection of high performance near-real time back office applications.” The product BHMI used to replace XPNET was Concourse - Transaction Messaging System (TMS) and Jack was quick to add how “it’s the latest addition to the Concourse family, which transcends the back office environment.”

“As a lot of people have noted, after ACI announced its new relationship with IBM,” Jack continued, “BASE24 clients have started considering their options. Concourse - TMS does give current BASE24 customers increased flexibility for messaging choices, going beyond what XPNET users might be considering; Concourse - TMS goes beyond NonStop and the financial services marketplace!”

In talking with Jack and Mike and about the success they were having with their Concourse product suite, the conversation returned a couple of times to their observations about the NonStop marketplace. Recognizing that there where customers giving serious thought to migrating off the NonStop platform BHMI responded to this perceived requirement by engineering Concourse, including Concourse – TMS, to run on several platforms including Windows, Unix, Linux in addition to NonStop.

While BHMI is in discussion with some NonStop customers to add new functionality on platforms complementing the HP NonStop server, both Jack and Mike added “contemplating moving completely off NonStop is no longer a priority for many of these customers. We have found a cadre of customers who absolutely will not leave NonStop and, quite the opposite to what we expected, aggressively pursue other software solutions should there be any attempt to drop support for NonStop!”

With the NonStop product roadmaps becoming better understood and the migration of NonStop systems to more modern Blades packages, there are less concerns being raised by customers of NonStop – they can clearly see for themselves where the technology is headed and are electing to make the appropriate NonStop platform for their needs. Yes, they do have real choices today.

“I think one of the biggest reasons customers are leaving NonStop is that they view it as old and expensive technology; in letting them stay on the old technology increases both their company’s costs and risk,” Jim Johnson observed before adding “it also reinforces their company’s perception of NonStop being old and expensive, because for these companies (unaware of the options and choices they have), it is!”

Spending time talking with the founders of BHMI and listening to the experiences they have accumulated by being in business for more than 25 years, then yes, they will make sure their products run on multiple platforms. They will continue to support NonStop as they have customers who will not quit!

The success of NonStop continues to be in our hands. However, just how well informed are we keeping our management? How strong an advocate have we become within our companies for the NonStop platform? Considering there are many enjoying a successful career by doing this, shouldn’t we be making modernization a priority!

Rather than sticking to the “TAL and TACL Till we’re Terminated” theme, we can embrace the modern languages and programming frameworks and gain the skills that will let us remain productive for years to come! Vendors are demonstrating strong commitments to NonStop, shouldn’t we, as users, be doing the same, in lock-step?

Modern applications developed with no knowledge that the target platform is NonStop, and yet inheriting the traditional NonStop properties of availability and scalability, are becoming more widely known within our community. The ease with which this can be carried out is “firing-up” many within the NonStop community, all to the benefit of the vendor community who continue to pursue development of solutions for NonStop.

High in the Sierras this past week, my thoughts were solely on survival and while that too is the sentiment of some within our community, it is a bit of a shame. Yes, there are choices and yes, there are many more options – but isn’t it an encouraging sign for all of us that we do retain control and that facing the mix of platforms we have today, there continues to be robust offerings for NonStop?

Chance Encounters!

2011-03-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

Like many within the NonStop community, I have received an invite to join a Webinar by Attunity - https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/686744769 and I thought it may be good to go behind the scenes and check it out!

The past couple of days have seen me rack up the miles. A quick dash back to Simi Valley was followed almost immediately by a lengthy trip Johannesburg, South Africa, for the annual SATUG event. Changes of scenery always trigger appreciation of new perspectives with me, and this trip proved to be no exception.

At first it had been difficult to convince Margo to accompany me on this trip, but eventually she succumbed. In the past few years, often something unusual and unexpected has transpired while we were away, and upon returning, Margo has been disappointed not to have participated. This trip, fortunately, didn’t disappoint – and the picture above is of Margo enjoying a rare opportunity to see a friendly Cheetah up close.

It was during my previous trip to the SATUG event where at the Emerald Casino and Resort, as part of the program, a trainer brought another Cheetah on stage and we all had photo opportunities standing alongside the fastest animal on the planet. For more detail on this encounter in 2009 at SATUG, follow the link to the post of February 24th, 2009, “Up close, and friendly ...” where I wrote of how surprised the event’s attendees were when the Cheetah did show for the occasion and where we had the opportunity for an up close encounter!

Margo had missed this chance and for the last couple of years, a framed copy of the picture used in that blog posting hung in her office.

At the CTUG user event, in Toronto, Canada, I wrote in the post of October 29th, 2010, “Reliable as the clock!” of how the architecture of NonStop in addressing the sum of many fallible components produced a better performing, more reliable platform, that remains “close to magic” even today! The photo used in that earlier blog on CTUG is a view of the exhibit area showing the booths of comForte and Attunity alongside one another.

I was representing comForte at the time, and it provided me with a chance encounter with fellow vendor, Attunity.

Representing Attunity was Itamar Ankorion, Director of Business Development and Marketing. As break-out sessions were being held, Ankorion and I found time to discuss technology and products, musing on where the HP NonStop server offerings were headed, and the prospect for growth across the user community.

Attunity has had a long association with HP NonStop and with the HP NonStop development organization. While the company’s origins were with Digital and open platforms, their expertise in data connectivity saw them port their ODBC and JDBC drivers to NonStop. In fact, they created the first SQL-based drivers for the NonStop platform.

Furthermore, Attunity had a ringside seat to the fortunes of both, Digital and Tandem, through the early days of the Compaq acquisitions and without pushing Ankorion too hard on this subject, there’s certainly much that can be said about the upside following the Compaq “merger” with HP! While Attunity’s products continue to pursue support for open platforms such as Linux, Windows, and Unix (LUW), support for NonStop and connectivity to critical NonStop subsystems, including Pathway, Enscribe and NonStop SQL, remain a priority for the company.

Chance encounters with Ankorion at the CTUG event may not be as exciting as meeting Cheetahs in South Africa. And the recent SATUG event fresher in our memories than last year’s CTUG – and yes, there will be further commentary on this latest SATUG event shortly.

However, the event in Canada brought me in touch with a key infrastructure provider. Attunity continues to be the source of a better, indeed a much faster, implementation of ODBC and JDBC drivers (products that HP highly recommends) and due to their appeal within the NonStop community Attunity continues to retain the NonStop platform on their product roadmaps.

Having subsequent discussions with users and with HP I learned more about the scope of Attunity’s product offerings, and while I make it a point in posts to this blog to track new products and technologies, it would be very remiss of me not to draw attention to solutions that may not be as well-known as others, yet are aligned with HP’s modernization initiatives.

“Our Data Federation software enables user to bring together data from across any mix of Enscribe, SQL/MP and other sources such as SQL Server and Oracle,” Ankorion explained. “HP sees how customers can benefit from such capabilities and included us in presentations at their recent shows (last year’s Las Vegas HPTF and the San Jose NonStop Summit), and had an Attunity demo running in the HP booth.”

In the white papers and articles I have written these past two years it seems I can never distance myself too far from the CIO mantra popular throughout the industry – do more with less! And there’s no escaping the reality that price plays a significant role in the selection of products. On this issue, Ankorion was as passionate as any HP executive I have talked to of late, and reiterated how keeping the costs low was imperative to his company.

“Attunity is the only vendor that enables their users to work with Enscribe as if it were a relational database without any requirements to re-host the data - a risky and costly undertaking by any measure you care to select. We are the only ones who enable the combination of data virtually (federation) and to have single views of the resultant data across NonStop and beyond. We have become the only native NonStop software that provides comprehensive, universal data connectivity, that lets you configure once and use your data anywhere, out of a single product.”

When chance encounters do occur, by happenstance mostly, and when it leaves you better infomred, as happened after meeting an Attunity representative, or when the result is a photograph you hang on the wall and smile each time you pass it, as was the case with mine and Margo’s encounters with Cheetahs - it makes traveling to user group events certainly worthwhile!

Next Tuesday, March 22nd, Attunity will be conducting a webinar, headlined as “Don’t Stop Being NonStop. Move Forward. Modernize.” A joint production involving Jim Johnson, Chairman of The Standish Group, well-known throughout the community, as well as Attunity’s Director of Technical Services, Richard Thomas. Registration can be found at:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/686744769

As I continue to look at vendors who may play a part in ensuring NonStop has a role in Cloud Computing and providing tools to integrate NonStop within the Cloud, Attunity will prove valuable to sections of the NonStop community concerned about the steps they need to take to have their business logic (accessing Enscribe and relying on Pathway) fully participating !

“Attunity has enjoyed its relationship with HP NED for many years and providing NonStop users with data connectivity and federation technologies has helped us cement this relationship within HP,” Ankorion acknowledged. “You could say we have had a front-row seat when it comes to the continuing dilemma users face today when interacting with multiple server platforms and where the business requires seamless aggregation of federated data from these platforms. The focus of our products in supporting these customers is positioning us well to deal with the systems in place today as well as for those of the future, many of which will evolve into private Clouds.”

Chance encounters may be easily dismissed and the promise they hold, forgotten all too quickly. I’m far from suggesting Attunity is a match for a Cheetah when it comes to personalities, but I am suggesting that when it comes to federation and where risks and costs are a great concern, perhaps they make a strong case for further consideration.

The NonStop user community has always sought innovative solutions and Attunity products show a lot of promise in this respect. And yes, I have it on good authority that they would clearly outperform the Cheetah after all!

Too much clutter!

2011-03-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

This is not the usual ramblings on my part focused solely on issues to do with NonStop. Nor is it a pipedream on my part! All I am suggesting in this post is we give due consideration to throwing away much of what we run today …

When plans were finalized to return to Boulder and to work from the home office, it didn’t immediately occur to me that this would involve moving a lot of stuff around. So much so, that after a couple of days I gave up and called a trash collection contracting service whose truck I had passed only a few days earlier.

All the same, it was a heart-wrenching moment when it came time to make the call as I was going to be discarding not just empty boxes and packing paper, but a couple of pieces of furniture as well as a several appliances I just hadn’t used for the past ten years. Rather than just adding more stuff to a growing collection of what at one time I had valued, the time had come to take a deep breath and just throw out the lot.

Dan and Tim from 1.800.GOT.JUNK pulled up in my driveway and after I directed them to the piles of discarded former treasures I had assembled at the end of my driveway as well as outside my basement, they quickly set about tossing it all into their truck. The picture above is of the process under way with Dan and Tim carrying stuff from one of the stacks! It felt good knowing that at their regional location my “stuff” will be sorted, with items of value likely to find new homes.

Knowing I am working on a blog about clutter my wife, Margo, after visiting a hair dresser’s salon, brought home with her the March 2011 issue of the Oprah.com magazine. Oprah had written in her editorial page, “What I know for Sure” how her life was “filled with so much clutter.” As she moved on to a new project, she admitted how she was “not just cleaning my closet. I’m cleaning out my life.”

As she described how she was going about this she remarked “I’m keeping only that which delights me or embraces my well-being. That means another big ol’ garage sale coming up: clothes, shoes, dishes, furniture, stuff.”

When it comes to our work, particularly when it has to do with technology and running the complex data centers, there’s a reason why we use the expression “let’s start with a clean sheet of paper!” And it’s no wonder we all have empathy for the team that truly can “think outside the box” – as for the rest of us inside the box, there’s just too much stuff to see clearly! There’s too much clutter we have accumulated that often can get in the way of making good decisions!

It’s also an admission that what we have, and what we continue to do has become a distraction, and before we can put together any plans for new projects, we need to clean house!

While editing a posting to another blog, there were questions as to why I had introduced two storylines and over a couple of paragraphs tried to tie them together, when all that I had succeeded in doing was developing a rather confusing, and somewhat cluttered, storyline.

There’s still no escaping the value of keeping something simple and I was left wondering, whether it’s undertaking the simple task of writing or, equally, overseeing a complex data center, as Oprah had written, “enough already with the stuff!”

When we take a good look at the mix of software we run today, is it holding us back from pursuing routine upgrades? How often have we heard that a particular routine or program has to continue to be run as it’s always been a part of the solution only to have no one able to explain what it does or who even developed it! And yet, it’s too risky to pull the plug on it, as managers are very nervous should something break – a lot easier to just let it run than do forensic to uncover its history!

Of course finding the time to pursue deep investigations on all the code we support is just something we do not have time to pursue – after all, we are all contending with the mantra to do more with less and superficially, this doesn’t look like a priority. Are we expected to rewrite the whole solution? Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to just keep running until we replace with a packaged solution?

For the most part, this is what does happen inside many data centers but the stuff we have accumulated is beginning to weigh us down. We can no longer find engineers who could even analyze what it all means should something go wrong and besides, with the little staff we have today, we are over-committed just to maintain all this stuff – we can’t touch much of it, as it’s just too important to business operations!

Today, the focus has shifted to modernization and to convergence – after all, how else we will capitalize on the benefits on offer from vendors such as HP if we can’t align with their product roadmaps . As technology leads us deeper into commodity platforms and solutions providers deliver products built with popular frameworks supported by the latest programming language offering, where will we find the time to consider and evaluate, let alone deploy. We have all this other stuff we just have to look after!

Isn’t it time we planned on throwing the whole lot out? Isn’t it time we called 1.800.GOT.CODE? But is this reasonable or even possible? I asked a recent start-up infrastructure vendor how quickly they produced code. How feasible is it to simply replace a product or solution? As this vendor has a small team of engineers with “history” at two other companies pursuing similar products, it was very important to them that everything be developed from scratch.

Inside of twelve months they had written a new product with more than 100,000 lines of code, sufficient to where Proof of Concepts (PoC) could be pursued. As this vendor moved through the PoC and completed supporting additional capabilities, as well as responding to customer requests for new features, the product grew to 250,000 lines of code. A completely new, alternative product offering written using all the latest development tools, frameworks and libraries and as modern as anything else on the market – all completed in just over a year!

Dan and Tim filled their truck and drove away but only after agreeing to come back the next day to collect even more junk. There’s something uplifting about seeing all the stuff you no longer value being taken away. Cleaning house has let me focus on what’s important to me even as it frees up so much time to get on with other things I really like to do!

It’s time we really clean out the old and give serious consideration to replacing it. With hindsight, how much of a contribution to our companies are we really making when we spend seventy percent of our time maintaining stuff we aren’t all that sure is actually doing much of anything!

Unrealistic perhaps and obviously I just don’t understand the implication of what I am saying and yet, on the other hand, how many IT departments have really tried? The tools and languages on offer today will, in most situations, allow us to unload so much stuff we may be very surprised. We will begin to see how much of a distraction it had become and how it’s very bulk had prevented us from having a clear view of where we need to be.

Imagine how much time will free up for development projects we really would like to do. And if we can just pull back on what we maintain to a lowly fifty percent, just think of the bigger contributions to the business we will be making!

Not a clear view ahead?

2011-02-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

The NonStop community has always been willing to give new solutions a try and many PoC’s have been undertaken to look at what is on offer from a vendor. And guiding these decisions has been the vendor’s product roadmaps!

For perhaps the last time I crossed the continental divide and returned to Simi Valley, a trip I have taken as many as fifty times these past four plus years. But with this trip my final destination isn’t to be Simi Valley, but Boulder, Colorado at the moment is many miles behind me. After spending as much time as I have in Simi, and despite having built several great friendships, I am looking forward to a less disruptive time working out of my home office.

As I pushed deeper into the mountains, what I could see wasn’t all that clear. And the photo above was taken through the front windscreen of my trusty Escalade SUV as I descended Vail pass – snow flurries obscuring major landmarks! With a posted speed of 65mph, a little over 100kph, I could barely see enough of the road in front of me to maintain a speed of 40 mph, and with the onset of a winter’s afternoon, I still had 400 miles to go!

Yes, without visibility it was futile to try to go faster or to even think about changing course. I couldn’t even see the exit signs and it wasn’t practical to pull over and wait for the weather to clear, as already a number of cars had been engulfed by the growing snow drifts unseen by their unwary drivers. I always travel with maps, and my iPad does a good job of telling me where I am, but even with these tools, when you are unable to make out simple features, lacking visibility of what’s ahead makes the best road maps next to useless!

As it so happened, only a few days before setting out, I had just finished an article for the upcoming March – April, 2011, issue of The Connection. For this issue the article I wrote was on roadmaps – look for it as the magazine arrives. In pursuing the story, I had the good fortune of exchanging ideas with a number of infrastructure vendors and along the way, I developed new respect for the work that goes into their development and the sincerity with which their owners strive to portray accurate assessments of what lies ahead!

This article in the upcoming issue of The Connection, references an earlier post of November 11, 2010, “Product Roadmaps! Still Required?” where I talked about recent announcements by the HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) of partnerships addressing user requirements in security as well as manageability. With this in mind, I then suggested that perhaps we were getting a glimpse into the future – as we wonder whether traditional approaches to building roadmaps can continue, in light of the so many variables and unknowns present today.

I then proposed that for roadmaps to be useful for users, NED needs to step up its engagement with vendors from across the NonStop community. To more accurately project what is to come next and to have users plan for it, NED needs to reduce product delivery timeframes, and needs to engage others from within the NonStop community: that would be a good way to help bring the horizon a lot closer and help eliminate some of the more speculative aspects of a product or feature that does little to help foster credibility among users. It’s just plain tough to see where technology is headed when visibility is blurred by so many distractions!

Little did I know as I made these claims that I would find myself on the highway cautiously navigating my way through slick conditions! But then again, its winter in the mountains so why should I have been shocked by what was happening around me? Why should I be surprised with my inability to clearly see the way ahead! Why should I even try to consult my road map?

Increasingly, I am seeing users develop roadmaps for themselves. They may call them by different names, hide them within business requirements documentation, and even discuss them in terms of requests for proposals, but whatever the language used they are roadmaps all the same. They reinforce a corporate objective in terms of a business plan or vision. Strategy documents are liberally sprinkled with roadmaps – explanations of what’s required and when it needs to be delivered to fully meet a company’s expectations.

The upswing in Proof of Concept (PoC) exercises bears this out – a company will often bring in untried solutions, and check them out, when they see the potential to leverage something new and it has the potential to push them further down the road. Well-executed PoC’s can often help users see how a product or feature, from a vendor not even on their radar-screen, and can prove extremely beneficial.

Among the NonStop community, there has always been a willingness to give these new vendors an opportunity to showcase their capabilities. As we emerged from Y2K testing, for instance, very few NonStop users expected to be able to support web access, let alone come to terms externalizing Pathway applications as Web services. Participating in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) seemed to be the domain of others – but the NonStop platform has proved itself to be as modern as any other platform hosting services externalized to the web.

Now that we are becoming more familiar with Cloud Computing, and with private Clouds in particular, we are coming to terms with how the NonStop platforms has every opportunity to play a role. Users are not the least concerned with which platforms populate the Cloud, only that the service being supported is always available from anywhere in the world, at any time of day.

User roadmaps show little that’s different from requirements of decades ago when NonStop first appeared! And why should any of us running NonStop be surprised? Unfortunately, for many users, the visibility they have is pretty poor and landmarks aren’t easily sighted. Popular misconceptions are only adding to the flurries whirling around in front of them, making the road ahead easy to discern. However, as we do get to see more clearly and as the flurries pass by, newer roles for the NonStop platform to play will become much clearer.

In talking with users and vendors, there’s no question about whether HP NonStop servers will ever take up sole residency within the Cloud, just as there’s no question about the presence of there being only x86 servers – every category of server can easily find a home within the Cloud. It is the role these platforms play that will determine participation or not, and it will be about the value a server provides that will determine its future. Roadmaps devoid of NonStop participation may well be selling short a crucial technology component and yet, as I listen to these users and vendors, there’s still those who are very much surprised by my predicting such a future for NonStop!

I arrived in Simi Valley quite late, but next day morning gave us clear skies. The photo here to the left is of the horizon, looking north from a park just behind me. Sometimes we forget how high the mountains surrounding the greater Los Angeles area are and how beautiful they can become when covered in snow. What was so dangerous only hours earlier were now a winter showcase!

Willingness to develop strategies and craft roadmaps, to pursue PoC’s and to push ahead with new ways to deploy the HP NonStop server is a healthy sign for all associated with the NonStop platform. Its future role may not be immediately apparent to all of us, but as the noise coming from today’s experts recedes and landmarks take form once again, we are more than likely to see NonStop platforms anchoring much of what is being presented as modern… and for that, the drive we may be currently experiencing will quickly fade from memory and be replaced with spectacular visages.

Three years on, and three more wishes!

2011-02-13T19:21:00.000-08:00

Car racers perform well when they pull from experience and after 35 years, experience suggests there's a lot more coming for the HP NonStop server. Imagine it – a NonStop in every Hybrid platform!

For several days I resisted the temptation of working cars into the storyline of this week’s blog, as for the past couple of weeks there’s been more than a liberal sprinkling of car photos and this will be the third time in as many weeks. But somehow the number three is relevant to this post’s storyline so I have gone ahead and used one more car picture.

The photo above is of me close by the pit exit at Willow Springs International Raceway (WSIR), that up until recently wore the title of the fastest track in the west. The one take-away I have from the time spent out on road courses is that focus is paramount and improvement only comes with practice. Experience developed over the years is what sets racers apart.

And practice, practice, practice – there’s absolutely no substitute for the time spent behind the wheel! The most powerful car rarely clocks the fastest times, nor does the drivers’ age seem to be a factor. At the club level, drivers will often switch cars and “volunteer” to show newcomers the best lines and you can always recognize when any car is in the hands of a more experienced driver.

The origins of this post can be traced back to a post I wrote three years ago to this weekend, and posted on February 12, 2008 “’My Wish’ for NS Blades” and then followed-up more recently in a number of articles I have written over the past couple of months including a feature in the October issue of the e/Newsletter Tandemworld.Net as well as an earlier post to this blog on November 30, 2010 “Nothing seems to last …”

On the understanding that NonStop would be supported as part of the BladeSystem offerings, I suggested three years ago that firstly, in terms of wishes, mind you, HP BCS delivers on the slideware Martin Fink, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems (BCS), unveiled as the “Shared Infrastructure Blades.”

With Blades a reality, my second wish was for the NonStop operating system, NSK, to be customer-configurable, perhaps even supported atop a hypervisor, such that customers could easily reconfigure the BladeSystem to support as many or as few NonStop processors as their applications required.

My third wish then pushed the barrier even further. Assuming an operator could reconfigure a BladeSystem to have as many or as few NonStop processors running as the applications required, then it would be easy for HP to provide an API, such that a workload manager could automatically reconfigure processors on the fly as transaction mixes determined.

Three years later, so how did I do? Obviously, the BladeSystem was announced and it supported NonStop, and today these have proven to be very popular systems. The drive to commoditization will only see the Blades become more universal in the months ahead so I suspect my first wish is close to fulfillment. The Engineering Prototype exhibited at a recent HPTF event certainly highlighted the potential from a shared infrastructure blades platform.

With respect to my earlier views on virtualization then no, they no longer make sense in my opinion – shifting NonStop further from the hardware lessens its ability to be NonStop!

As for the third wish, and perhaps even for all three, it’s going to depend on how solutions providers weigh the value of a hybrid platform and whether there’s a competitive edge for them as a result. In other words, new entrants into an industry vertical dominated by one or two vendors may not just step outside the box, they may smash it to pieces.

While one solution mandates a BladeSystem chock full of the same high-end Blades processors, a new solution may call for only a couple of high-end Blades processors and then complements it with cheaper systems – mixing Linux and even Windows with NonStop, for instance – then the price difference could be material.

Transactions will never uniformly represent the same value to any user – some transactions will be extremely valuable whereas others will be simply nice-to-have. The fiftieth time I check my 401K balance surely drive my services company nuts if every time it’s processed it’s been on the same system that handles billion dollar trades!

Between my second and third wish lies a really significant piece of work that I have covered several times, and yet has been getting a more encouraging response. Before you can manage, you first have to capture and report, I have been wisely counseled. This makes a lot of sense to me so I now anticipate the first forays into this area will be simple dashboard like solutions telling me I have 3 transactions of this type, 20 of that, and another 6 the other type. Processing will continue on a homogeneous Blade platform, but at least we will have mechanisms in place screening the workload.

If in my general enthusiasm I have not explained myself well, then what I would like to see is a chassis populated with commodity Blades that are physically identical and that can run any operating system, including NonStop, to provide a Hybrid platform and that the number of such Blades running any instances of an operating system can remain fluid – the number assigned in support of NonStop growing and ebbing solely on the mix of transactions arriving that really must be processed no matter what!

Furthermore, while the basics are in place, or are about to be, I no longer see HP driving the release of such packaged Hybrid platforms – it will be successful solutions vendors grabbing market share from the incumbents that will fuel such a possibility! It will be successful solutions vendors that attract infrastructure vendors to resolve the workload monitoring and management that could drive its eventual development.

However, it is now three years later and as I look back, I grade myself a B+ on the understanding that blades can populate a single BladeSystem and that it’s just a case of solutions vendors filling in some of the missing elements. But what do I wish for these days? What are my latest three wishes?

Expressed late last year as observations, let me start out by quoting Martin Fink, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems (BCS), when he proposed in a recent email exchange “with every new microprocessor that becomes available to us, we continue to evaluate ServerNet and its impact on overall system performance. Certainly at some future date, we'll move to a standard interconnect – probably Infiniband (IB) as a possible alternative.”

Fink then added, “that's precisely in keeping with our stated strategy to have NonStop built from the same common, modular infrastructure as all the rest of HP's servers.” That will support a commoditized blade package, without a doubt and while there’s still no guarantee we will see every blade package with integrated IB support, a standard interconnect technology for all blades packages seems a certainty.

If that remains my first wish, I am now more than satisfied that one outcome of the commoditization could be NonStop shipping within every platform. This would be my second wish. Again, there are capabilities that could greatly benefit from the presence of NonStop. In much the same way as when IBM moved to “parallel sysplex” and required an instance of MVS to run “clocks, locks, and lists” HP could achieve something far better through the presence of NonStop in every Hybrid blade platform.

As for my third wish this time around, then it’s for greater cooperation with solutions and middleware vendors. We have already seen some partnership success in areas to do with security and manageability, but I believe there will be even more action on this front – the magnitude of what’s presented today in the software roadmaps really does call out for help from others to ensure implementation in a timely manner.

It may be a different set of circumstances from what a racer may find, but when it comes to my most recent three wishes, more than 35 years on, HP has the experience to master just about all I have covered. And for my part, it certainly would instill confidence across the community should these wishes eventuate any time soon!

Hybrids? Careful what you ask for …

2011-02-03T13:52:00.000-08:00

Auto industry is in turmoil with alliances, government funding, and IPOs only adding to a sense of dramatic changes yet to come. And the rush to produce Hybrid cars may be a foretaste of what may come for today’s CIO!

The weather has been almost perfect here, in Southern California, and last weekend I had the good fortune of driving the roadster through the canyons of Malibu. The picture above is of Margo and me descending Mulholland Drive; my eyes fixed on the exit of the turn, as we headed to The Rock Store, a popular hangout for the likes of Jay Leno and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was taken by the professional photographers from “RockStorePhotos.com” who just happened to snap us on the descent - and for those of you well to the East of us and snowbound, check out the Spring flowers already in bloom!

Having none of the electronics or “nannies” watching over us, relying on old-school techniques, driving the roadster took me back to the times when all cars called upon the skills of their drivers just to keep them on the road, and where they provided a measure of feedback to ensure the driver remained engaged across the full range of interactions that occurs whenever a vehicle is being driven.

There’s been a lot published of late about the transformation under way in the auto industry and not just about the mergers, buy-outs and IPOs. I had to laugh the other day when I saw an American muscle car with the rear license surround of “Yes, it’s a Hybrid! It burns gas and rubber!” Yet Hybrids are making an impact and with Motor Trend crowning the Chevrolet Volt its Car of the Year for 2011, there’s plenty to suggest that the demise of the internal combustion engine is imminent.

At least as the sole source of a vehicle’s propulsion!

For much of the car buying public, however, these Hybrids are pretty dreadful looking (although, have you seen pictures of the futuristic-looking 767hp Porsche 918 RSR race car?) and yet it’s a trend that is not going away. The only question for me is what engine performs which function; when it comes to considering a hybrid power source, the combinations are almost limitless!

Personally, I would like to see a diesel electric: a very small diesel monitoring the batteries, and a powerful electric engine built into the hub of each wheel. You want Quattro? I will give you Quattro, and much more! It’s all about keeping the driver very much involved with enough feedback to make the driving experience truly enjoyable.

It was a few years ago, at the 2008 HPTF event in Las Vegas, when NonStop customers were treated to an HP “Hybrid” BladeSystem supporting a mix of NonStop and Linux Blades. It was presented as an Engineering Prototype, and I covered this in the Real Time View post of July 16th, 2008, “Specialist! Am I still needed?” where I wrote of how this Hybrid from HP gave us a perspective on what we could expect to see from HP sometime in the future.

At that time, I suggested a Hybrid provided generalists with the opportunity to have a cluster of specialty servers delivered to them by HP and functioning right out of the box! All the elements of a “pocket mainframe” with support of a Window’s-based web server, NonStop front-ending transaction processing, and a HP-UX / Oracle data base representing just one possible configuration. NonStop at the heart of it all, integrated in a way we have relied on specialists to do in the past!

Two years later, in the summer of 2010, IBM took the wraps of its new mainframe, the IBM zEnterprise 196 promoting something similar to what I described as HP’s Hybrid BladeSystem. At that announcement, IBM talked of establishing “the mainframe as the central management point for enterprise data centers, with other systems directly feeding off the mainframe's configuration,” according to columnist, Andy Patrizio, in the July 22nd, 2008 issue of the electronic newsletter ServerWatch.

“IBM has added the ability to manage Power 7 and x86 IBM blade systems from the mainframe console through zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension, making the mainframe the hub of systems management. Workloads can be spread across all three systems and resources shared and managed as a single, virtualized system, so long as they are IBM systems,” Patrizio observed.

He then quoted Rod Adkins, senior vice president of the Systems and Technology group at IBM, "this is really the industry's first multi-architecture platform. We're taking the traditional quality services of System z and extending those capabilities to provide better data center integration and data center management.”

Given that HP and IBM are pursuing hybrid packaging then, as with vehicles, there’s growing evidence to suggest that reliance on just a “one-platform architecture” may suggest the demise of homogeneous systems is imminent.

At least, at the heart of our data centers!

Even though, for most data center managers, these hybrids present as many challenges as they offer less-expensive alternatives. And the only question for many CIOs is what application will run on which architecture?

For the NonStop community this is particularly true as the flexibility NonStop provides, from online transaction processing (OLTP) to operational data stores (ODS), to enterprise warehouses (EDW); when it comes to hybrid platforms, then again, the combinations are almost limitless!

Within some industry verticals, the picture is a lot clearer. When it comes to financial services, for instance, there would be very few CIOs who would consider running a payments platform switching software on anything but NonStop?

The availability of less-expensive architectures within the platform to run less critical services, such as an account balance inquiry, will more than offset the presence of NonStop supporting account access authorization requests.

As with Hybrid cars I suspect it will come down to how valuable CIOs perceive the NonStop to be. You want NonStop? I will give you NonStop, and much more, seems to be a likely scenario that plays out across many organizations where availability remains strategically important.

As good as an IBM mainframe has become of late, it’s still not continuously available in the sense of a NonStop – have you listened to an IBM DB2 database administrator of late? Old-school computing? Definitely! And as much as they pressure corporations to consider their multi-architecture platform, without NonStop, it really is just another pretty dreadful looking box.

If you truly recognize where the industry is headed, and the packaging of what used to be everything in the data center within a single platform, as is becoming the fashion, then be very careful where you assign the various workloads. Pay particular attention to how your vendors carve-up the transaction processing and data base access assignments and what these vendors may value in terms of trade-offs.

After all, when it comes to Hybrid computer systems and the multi-architecture platforms they embrace, we have to be every bit as careful as we would be when it comes time to choose a vehicle. Perhaps even more so, as there’s some pretty dreadful packages becoming available and it will not be as easy to trade-up once these models have left the showroom floor!

About that data ...

2011-01-28T06:43:00.000-08:00

NonStop servers and Mercedes Benz cars have something in common, and it’s not always visible. No, it has nothing to do with pricing! NonStop is heading towards being a pure software play and it’s all about the “stack” …

Last weekend, driving west along California’s highway 101 I passed the local Mercedes Benz dealership, and a quick glance at their showroom had me heading for the exit immediately. A quick U-turn and I was in their parking lot.

The picture above captures the sight – a new Mercedes SLS “Gullwing” sports car! Alongside the SLS, a car I hadn’t seen while driving on the highway, was a Mercedes SLR “McLaren”! Both cars obvious works of art, but beneath the metal and carbon fiber skin a full complement of race-bred technology. The picture above captures the two cars, side by side, with their distinctive doors fully extended.

For years, I have viewed this marque as the benchmark when it comes to quality engineering in an enjoyable, reliable package. It was in the early ‘80s that, while I was living in Sydney, my neighbor gave me the keys to his SL350 for the day, and with the coupe’s retractable rag-top pulled back I had a blast cruising the local beachfront streets. I even used it to make a business call at a data processing service bureau I had just landed as a client.

I have never owned a Mercedes Benz, having always preferred the cars produced by their competitor in Munich, but I always valued the information that came from driving their cars. Through the years the list of features has grown enormous as has the power they have been able to generate from their engines and yet, as a benchmark, I am no longer as sure as I once was that the benefits of owning a Mercedes Benz is worth the price they charge.

It’s been hard to escape the many stories circulating of how, in the March timeframe, there will be major announcements by Leo Apotheker, HP’s newly-appointed CEO, on everything from the make-up of the board, his executive team, the products, as well as a new strategy for the company. While there has been considerable speculation on what will be addressed, we have already seen some of the details as the changes in the makeup of the board of directors became public.

When it comes to strategy and to technology and products, for many within the NonStop community, it’s as if the news being leaked has been telegraphed for some time. With the push to commodity hardware almost complete, and where very little of the hardware package that makes up today’s blades required to run NonStop is unique, it will surprise none of us should the hardware package become ubiquitous. After all, it is the full stack that is NonStop where the magic has always existed.

Along these lines, in the feature “NonStop, A Running Commentary” just published in the January 2011 issue of the Tandemworld.Net e/Newsletter, I even went so far as to suggest that, with the way the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) R&D has handled the adjustments that had to happen with the switch of chip vendors to Intel, I have to believe NonStop could run on a pair of sardine tins, if there were any processors inside whatsoever!

Nostalgia? It’s not the hardware anymore that differentiates today’s NonStop, so let’s not get hung up on this issue, I suggested!

For the many of us relying on NonStop servers to anchor support for mission critical applications we have been aware that NonStop is about a lot more than just the hardware, and even more than just the operating system. If it had been just about the operating system, then the history of NonStop would be long over, and the 35th anniversary the stuff of imagination. Perhaps outlasting some of the better-known operating systems of the late ‘80s, all the same, but eventually losing relevance in the face of power house operating systems such as Unix and Windows.

Just as I have considered the Mercedes Benz as the benchmark for quality engineering in an enjoyable, reliable package, so it is that I view the complete stack on NonStop as the benchmark for continuous, perhaps even permanent, availability. From the transactional TS/MP (Pathway) layer of the stack on up through the Transaction Management Facility (TMF), the NonStop SQL/MX data base and even the Remote Database Facility (RDF), these layers when exploited in combination, ensure modern applications can be deployed in circumstances where downtime for any reason simply is not an option.

In the December 2010 issue of Database Trends and Applications, with its theme of “Big Data, Big Issues” in an article entitled “In Search of the Elastic Database” the author writes about the Relational Database (RDBMS) as the data management layer underpinning every popular database implementation in use for the past two decades. However, in addressing this topic, the author raises a number of concerns, among them, the ability to handle really large volumes of data.

“Unfortunately, unlike most other elements in the application stack, relational databases scale out very poorly. With a few exceptions, it’s not possible to simply cluster your database and add nodes to the cluster as workload increases. Relational databases work best when all the data is managed by a single node.” The author then observes how “shared disk clustered databases such as Oracle’s Real Application Servers (RAC) can increase or decrease cluster members faster, but have an unattractive licensing model.”

Continuing with his observations on Oracle RAC, and looking ahead to possible requirements of cloud computing, the author then remarks on how they “are generally not deployed with very large node counts, and do not solve all the issues involved with scaling I/O rates and data storage. So, purveyors of cloud-based computing infrastructures also need an elastic database.”

NonStop systems aren’t just about the hardware. They aren’t even about the operating system, or about the database management system. NonStop systems are about the collection of layers that in combination make a complete stack that leverages it all, enabling a single node to take on enormous proportions, and for the database to scale well beyond competitive implementations whose origins were in systems that maxed-out with just a few processors.

NS SQL/MX as a database system shows up on very few industry analysts radars. The list of features may even appear less than ideal when lined up against the major vendors’ offerings. However, as part of the complete stack that is NonStop, its ability to be as “elastic” as we need surpasses anything on offer today and continues to be among the best-kept secrets that today is NonStop.

As we head towards March when more information about HP’s strategy is unveiled, it’s no secret how much of the focus of this strategy will center on HP’s transition to a software, services, and integration. Building commodity boxes HP can do blindfolded but that’s not where it’s future lies.

Taking these commodity boxes, building integrated systems on top of them, and offering complete stacks to Java and .Net developers alike, is where HP hopes to excel and build a more profitable and sustainable business. That’s where the value for the user community will lie and with NonStop as part of this strategy, there will be renewed focus on the capabilities of NS SQL/MX much to the delight of a much-maligned cadre of supporters!

While my local Mercedes Benz dealer showcased the SLR with its McLaren heritage and the SLS with its (arguably) Dodge Viper influence, the technologies of these vehicles were priced well beyond the reach of most car buyers. However, alongside these two models, was the more affordable and yet in some respects more modern SL 6.3 coupe. Arguably, the value deal!

When it comes to NonStop showcasing an S-Series, or even an earlier Himalaya K-Series, alongside today’s Blade systems, it’s easy to consider them the benchmarks for reliable, continuously available servers.

However, perhaps not as readily recognized in today's modern Blade server running the full NonStop stack is what hides beneath the covers, like the coupes from Mercedes Benz, invisible to the unknowing observer - a multi-layer stack of integrated, “mission critical” bred technology that remains unchallenged after all these years!

Let's show our colors!

2011-01-18T07:44:00.000-08:00

“You are either red, or blue – there’s no beige on the mountain!” As the focus of NonStop turns to software, and the news spreads to the rest of HP, how can we not applaud the stories now coming out of Palo Alto?

I’ve just come back from the car wash. It’s winter in California, and yet the mercury has climbed past 80 degrees. Coming from Boulder where there’s still a lot of snow on the ground, I’m as much in shock as anyone else from these parts. The picture above was taken as I was getting the SUV out of the garage and about to depart for California.

Winter? California? Knocking back a sports drink and looking for shade, the state is finally living up to its moniker!

Perhaps it’s a sign of changing economic conditions as the cars at the car wash are a mixture of bright yellows, reds, and blues, of course! For the past year cars have been a lot less colorful with silver and beige predominating. Nothing is more depressing to a car enthusiast than the lack of color – beige? Good grief!

In an infomercial for the Great Race, at the Mount Panorama circuit in Bathurst Australia, Russell Crowe provided the voice over, and looking at a spectator crowd waving GM and Ford banners Crowe so eloquently summed up the sentiment of all those who had come to watch the spectacle: “you are either red, or blue – there’s no beige on the mountain!” Perhaps there’s no stronger or fiercer competition today than exists between Ford and GM.

In many industries there’s competition between market leaders. As the year closed, EADS, parent of Airbus was highly vocal with its message of marketplace supremacy over Boeing when it totaled up how many aircraft were shipped. As much as many in America decry the use of government subsidies (and a subject I will leave for another time), EADS still managed to roll out more planes from its factories in 2010.

Ford, GM? Boeing, Airbus? And then of course, there’s IBM and HP and where the two technology leviathans continue to compete fiercely for every business deal. The similarities between the struggles Ford has with GM and Boeing has with Airbus can be hard to escape at times.

Boeing has the high-tech 787 about to come to market, while Airbus toys with a competing 350 design. Ford competes with GM on the basis of smaller, fuel efficient cars and yet, GM is about to launch its own technologically advanced hybrid, the Volt.

Likewise, even as IBM continues to report on its growing software and services business, could we see a huge shift in focus at HP to become a more serious threat to IBM in the Software and Services marketplaces? Speculation is rife that sometime in March the new HP CEO, Leo Apotheker, will change HP’s direction in a big way.

According to the latest issue of Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal (Jan 17th, 2011), the article “New HP CEO eyes strategy change”, quoting the Wall Street Journal it reports “the new CEO is eyeing a shift towards the more profitable software, networking and storage businesses. He reportedly plans to downplay the less lucrative personal computer and server businesses.”

There could even be significant executive changes as well, as the stories speculate that Apotheker plans to further flatten the organization and have more direct reports from the executive ranks. And some familiar faces may even be leaving the company!

My early exchanges with clients and HP customers generated little more than a stifled yawn. NonStop users have been hearing a similar message for some time. The commoditization of the hardware is almost complete; sometime between the adoption of Intel’s Poulson and Kittson multi-core chips, I believe that ServerNet will be replaced by InfiniBand (IB) of one flavor or another, as the current ServerNet implementation will be simply overpowered by the demands of these multi-core chips.

With the future hardware building blocks commodity items (and yes, wouldn’t it be great to have NonStop working on x86 blades as well, just to round out the options, of course), and perhaps a variety of NonStop servers running a choice of chips, even from inventory a couple of years old, the transition of the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) to a strictly software play would be complete.

I’m speculating, of course, as I have no inside scoop here, but the need to build specialized hardware just to retain the NonStop (or Tandem Computers) label is long gone. Hardware needed to be tweaked when it wasn’t reliable and NonStop has performed marvelously at hiding the frailty of hardware for decades.

However, today it’s almost as if we have come full circle. The NonStop “stack”, the “Guardian” of yesterday, makes sure we can keep running even if a processor fails, whether it’s the whole board, a chip, or a core (or even sardine cans if they have a processor).

It was the late, great, racing driver Mark Donohue's who wrote the book The Unfair Advantage where he “detailed, step by step, (a) record of the engineering approach he took to getting the absolute highest performance from every car he drove, always looking for that elusive ‘unfair advantage’”. For most of us associated with NonStop, the tasks performed by the NonStop Kernel (NSK), holding the “unfair advantage” strikes a very familiar chord.

But wait, there’s even more! When it comes to holding an unfair advantage, I have become more aware that a fundamental of NonStop so overlooked these days is the simplicity with which NonStop supports clusters – and clusters of enormous size.

Whether it’s deployments at Telcos, governments, or the media single-image systems, more than 100 processors is not an uncommon sight. Talking with managers deploying 100, 200 and often many more, Intel servers presents challenges, they say, often left partially ignored or at the mercy of replication and partitioning software.

In other words, the data base can often end up looking like a badly ironed quilt – horribly patched together with too many duplicate squares of the same color!

However, here’s where the speculation comes to a halt. In truth, not much of what I have described above should be a shock to any user or vendor watching NED unveil product roadmaps over the past eighteen months. Perhaps the only news that may raise an eyebrow or two is that while the hardware is headed to rock-bottom, commodity prices, the software is not. Its providing way too much value to be given away.

In the months ahead the challenge will really be for solutions and middleware / utility vendors to realign their pricing to accommodate what’s ahead. While the granularity may not be too fine, I am sure we will see systems that include mixes of single-core chips, dual-core chips, and beyond, all housed in the same blade chassis and short of returning to transaction-based pricing of the past, smarter software will need to be provided and I am hopeful we will see a degree of unprecedented cooperation between NED and the vendor community to define a reasonable yardstick.

Russell Crowe was passionate when he observed the allegiances of car supporters, perhaps still gladiatorial in his assessment that “you are either red, or blue – there’s no beige on the mountain!” Over the years, we have heard variations of this, perhaps nothing more complicated than the issue being as obvious as black or white. But beige? That’s about indifference, of not taking sides!

HP will match IBM in terms of revenue creation and the focus on software is not something HP will fail to deliver. There will be a couple of super acquisitions, I am sure, to follow in the months ahead. But in the transition to a pure Software play, NonStop will sow the seeds of longevity that otherwise may have eluded the technology.

For me, it’s good to see colors other than blue and perhaps, after 35 years, it’s time to drag out the red flags, chevron and all, and begin waiving like crazy! See you on the mountain …

Product Roadmaps! Still required?

2011-01-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

Its winter and a time for staying indoors; for frequent visits to the trusty wine cellar, and to just kick back and enjoy the brief time off! But even though the mind may numb from the cold, it’s not hard to miss the subtle changes occurring with NonStop!

Working in Boulder across the holiday season has given me time to check out the cellar to just make sure wines I have treasured for so many years are even drinkable. The basis of my concerns centered on a number of really good red wines from Australia that were bottled in 1996 – one of the much better years for wine coming out of Australia. And the picture above is of four such wines pulled from the cellar and opened over the days following the New Year.

Readers may recall in the post of August 29th, 2010 “NonStop? Spreading the word ...” of how it was only a couple of years earlier that I had made the terrible mistake of selecting the inexpensive wine after I said to my wife that I am off to get a special treat and of how, for the rest of the holiday week, I had opened some of the best wine I could find in the cellar so as not to be subject to any more wrath over my prior lackadaisical efforts.

Pleased to report, this time around, my efforts met with much greater appreciation and the picture above is of four of the wines I selected.

It’s been a couple of cold weeks spent in Boulder – temperatures frequently in the low teens. Looking out onto the landscape with nightfall approaching, the thermometer only managed to climb up to 14 degrees. And that’s a Fahrenheit reading! So much of the time has been spent indoors, reading, catching a few headlines, and just generally trying to stay on top of things. My clients are gradually making it back into their offices and so I am not anticipating I will be enjoying this luxury for very much longer.

In the lead up to the holiday season I worked on a feature story for the next issue of The Connection. Selecting the topic, Manageability, gave me the opportunity to once again revisit former good times working at Tandem Computers. Many of the friends I had at those times are now actively engaged in their own businesses and the fact that many of them have struck deals with HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) speaks volumes about how well they have addressed the needs of the NonStop community.

After all, the highly visible aspect of the NonStop server’s minimal demands on oversight personal continue to allow it to enjoy a significant cost of ownership discount, much envied by other platforms.

None of this could have happened, mind you, without NED product management assembling roadmaps identifying user requirements that gives them the requisite “feature boxes” with which to approach vendors in the manageability marketplace. Not that that’s their sole purpose, as none of us can deny how popular roadmap presentations prove to be at any user event supported by HP NED!

They continue to be the only opportunity we have to get the inside scoop on where products are headed.

Or may be headed, at least! It often comes across a little idealistic and with fingers crossed, but for the most part, the years have proved kind to those who have worked on roadmaps within HP NED. Tracking the Intel roadmap, for instance, has certainly clarified where the hardware is headed.

No NonStop customer who recalls the prices for former Tandem Computers VLX and Cyclone systems will begrudge the enormous price performance gains achievable with today’s modern NonStop platforms.

Perhaps it’s the cold, or perhaps it’s just the general trappings of winter that I have to accommodate at this time of year. I’m reluctant to leave the house and I am avoiding running errands of any sort unless it’s absolutely necessary. With snow laying everywhere and the thermometer continuing to fall, I am beginning to wonder whether worrying about what’s coming in three years’ time is really worth the effort!

Roadmaps are never set in concrete and as those in the NonStop community, with many years of experience behind them, know all too well, rarely prove infallible. So much can change, and so quickly. As I have observed in other posts, who could have guessed how successful the iPhone would have become, let alone the iPad! Mobility has now having the biggest impact on all vendors’ roadmaps, and these devices weren’t even around a short time ago.

For those of us in America, it’s been hard to escape the hoopla surrounding this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It’s perhaps the worst kept secret that shortly, Verizon will begin to sell Apple’s iPhone. Indeed, as you read this post, it may have already happen.

Verizon isn’t just getting attention because of the iPhone – its network is also grabbing the headlines and as it rolls out new consumer gadgets, according to USAToday, they’re also hyping how they now have a “wireless network that’s faster in many cases than wired broadband.”

That’s sure to influence Verizon’s competitors’ roadmaps. Whether everything that’s forecast will actually materialize remains questionable as product development never takes place in a vacuum, nor does the market ever prove to be an ideal world.

Perhaps it’s then no coincidence that there is greater vendor participation in addressing requirements identified by HP NED’s roadmaps. And perhaps we are getting a glimpse into the future – as we wonder whether traditional approaches to building roadmaps can continue, in light of the so many variables and unknowns present today, projecting what is to come next needs to see timeframes reduced, thus engaging others from within the NonStop community.

In an earlier exchange with Shaun Clowes, who heads product management for NonStop at Integrated Research (IR) he suggested that “perhaps what we really need are product radars where we plot potential new features etc. based on importance (closer to center being highest), product area (quadrants) and estimate the size of the outcome based on the size of the blip!”

Explaining this concept a little further, Clowes added “this would allow us to have open and honest discussions with customers about what we're thinking and collaborate to understand what is on their radar and why.” Maybe we could all benefit from an approach like this? Now, that could be refreshing …

So how did the four red wines from 1996 fair? There was a Lindemans Padthaway Cabernet Merlot that scored a mixed review – I didn’t care for it. From nearby vineyards of Stanley Brothers came a Shiraz we put aside for cooking. The Wynns Coonawarra Estate Cabernet Sauvignon proved rather good, while Cyril Henchke’s Eden Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc blend proved outstanding, clearly the better for aging.

Unfortunately, the random choices we picked from 2006 seemed to stand up just as well. I am pleased I hung onto the older vintages but I’m also pleased that I didn’t leave their consumption for another year!

Pursuing the creation of roadmaps even as everything heads towards commoditization can’t be discounted nor can it be deemed irrelevant. That’s simply too harsh. But opening them up to greater vendor engagement and developing approaches that more aggressively court user participation, are actions, I believe, that will quickly overshadow what was done in the past.

It may be cold outside, and perhaps that numbs the mind. But I think the NonStop we see emerging later in the year, perhaps early next year, will be augmented with charts and timelines that have less to do with what may happen next, than with milestones for NonStop created packages of vendor produced products and solutions.

We may even see the emergence of NED, the wholesales / distributer; responsible for little more than stacking the shelves with “named” selections for every aisle that once was nothing more than a feature box on a roadmap!

The numbers are adding up!

2010-12-31T06:44:00.000-08:00

iPads made an impact this holiday season as sales topped all expectations. And I am now a proud owner as well. Will this fuel creative minds to come up with more new ideas? Will NonStop share in the success?

Walking back into my Boulder home this week I was truly appreciative of how fortunate I was to live in Colorado. With an uninterrupted view of Colorado’s front ranges as well as the Continental Divide, with the snow covered 14,000’ Long’s Peak clearly visible beneath a few high clouds, it’s proving quite a spectacle!

Readers of the comForte Lounge blog may have caught the most recent post It’s now in our hands! where I wrote of how I came into possession of an iPad over Christmas, and how pleased I am to become completely untethered, free to check magazines, newspapers, and even blogs no matter where my travels take me. The picture above is of me seated in my kitchen nook, checking the cricket scores, of course!

I’m not the only one in the family, however, with an iPad. Before I received my very own, our daughter Anna, very active in teaching technology, was given an iPad. In a recent post to her blog iTeach with iPad she wrote of how “as iPads gain in popularity, those in education are looking at ways that the iPad may improve teaching and learning in the classroom (and) I was given an iPad to test out!”

Unfortunately, she’s far from being as impressed with the iPad as I have become, and for good reasons. “It seems that there are not many good tools when it comes to teacher productivity. There are lots of educational apps that would be great for kids to use if each child had an iPad at his/her disposal, but virtually none that are helpful when there's only one iPad in the room.”

But it’s still early days and I suspect the iPad, is going to play an increasingly relevant role in business and the pool of applications available to tablet users will grow exponentially in the coming years. If the pundits prove correct, in time Anna may just see every kid with an iPad anyway!

In its last media prognostication contest USATODAY journalist, David Lieberman, did go so far as to suggest when it comes to which company will be selling the most netbooks in late 2010 – Apple? Dell? Google? HP? Intel? Someone else? responded with “the spirit of the question has to do with hot products, and one of the big stories of 2010 is how the iPad has reshaped the way we look at portable computers. So we’re going with Apple here (as it) dominates the mobile market …”

Social media will change, too, that’s for sure. While it’s not news to iPhone users to see an application, or App, for Twitter, Facebook, even LinkedIn available for their smart devices, embracing the iPad will see even more involvement.

To many industry observers it seems possible that sites like Facebook, with the support they provide for business pages in addition to wall space, may easily replace the need for a web site. Today’s up and coming business leaders will tend to look to Facebook for info, as readers of my generation checked out a web site!

This is not surprising as already I am accessing more and more sites directly from the Apps provided on my new IPad than from interacting directly with a browser. Perhaps what we are seeing from our young leaders should not be ignored.

Some of the numbers are amazing, almost overwhelming, but worth quoting in case you missed them. In naming Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, it was reported that Facebook added its 550 millionth member. Time then added “one out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account … (and) lavish 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month.”

More impressive yet, Time then reports on how “last month, the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day.” Finally, and to pull it all into perspective, “in less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India.”

Facing criticism over its detours into green-tech investments, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins was under growing pressure to return to what it does best – picking winners when it comes to internet start-ups! In its regular Valley Talk editorial Fortune columnist, Adam Lashinsky, wrote in December 6, 2010 issue, under the heading of “Kleiner Perkins gets its’ digital grove back on” how “they have stopped drinking the Kool-Aid and are committed to coming back and focusing on making money again.”

This was a reference to what one investor had told the journalist, but then to clarify where the money would be invested, wrote of “the recent announcement of Kleiner’s trendy ‘sFund’ for social media companies at least signals where Kleiner’s heart is these days.”

In the same issue of Fortune that I referenced earlier, Intel ran a full page advertisement that sums up much of what has been covered here. Under the heading “from the mind to the marketplace” Intel promotes how they are “helping university students’ worldwide turn thinking into the business of the future. Because encouraging new ideas fuels innovation!”

Put aside for one moment the smart phones, tablets, and netbooks and whether one company or another will dominate their respective markets. Ignore also the explosive growth in popularity of social networks and the content being provided on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Be even less concerned about something as trivial as our kids’ texting each other pushing cloud computing to the forefront of technology discussions.

What’s more important than the simplicity, and ease of use, of these devices, and all the services being provided, is that there will be a generation of highly creative individuals empowered at a much earlier age than ever before. Their creativity will fuel the new ideas that drive the innovation that we so often talk about and struggle to embrace in our daily business lives.

When these new ideas translate to solutions and come to market, however, many of them will push into mission-critical markets where the attributes so highly valued by corporate IT managers and familiar to all where NonStop is deployed, will once again percolate to the top!

I really like my iPad and I have started to take it with me everywhere I go. It, and similar devices, will become the tools supporting many networks of creative folks. The information being captured and marshaled and then in turn, becoming the foundation for yet even more new ideas, lends itself for a new role for NonStop servers.

What we have taken for granted for so long with NonStop, and continues to create angst among those of us aware of opportunities even as we see so many oblivious of its potential should be fuelling an even more aggressive outreach on our parts. Free and untethered as so many of us have become, with little tolerance for outages of any kind, it seems to be ready-made for NonStop servers.

Perhaps it is already being pursued and perhaps there’s creative folks already tinkering with some new ideas. I am very encouraged by our daughter’s School District passing several iPads to the technology teachers to encourage creativity in the classroom. She certainly will put time into this research project, and you may want to follow her blog, Techie Teacher, to track the progress she makes.

And perhaps the message of NonStop will not be lost on this new community. Clearly, I have more work to do on this subject and as the weather over the Rockies worsens, I will just check out my iPad a little bit longer …

Still making notes on coasters?

2010-12-21T10:24:00.000-08:00

There’s many who see the role of social media as a distraction and a nuisance at times, while there are those who believe it will spur innovation. Should we be moving more aggressively to support innovation?

Perhaps the highlight of the year for me was the time spent on the Nurburgring circuit, late in September. This circuit used to be the venue for the German Grand Prix and having the opportunity to complete a number of uneventful, and relatively slow, laps driving on Germany’s Grüne Hölle, the world-famous Nordschleife, or North Loop, of the Nürburgring, fulfilled a childhood dream when I imagined I was running wheel to wheel with historic figures from a bygone era as we raced around this highly challenging and extremely dangerous track.

For those who may have read the post “Respect the ‘Ring” I made to my social blog, buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com, the track was wet on arrival. There had been heavy rain overnight that had continued into the morning hours and as we drove to the track, we passed a number of flat-bed tow trucks leaving the track with wrecked cars on board. But with the coming of winter the Eifel forest, where the circuit is located, is often blanketed in snow and the picture above was sent to me by Thomas, one of the instructors from RSRacing who had tutored me in September.

Sitting at coffee shop the other day and paging through my Blackberry, I saw that it was snowing in Nurburg and I knew Thomas had read previous posts to my social blog and had connected with me on LinkedIn (LI) so he was likely to respond to my request for a photo but all the same, collaborating with Thomas to get the photos I wanted and in the timeframe that I needed, was pretty impressive. The picture above is of “hatzenbach” an early sequence of turns within sight of the South Loop and the grandstands that are a part of what today is the venue for the modern-era Formula One races.

Social media channels, and the ease the information can be shared globally, lets us maintain dialogues with friends and acquaintances with nary a concern about where they are or what they may be doing. Whenever we have questions, or need information, there are always those willing to step in to help us.

A good friend of mine, and a colleague from my days at Insession, began an email to me recently with the somewhat traditional “how are you,” only to correct himself and adding, “of course I know how you are, as does everyone else!” A reference to how regularly I update my LI profile as well as post to my Facebook (FB) wall and tweet! However, it’s not just sites like LI and FB that have the corner on collaboration!

From the first time I was exposed to the virtual community Second Life (SL) and created an avatar, I thought that global participation within a virtual community would be a boon to business. I had a lot of fun flying from island to island, checking out the construction that was under way. Landing on an island where Pontiac had a sales presence I even took advantage of the opportunity to test drive a Solstice only to drive it into a lake.

I dropped in on islands that IBM had bought where they were building digital representations of their labs, holding virtual meetings and, for a short time, there wasn’t a major IBM marketing event where you would escape an update on how IBM was benefiting from its exploitation of SL. While IBM is less vocal about its SL pursuits, it has licensed the technology and is hosting it behind IBM’s firewall.

Perhaps not immediately associated with traditional social media channels, it’s possibly more indicative of what’s to come than many of the more popular sites we readily access today. SL combines visual cues with exchanges we may otherwise overlook – and having cues that reinforce information only accelerates further collaboration.

But will virtual communities eventually overlap, perhaps even merge, with more traditional social media channels – will we stop being “followers” and be more active in our exchanges with others? Will communities such as SL lead to the development of even more communities?

I’m not a “gamer”, and so much of what is now available on SL is of little interest to me nor is it to many within the IT community I talk to. But a future where every social media channel, “traditional” or otherwise, takes us to areas of interest more quickly will be something that only further heightens our interest in collaborating that in turn nurtures the prospect for innovation!

Watching an old episode of CSI, a popular television program, the lead investigator visits a Buddhist temple where threats had been made and where it had been reported one of the monks had promised retribution. Picking up an old sword, the investigator is advised that it’s just an old sword brought over from Thailand and wouldn’t be of interest to which the investigator responded “the past is just the past but it may have the fingerprints of the future!”

So it is with the many forms of social media that we now so readily embrace – whether we treat them seriously or as a nuisance - as a networking environment that easily and readily supports collaboration, they may be very much an indication of what the future will look like! “The growing importance of networking, of mixing it with colleagues and generating ideas – using social media not unlike we used to use beer coasters and dinner napkins,” shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us!

Recently a reader emailed me a link to a review by Fiona Graham, technology of business reporter for the BBC news, of the book “Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation” by Steven Johnson. The quote above come from the author’s introduction, and what followed not only shouldn’t surprise any of us but help us realize where the future is headed.

The review adds a comment from Johnson that really adds substance to my own observations of late, suggesting “(good ideas) come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the ‘eureka’ moment. But in fact … it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems.”

Wrapping up the review, a final quote concludes with “the ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash … but for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."

Spending time in Nurburg and unsure when I would next visit the town, I collected beer coasters as souvenirs. At the time, I thought that they would serve as a reminder of the great time I had, but perhaps I had missed the point. Long after their presence is gone and any association with my outing on the track is lost, there will still be blog postings and updates in various social media channels.

And just as we no longer sketch ideas on coasters but instead use our iPads, it is within the network that our creativity is fed and our ideas fine-tuned. With this change, as noted earlier, it will be the crowds with which we collaborate where future innovation lies. The fingerprints of the future are definitely visible today on all that we have worked on in the past – perhaps I will just keep the coasters to protect my countertops from the celebrations I am sure will follow!

CI-Ready or Not!

2010-12-08T17:32:00.000-08:00

ISV’s are pursuing certification; the credentials obtained will sort out whose embracing modern programming models and frameworks and it’s a good start! But it has HP’s full attention!

This weekend I paid a quick visit to the vineyards near Los Olivos, just outside of Solvang. Deep in “Sideways” territory that includes a number of the vineyards and restaurants featured in that film. Since the weather wasn’t particularly helpful, after tasting a flight of wines at Fess Parker winery, we selected a bottle of Syrah and enjoyed it with a little cheese we had brought with us.

The photo above is of me in the midst of reminiscing on the film and devouring the cheese that included a very good English Stilton. For those who may not recall the specifics of Sideways, two aging former college roommates that had been unsuccessful in their respective careers – one a television actor and the other a writer – elect to just get away from it all and spend the week in the Santa Ynez Valley prior to the television actor’s getting married.

“Heavy week of posts behind me – think I will head for the wineries; about time,” I tweeted early Saturday morning as I added a baguette and a little pâté to the cheese I already had pulled out from the refrigerator. Somehow I recall that’s exactly what the characters in the movie did at one point and you can’t really blame them - it was difficult to miss their passion for wine!

This all leads into the exchanges I have had earlier this week, all triggered from commentaries I provided in earlier posts to this blog, as well as to a short post provided to the new comForte Lounge blog. Both of these posts were influenced by the recent article in The Connection, “NonStop ISVs can now earn ‘Converged Infrastructure Ready’ Insignia”, where author Sundaresh Krishnan (Sundar) provided a quick snapshot of what the program entails and why the community should pay attention to it.

In short, as HP was designing the Converged Infrastructure Ready, or CI-Ready, program it was the NonStop participants within HP who selected the tenets of CI-Ready applicable to NonStop – common modular infrastructure, common management, standards based software and came up with the criteria to determine whether an application or critical infrastructure software were CI-Ready.

In my November 9, 2010 post “Papers? Papers, please!” to this blog, I described how at this year’s NonStop Symposium HP NonStop management mused that “customers have upgraded their hardware, but their applications have not evolved.” How could we expect to see anything different? Wasn’t it up to the ISV community to embrace modern programming practices?

In fact, should an ISV develop solutions around modern tools, how could we be assured that these solutions would be compatible with the new tools being introduced by HP for NonStop? CI-Ready would provide these credentials, according to HP, and help assure IT that such a product satisfied the key criteria. ISVs would also benefit from the internal HP programs, as those with the CI-Ready credentials would gain increased mindshare with HP at large!

The Fess Parker winery is steeped in history and was one of the few wineries not to be featured in the movie Sideways. The winery’s founder, Fess Parker, was the actor hired by Walt Disney to play the role of Davy Crockett. The motif on the wine glasses of Fess Parker winery is the coonskin cap made popular by Parker’s character. On the walls around the tasting table are memorabilia from the Parker’s time with the Disney Corporation.

And yet the winery’s mission is among the simplest I’ve ever seen, admitting only to wanting “to grow the finest wine grapes on earth.” Somehow, I could hear in this admonition some of the same phrases from the NonStop Symposium of how NonStop is not a Tandem and how “the difference is real and significant, but the fundamentals are the same.” The platform of today is modern, open, standards based, deployed on commodity hardware without price premiums long associated with Tandem’s of the past.

The need to upgrade to modern applications was not just recognition that running yesterday’s software on today’s modern hardware wasn’t going to yield the ROI you would expect, and it was a huge dose of reality. Fresh from college, computer science graduates were coming well-equipped to work with development platforms capable of producing the types of solutions companies needed to compete and yet, there was nothing in the way that prevented the solutions created from running on NonStop.

But which tools? Which frameworks and runtime environments? And which ISV products provided options that didn’t simply compound the problem, as after all, the intent was to produce the finest applications on earth! “Modernization leads to business advantages,” Sundar suggested in a recent email exchange, adding “as the converged infrastructure strategy gains even more momentum this year, CI-Ready certification will be a key differentiator for partners.”

In the short post of December 3, 2010 “Call this art?” to the blog, comForte Lounge, I referenced a recent article of Marty Edelman where he rightly described modernization as “a journey of many steps,” and where he notes how “no one coming out of college has ever heard of (Tandem’s tools)!” What the intent of CI-Ready is to make the platform running the finest applications on earth completely transparent to those who develop them.

There’s now many managers who tell me that new hires fresh out of college have no idea at first that they are deploying their code on a NonStop server and when they do, they become quite passionate about it, marveling at all the steps they don’t have to take to ensure their applications will scale and remain available – all steps that required considerable programming discipline and called on techniques many found difficult to embrace.

There will be a period of overlap where more seasoned IT staff continue to maintain existing applications, even as they come up to speed on more modern languages like Java, all the while the college graduates, the new kids if you like, turn out new applications using the modern environments they were exposed to as part of their education.

This still doesn’t detract from the central topic. What about new applications being acquired – how can companies really tell if they won’t compound the problem and simply add to the complexity? After all, many IT departments have failed after bringing in the latest “Gucci Development Environment” only to realize what once was consider fashionable and trendy lost steam, as newer more modern technologies arrived!

“Converged Infrastructure (CI) is THE strategy at HP. It has resonated really well with the customers for the past year or so, and various business units within HP are strongly aligned to this,” Sundar continued in his latest email to me.

And in pursuing this strategy, HP has to be lauded for kicking off a program as ambitious as CI-Ready, as they could have as easily stood aside; the results may be questioned and some of the ISVs will be unsure of the true value. However, only a few weeks into the program such heavyweights as Integrated Research, ElectraCard Services, comForte, and even GE Healthcare with Centricity Enterprise have gained CI-Ready credentials so I can only assume in time, the majority of ISVs we all work with will pull out all the stops and follow suite.

“To grow the finest wine grapes on earth,” and then, to produce the finest applications on earth! There is a synergy between producing wine and applications – and I’m sure there will be many who want to help me out on this point. Bring a good English Stilton, of course!

Nothing seems to last ...

2010-11-30T18:30:00.000-08:00

It was only a few weeks ago when we took our car to the track, for the last time this year. And it was a wet weekend, raining so hard on Saturday that all events were cancelled. It was still a gamble as Sunday morning rolled around as the rain continued to come down, but intrepid drivers were not prepared to give up on the entire weekend.

The picture here is of the Corvette on grid, rain easing up just a little, but with me a tad anxious all the same. The season had started with a wet weekend and so it seemed appropriate to end on a similar note.

Ending the year at the fabulous (for Corvettes) and very wet Auto Club Speedway, a combination of an infield road course with the wide open banked oval of the NASCAR circuit (and hence the label “roval”) seemed appropriate, if not a little depressing.

When there’s water on a track however, all drivers take to the circuit with a measured sense of self preservation. No matter the kind of car on track, there’s not a driver who wants to return to pit lane with a car that’s badly bent out of shape!

Wet weather driving does encourage experimentation and a little innovation – very quickly the racing line becomes visible as the only dry section on the circuit. However, it may not be the best place to drive and early laps see drivers checking out alternate lines around the circuit and experimenting with braking zones and turn-in points. There was even a brief period where we had a dry, extremely clean, track and although it didn’t last long, I managed to eke out a couple of good laps.

In the latest issue of Time magazine that I picked up a few days ago, Richard Stengel, the magazine’s Managing Editor, wrote in his column “in our networked world, nothing ever goes away, but nothing seems to last very long either.” Certainly, applicable to the weather I faced this weekend.

Stengel then goes on to suggest “information these days is a commodity; understanding is scarce.” All of us trackside could see that it was wet but it was only a handful of wily drivers who recognized where to drive to avoid mishaps. And it can be said that all of us can get our hands on reams of publications about HP and about NonStop, but do we truly understand where NonStop is headed?

The Tandem architecture is now 35 years old and most of us have warm memories from the great times we enjoyed during the early days. Yet, to paraphrase Stengel, particularly of late as NonStop rides the Intel “curve,” nothing seems to last very long and yet, nothing ever goes away!

It was over two years ago when I posted “‘My Wish’ for NS Blades” to this blog and developed a Powerpoint slide-show around its core messages that I presented at numerous NonStop user community events. As a writer ever-willing to provide opinions, it’s a sobering thought to return to forecasts made this long ago, but before providing any further predictions, it’s none the less an important first step to take. After all, how accurate were these prior predictions?

In that post of February 12th, 2008 I suggested that my wish list was comprised of just three items - HP delivers in its message of Shared Infrastructure blades, HP commits to virtualization and provides a Hypervisor that supports NonStop as a guest operating system, and that HP acknowledges that it will also need to support middleware that interrogates incoming transactions, directing mission critical transactions to NonStop, important informational but not quite mission-critical to a Unix or Linux, and voluminous inquiries to Windows.

The first item was a request of HP BCS to deliver on the promise made in the slideware Martin Fink first unveiled as the “Shared Infrastructure Blades” package. This is where any mix of NonStop, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows Server OS’s will be supported. Shortly afterwards, the wraps came off a blades chassis populated with a mix of NonStop and Linux blades, and participants at the HPTF event that year could see demonstrations of mixed workloads running on this system hybrid.

Looked good and attracted the attention of a number of vendors but NonStop customers were a little uncertain as to what to make of it and gave little feedback to HP, and so we have not heard much more about this first attempt at hybrid.

But followers of the IBM mainframe can now point to the latest mainframe offering where zOS and Linux (with other OS images to follow, it is believed) sharing a common system bus with almost zero latency between intersystem calls! With all the talk of hybrid clusters and cloud computing, industry standard chassis populated with commodity blades running any combination of OS images is a goal being pursued by many vendors.

As for virtualization and a hypervisor, like one from VMWare, is not something I’m as aggressively proposing. It’s a bit like trying to determine what tires you need to run on a wet track – and be careful what you ask for! As so many in the community highlighted for me, there would be a cost to the level of availability offered and NonStop would lose all visibility to the underlying hardware – something very akin to the dicey situation that can develop when on a wet track with the wrong tires.

However, even as I admitted at the time of how I was going out on a limb with my last wish suggesting that with the mixed OS hybrids there would be a need for middleware products that supported real time interrogation of the incoming transactions and would direct mission critical transactions to NonStop, important informational but not quite mission-critical to a Unix or Linux, and voluminous inquiries to Windows?

Even as I see the hybrid model of my first wish building up a head of steam, this third wish – a kind of mutant mixed workload measurement and management system – remains a valid concern. Looking back, I continue to stick with two out of my three wishes which, in some small way, isn’t all that bad of a result.

Watching the sports headlines this week, TCU university, like so many other American collages of late, is switching from one conference association to another. Electing to participate with other collages with greater potential to play in major tournaments, TCU was leaving behind a program that had seen it join the elite of American football teams.

However, as well as it performed on the playing field, it was still having a tough time getting the attention of the tournament organizers and was being overlooked as potentially, the best football program in the country. "If you don't dream, you're living in a memory," Del Conte, TCU’s athletic director, said. Conte than proposed "who wants to live in a memory? Every single time we have an opportunity to think about where we're going to go (we) dare to be great academically and athletically!”

And nothing could be closer to the truth when it comes to looking at frequently overlooked NonStop – yes, memories of 35 years of Tandem architecture remain with us to this day but for me, it’s all about the future. Readers may have missed some commentary I provided in NonStop – A Running Commentary in the October issue of the eNewsletter, Tandemworld.Net and the slight variation I made on my earlier forecasts.

Gone is the pursuit of a hypervisor capable of supporting NonStop, and the availability of hybrid clusters in a box is now something I sense solutions providers will be the parties first to embrace and utilize in more creative fashion. And along with the hybrids, the need for hybrid workload management hasn’t lessened in the least, and so that remains a consideration.

New are the observations of a NonStop server becoming a smart controller! And of whether NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) will develop any of this at all, becoming a clearing house, or distribution point, for an arbitrary collection of third party infrastructure and middleware!

Will product roadmaps become nothing more than templates provided as guides and reference points to an ecosystem of ISVs investing their own nickels and dimes to populate?

My previous predictions first posted in early 2008 are all but memories for most of my readers but tallying up the scorecard and getting a two thirds pass rate I will take any time. All that I need now is one of these last two observations to prove to be correct to retain that two thirds pass rate.

Having said that, these latest projected events could prove to be extremely controversial among some users and trigger many more questions in the months ahead. On the other hand, and to paraphrase TCU’s Conte, too long with nothing but memories and it’s hard to start dreaming! And we would all be the poorer if no one dreams of future NonStop deployments!