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When it’s an Indy racing car driver that expresses so succinctly the value proposition that comes with embracing standardization and commoditization, the message for the NonStop community is hard to miss and forward-thinking vendors are responding ... For several years, well, decades really, we have been collecting wines that were sold in magnums – essentially a double helping of your favorite wine in a really big bottle. There’s a couple of Penfolds, several Silver Oaks, Duckhorns, a Joseph Phelps and even a ’93 Bordeaux from a famous vineyard picked up cheaply at Heathrow airport when the US dollar was a lot stronger. However, they are mostly Australian reds and when the holidays come around, it’s a great time to pull a cork and see just how well they have developed. As many of the bottles are from the early ‘90s, it’s always a mixed blessing – sure we like the wine but now the cellar looks the poorer with the absence of a really good examples of wines we like, but the respons...

Everyone picked up on Google’s clouds misfortune, but back on July 2, 2012, New York Times reported: “On Friday night, lightning in Virginia took out machines that were part of Amazon Web Services, which hundreds of companies use for data storage and computation. Well-known sites like Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram were not accessible for hours.” On October 22, 2012, GIGAOM reported: “Here we go again. Problems with Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service have brought down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku, and other popular websites. Once again, Amazon’s U.S. East data center in Virginia is ground zero for these issues” Back in 2011 Earnst&Young published a paper “Cloud computing issues and impacts”, as part of their Global Technology Industry Discussion Series. Interesting reading: http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Cloud_computing_issues,_impacts_and_insights/$File/Cloud%20computing%20issues%20and%20impacts_14Apr11.pdf So, unguarded clouds may get us all in troubl...

What has kept NonStop entrenched in our data centers for many years – its unique attributes when it comes to running mission-critical transaction processing – ensures that it will not be overlooked when it comes to building out Big Data frameworks! Having the RV as our “command center” when we travel is giving us new freedoms when it comes to being able to be flexible with our travel plans. Any time we need to head back to the west coast, there’s now few issues preventing us from stopping by good friends at HP and to catch up with former colleagues from our times at Tandem Computers. With the recent move to new facilities, within the HP campus at Palo Alto, we were able to enjoy an unexpected pleasure – visiting for the first time the well-maintained original offices of both Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard, and the photo above was taken of us alongside the desk of Mr. Hewlett. Big occasion and a big highlight! The street and city were one of the first US addresses that I came acro...