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Along the drifting cloud the eagle searching down on the land; Catching the swirling wind … Go closer, hold the land feel partly no more than grains of sand; We stand to lose all time a thousand answers by in our hand …” so go the lyrics from a YES song written decades ago and yet, it foresaw we stood to lose a thousand answers … In a play on a title I used for the final post of 2012, Yes, I get it! closing out 2014 brings with it a lot of anticipation. There will be NonStop community members – users and vendors alike – that have placed orders for NonStop X and more than likely have been testing their applications on NonStop X for some time. The prospect of installing your own NonStop X system is bound to arouse excitement typical for this time of year. For all of us living in the northern hemisphere, the prospect of spring seems a long way off, as winter has us fully in its grip, but spring will come, no matter what, and that’s how I sum up NonStop X. It’s coming, no matter wha...

Yes, it’s only one quarter away from being shipped to customers, and already the NonStop vendor community is very much  on-board  with this latest addition to the NonStop family of products … Kicking back and beginning to take it easy as preparations for the holidays continues unabated, even as our home embraces the festive seasons. The tree is up and decorated; the wine cellar restocked; and the food is in the pantry only needing to be cooked. Preliminary parties are behind us – only the big one to go and it will be over. However, this is also the season to simply take a deep breath and to be thankful we have made it through another year as we all begin planning for 2015. For the NonStop community, it’s going to be a very big year. Pictured above as a half-height blade, NonStop X, featuring a Xeon 4-core E7 processor - the latest product family in a long line of fault tolerant systems coming out of Silicon Valley, is tantalizingly close to reality. Just a couple of mon...

HP grabbed more than its normal share of headlines this past week and it was all good! To see as many references to Superdome and NonStop in the same sentence has set a precedent – on equal footing, attracting equal time in the spotlight, is a harbinger of good days to come! I maintain two distinct office spaces complete with walls, windows and most importantly, doors, so that when it comes time to talk on the phone, I take myself away from my PC. I need to maintain this separation as I am prone to excessive multitasking, so much so that it becomes a distraction. Just by walking across a corridor I am in a new, considerably less stimulating place than where I spend most of my time. In a business environment dominated by the ubiquitous cubicle, one side effect from having a separate business work space in the home is that I have a real office where my daily routine doesn’t disrupt anyone else! These past couple of weeks, distractions have been on a whole different plane. Readin...

A chance posting to Facebook had me looking at the attributes of NonStop and whether you argue for availability or perhaps scalability, in the end, just having the discussion suggests NonStop is still very much in the game … Versatility! How many times have we heard a sales pitch that highlights the versatility of a product? In many ways, this is an approach to mitigating potential future obsolescence and it extends the product’s useful life.  Flipping through pages about NonStop on the web, I came upon a reminder of days past when NonStop was considered the Swiss Army knife of computing – versatile in its own right. This knife featured in a  First-Friday skit  by Jimmy Treybig that just came to my attention following a post on Facebook by long-time Tandem supporter, Maria Olivero. However, the original fault tolerant message has been replaced with new messages on availability, scalability, data integrity, security, networking, manageability and so on. So what rea...

The strong turn out by the NonStop community for this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp was encouraging even as it was a testament to how strongly the NonStop system is supported by advocates spanning the generations. Could NonStop be viewed as a hobby for some and if so, did this contribute to NonStop thriving for forty years? Many years ago my father asked me if I would be prepared to give up my Saturday afternoons to help out a friend who had just bought a yacht. I have touched on this subject in other posts – to be specific, the post of July 16, 2008, Specialist! Am I still needed? In that post I described how I began my time on a 40’ sailboat having no experience whatsoever, and that, in time and with experience, I became the sole for’ard hand responsible for everything in front of the mast. For a couple of years running, in the early 1970s, we were overall season’s winners in the category we sailed and I came to develop a real love for this “hobby”. What I didn’t write...

Even as many NonStop users need to look to modernize their existing applications there’s a pressing need to include modern platform support on NonStop to attract new applications – and shortly, at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp we will hear more of one project in support of such a mission. Pictured to the right is an architect’s representation of an addition to the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and from what I read this morning it would appear that it is about to open to the public. In an article just published in The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, UTS unveils 'paper bag' building , the future home of the UTS business school certainly isn’t escaping comments –calling it a paper bag, tells its own story. However, for those who have seen some pretty far-out structures in Prague, Vienna and even Barcelona, they can’t help but wonder about the intrusion of highly fluid lines that has worked their way into the form of these buildings. Whether or not they appe...

In the Chris Rea song, Johnny Needs a Fast Car, the lyrics are self-explanatory. “Johnny needs a fast one Johnny needs it now. You got to give him something to let him show you how.”  And just sometimes, we need to give developers something to show us how … Over the past couple of years I have written posts that featured different cars Margo and I have owned at one time or another. However, what has lurked in the back of the garage (and rarely featured in any blog posts) is the car affectionately known within the auto trade as Godzilla – a Nissan GT-R. Left in a parking station it attracts glances only from 20-something individuals who each give it a respectful nod and yet, it’s rare to come across any other vehicle on the road with equivalent capabilities – it just goes fast. While we have essentially tracked all the cars we have owned, Godzilla has not seen the track and for a very good reason. Yes, it’s fast, but we like it far too much to risk damaging it, but ...

A flashback to 1993 and an ITUG event in Orlando gave me the introduction I was looking for with this post about who's talking at the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2014 ... It was a little over 20 years ago – October, 1993, as I recall – that I attended the annual ITUG event in Orlando. I was with a group from development that included Margo Holen and we were showcasing a project we all called Chameleon – featuring “twin tails” connections between PCs, and Tandem computers. Cut one “tail” and the other took over – it was all based on Ethernet and took advantage of custom NICs from Ungermann-Bass (UB). Joining Tandem developers was Michael Ladam from UB. Michael, Brad Poole (now with comForte), Margo and I took a drive to Cape Canaveral and we stopped for gas alongside a tourist shop selling practically everything. To this day we all will not readily forget Michael’s exclamation while perusing western belts, each one featuring a flashy belt buckle, when he found a be...