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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...