It was as if the music played - it was vibrant indeed, and
thinking of the composability along with Converged Infrastructure (CI), as
Martin Fink described the concept at the June 2015 HP Discover in Las Vegas, I
could not pass this guitar without having a picture taken. Vibrancy? HP? Perfect
illustration! We travelled to Dallas, Texas, for the N2TUG, detoured through
Austin, Texas, where the Vibrancy (pictured above) was on display, then it was off
to Las Vegas, Nevada, followed by Southern California. Now as I write this post
we're in Palo Alto, California, for a couple of days.
Hearing a little more from Sean Mansubi about CI and more specifically, about Converged Data Center Infrastructure (CDCI), I was thinking how similar CDCI – at least in concept - is to the NonStop we all know. With its ability to add or remove resources, be these the processors, storage, or networks, visibility to the system in part or in whole by any application is a given. Having the ability to provision it for whatever new requirements arise – absolutely, it’s being able to compose your system. Yeah, just like a NonStop, right? There’s no Pathway as best as I can tell, but even here, I am intrigued now by the potential of OneView.
Hearing a little more from Sean Mansubi about CI and more specifically, about Converged Data Center Infrastructure (CDCI), I was thinking how similar CDCI – at least in concept - is to the NonStop we all know. With its ability to add or remove resources, be these the processors, storage, or networks, visibility to the system in part or in whole by any application is a given. Having the ability to provision it for whatever new requirements arise – absolutely, it’s being able to compose your system. Yeah, just like a NonStop, right? There’s no Pathway as best as I can tell, but even here, I am intrigued now by the potential of OneView.
With OneView it is beginning to look pretty exciting and so is the concept of the “virtual” NonStop. CDCI, at its core, supports the externalization of all resources and via One View has the ability to change everything to better accommodate the needs of the moment
Many current members of the NonStop community may have forgotten Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the volume of trades overwhelmed SIAC and yet, with NonStop in the data center and running the trading application, it was just a case of adding more processors and disks on the fly - and the NonStop OS embraced them transparently. If it wasn’t for the ticker tape not being able to keep up, NonStop would have just kept on processing. Looking at this new composition model that’s central to CDCI shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with NonStop.
I couldn’t help discussing where HP is headed following our
discussions with Sean, and Richard and I had a thought. The requirement, or
question, was how could we hasten the deliverable of having NonStop, via IB,
participate, adjacent to the CDCI systems. The value-add we came up with had to
do with a very key NonStop subsystem; wouldn’t it be nice to be able to wrap
the arms of Pathway around processes on the CDCI systems and give them the same
degree of persistence as you would expect to have from running them on NonStop?
With maRunga being re-messaged around hybrid and hopefully
set up in the ATC – could a demo running a NonStop / IB / CDCI be arranged at
some point, and perhaps even before December’s HP Discover? We can’t see why
not! I keep coming back to maRunga as I
don’t think we have fully exhausted all that it can do when it comes to
heterogeneous system deployments. And I don’t want to sound like a broken
record but fundamentally, when I think of clusters and where there’s more than
one platform involved, extending NonStop attributes to include these other
platforms just seems to make sense.
The proof in the pudding is in the eating of course, so first we need to get the hybrid system set up at ATC and put our paws on the IB APIs as they will become available (we would not go for the raw verbs, of course), then look over at the CDCI systems should they be available. But here’s the bigger question – will NonStop always look the way it does today? Could there even be more than one NonStop solution? Just as important for many within the NonStop community, might NonStop be given a new name, from Tandem to NonStop to something else certainly can be in the cards and new branding just might do the trick of generating interest among the industry analyst community. Goodness knows, we need to get them engaged anyway we can.
The proof in the pudding is in the eating of course, so first we need to get the hybrid system set up at ATC and put our paws on the IB APIs as they will become available (we would not go for the raw verbs, of course), then look over at the CDCI systems should they be available. But here’s the bigger question – will NonStop always look the way it does today? Could there even be more than one NonStop solution? Just as important for many within the NonStop community, might NonStop be given a new name, from Tandem to NonStop to something else certainly can be in the cards and new branding just might do the trick of generating interest among the industry analyst community. Goodness knows, we need to get them engaged anyway we can.
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