Real Time View

With the last post of 2016 we can look back at all the news surrounding NonStop systems and simply acknowledge just how quickly the world of NonStop is changing and yes, changing for the better … Struggling to exit the local shopping mall with packages in both hands, as Margo and I left it almost to the very last day to finish our Christmas shopping, I took the opportunity this gave me to have a good look around at both the shops and their customers. So much has changed since I went back to strolling malls worldwide a decade or so ago – yes, I had lived in Edmonton, Alberta, as plans were being drawn up to build the West Edmonton Mall, pictured above and still the largest mall in North America (sorry, Minneapolis) – but after the birth of my daughter, Lisa, I found a Saturday morning filled with exploration and yes, of course, fresh donuts, an affable escape from normal routines. The popularity of malls has ebbed and flowed through the years. Visitors to Silicon Valley who spent...

It’s in the very DNA of NonStop – you want extreme availability, scalability and yes extreme performance and now SQL? Then you got it! And NonStop could prove extremely beneficial for you … Staring out the back window of our family room what greeted me was a chilled landscape. Overnight the temperatures had dropped some 30 to 40 degrees from the day before. The poolside chairs seemed to be looking on forlornly at a pool and spa no longer serving any purpose. For more than 15 years we have come to expect chilly weather, but this year, with the return of that dreaded Polar Vortex, the overnight lows are having us checking the plumbing each morning to ensure pipes haven’t frozen even as we have raised the thermostats setting. What is depicted above is Boulder, Colorado shivering in -2 degrees, Fahrenheit.   Texting our good friends in southern California brought us little sympathy. Even though they had been out on the coast celebrating a boating festival, when they returned h...

Progress continues to be made on The Machine with the first working prototype unveiled at HPE Discover 2016 (London). Could future NonStop hybrid systems leverage future iterations of The Machine? This week I came across an article in, of all things, Composites Worlds. It was in response to a Google search for technology appearing in manufacturer’s prototypes that eventually is adopted within existing product lines. The article began with, “Already used in series production of structural carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) parts for BMW’s (Munich, Germany) i3 and i8 models, high-pressure resin transfer molding (HP-RTM) is viewed by some as new technology. To others, it is merely modernization of early RTM processes, like that used to build Dodge Viper parts 25 years ago!” In several auto magazines it has already been highlighted that perhaps the single most important outcome of the development of the hybrid BMW i8 was not the new power unit but the fine-tuning of t...