Real Time View

Our desks may be cluttered with phones, laptops, tablets and PCs and there is still a need for cables but we have come a long way with comms and for the NonStop community, we have so much choice when it comes to media focused on NonStop! Where do we go for news today and how do we keep in touch with colleagues and business partners worldwide? Once, these two matters were very separate topics – we had phones, email, faxes and newspapers.  When the fax machine arrived near my office at Nixdorf Computers, back in the early 1980s, I could see my skills as a telex machine operator go out the window (and after all the time I put into becoming a skilled operator) but on the other hand, I started faxing everyone I knew! When it came time to consider working for Tandem Computers I heard about its Tandem-based email system and I was hooked. So much so that on my first day in the Tandem offices at North Sydney, I accidentally sent an email to everyone in the company only to recoil in s...

Back on August 20, 2007, coming off my time as ITUG Chairman, I had no idea that I would be still writing posts for this blog. But here it is, ten years later, and the fundamental message of NonStop has changed very little … I have to admit that this post is following quickly on the heels of another post just published, a matter of a few days ago. But tradition remains an important factor; I have written a post to this NonStop community blog, Real Time View, every August 20 for ten full years. Almost every August 20,  as checking the archives, there were a few posts that missed the exact date. For me however, precision is important. It’s rather binary when you think about it. It either happened or it didn’t. I was reminded about this during a conference call with a well-known industry analysis organization when the discussion turned to 24 x 7 and the way it was treated; all systems today run 24 x 7, don’t they? Right now it feels as though I have been working 24 x 7 as I fin...

Revisiting the topic of scalability reminds us about just how flexible NonStop systems continue to be and with enterprises preparing for ever increasing data volumes, having an out of the box system that readily scales will prove to be a big bonus ... After  two plus months on the road, meeting with many members of the NonStop community as we drove almost 6,000 miles in the company command center, it’s a good feeling to once again be able to say you have a permanent address. At least, as permanent as anything can be these days, given the nature of the business we are in – content generation can be done almost anywhere but even so, having a residence that best could only be considered temporary certainly came with many distractions. On the other hand, we did stop in at N2TUG as well as 2017 HPE Discover and we did get to meet with clients in southern California.  To directly answer questions I have received of late our new residence is just a little north of the N...

Being on the road as much as we have of late has given us time to talk to members of the NonStop community and it’s been a very interesting indeed colorful ride so far … There is nothing like seeing the first signs of home appearing on the horizon. With all that has transpired these past couple of months, crossing the state line and seeing the tourist-promotion billboard declaring entry into Colorful Colorado was welcomed, indeed. I am going to leave it to postings to other sites to cover all that has transpired while on the road these past two months but suffice to say that it was most interesting, with challenges coming at us every day. Sounds an awful lot like a typical day inside any enterprise data center as no matter the plans, there is always something unexpected taking place. It has been on these travels that I have come to truly appreciate the need to have multiples of just about everything. Suddenly primary and secondary are no longer abstract terms as even the best...