In 48 hours’ time we will
be back out on the highways mixing it up with all the big rigs, trucks and SUVs
and even though it takes us three days, there is no way we would miss the
NonStop Technical Boot Camp, 2017, in San Francisco. Will we be seeing you
there?
If
by now you haven’t heard about the biggest event of the year for the NonStop
community, then listen up! This is a big occasion and already the number of
attendees is crossing the line and approaching a really good figure – not sure
exactly what the final count will look like but I do know there are a lot of
people really looking forward to this event kicking off in just a few days’
time. The move to San Francisco may be one factor, or simply because it’s a
chance to head to sunny California where the real appeal lies. No matter, the
chance to hear the NonStop team outline the next milestones for NonStop and to
hear firsthand about recent successes in the marketplace by HPE along with the
vendors providing solutions on NonStop, remain important catalysts driving continued
interest in all things NonStop.
For the past couple of weeks I have been out on the road. Mixing it up with current and former Tandem and NonStop developers, sitting at tables with multiple vendors and yes, participating in webex and goto meeting calls, have made one thing very clear. Any doubts I may have had about the potential longevity of NonStop and any thoughts as to whether the best days of NonStop are behind it are incorrect and quite misleading. It’s always easy for competitors to downplay the significance of systems and platforms – just look at the angst being expressed among the IBM mainframe supporters of late. Not to make too fine a point of it, but for as long as I can remember, I have been questioned over my support for NonStop and as time has passed there have been days when I may have had my doubts. But no longer!
When driving America’s highways it is hard to miss the impact that trucks, SUVs and crossovers have had on the driving population. Trying to find a coupé or even a sedan is proving harder to do as this niche market addresses those who rarely take their vehicles any further afield then their office. Or the airport! As for the humble station-wagon, fuggedaboutit! What is more surprising is that time and time again, there is only one person occupying the vehicle and while these automobiles are often filled with equipment or towing a trailer loaded with materials, it is still significant that the go-to vehicle of today is big, brawny and gas guzzling 4 X 4 whose owners expect to use them in many different roles. And so it appears to be happening within IT. No matter how we look at it, cloud computing deployed on-premise looks every bit as big as the largest systems we deployed back in the heyday of mainframes. Yes there are collections of industry standard servers but just take a look at the pictures used to illustrate the server farms supporting on-premise clouds and the racks of servers disappear far into the distance.
Point is, big is back and the distributed systems of just a few years ago are being pushed aside in favor of much larger configurations. Of course, we cannot ignore for one moment the huge uptick in volumes we are dealing with from our online networks, as everyone is connected. Everywhere! Nor can we ignore the waves of change heading our way as we begin to deal with IoT and the intelligent edge. The technology pendulum we know so well is swinging back to bigger centralized on-premise system complexes. Did we see this developing just a decade ago? As we turned the corner and entered this century, the populist thoughts were all on the network as the system where client / server computing prevailed. Certainly, aspects of what was talked about, all those years ago, remains but nothing really prepared us for the uptick in big systems that we see being deployed today.
When it comes to NonStop systems and where the NonStop community is headed, there is a developing wrinkle to this story. Consider NonStop Technical Boot Camp platinum sponsor, OmniPayments, who is happily populating their clouds with NonStop X systems. A very unique situation, but one worth watching all the same and yes, at TBC, I am sure we will hear from Yash about some of his recent successes originating from his ability to offer OmniPayments as a SaaS. But Yash is not alone. Already there are discussions at vendors as diverse as comForte, IR and even DataExpress about the value that might be realized in offering their products on the basis of IaaS / SaaS. In so doing, of course, adding the capability to support multiple enterprises can only be effective if they scale up their servers to meet the demands that could materialize.
Are we ditching our economy boxes? Are we retreating from our niche servers? The short answer is yes, we are. And it’s all about the value proposition of commercially available, off-the-shelf, hardware. As one source states, “Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization, without the need to commission custom-made, or bespoke, solutions.” So yes, as one of my former bosses used to tell me, “The gigs up!” You either support COTS or you find another line of work. Really? Yes, really – in less than a decade, the NonStop systems we know so well will be relegated to museums even as virtualized NonStop permeates many enterprise clouds. Too dramatic – well, let’s just see. When TBC kicks off and we get past the opening keynote presentations, come visit me (I will be part of the Striim team, working the Striim booth in the Partner Pavilion, Booth # 52) and let’s have a coffee and talk about it. I think it will be hard to escape the inevitability of a substantial change in focus for NonStop development.
It is not so much a case of pursuing a path that takes us back to big general-purpose computers but rather the array of processes strung together in support of a cloud (or cloud-like) to provide more flexibility which allows enterprises to run pretty much everything they have needed in the past. COTS open the door to containers and virtual machines and whatever is your preference, you can fire up a configuration to suit even the most custom application you may have. In the same way we are headed to autonomous, driverless, if not totally boring but ubiquitous motoring experiences, so too we are headed to autonomous, operatorless (thanks to AI, machine learning and the like) and yes, ubiquitous computing experiences. Move some icons around a screen and Voila! There you have it – your computer provisioned just the way you like it …
Of course, none of this may take place in the immediate future and the market that NonStop serves so well today is notoriously slow-moving, but my reading of the tea leaves suggests it is inevitable. And I am happy to see that as niche markets, even those dominated by boutique players, eventually close down. Disappear! Giving NonStop wings to fly inside every cloud well – isn’t that a world we all have wanted to see for as long as NonStop has existed? The picture atop this post is of me in front of both an S-Series (note the Tandem badge) and an Itanium Blade system – the S-Series is pretty easy to identify but the older Blade system? Not so much; in the future, it will be next to impossible to locate where NonStop is running because the simple truth might very well be – it is running everywhere!
See you at TBC 2017 and safe travels!
For the past couple of weeks I have been out on the road. Mixing it up with current and former Tandem and NonStop developers, sitting at tables with multiple vendors and yes, participating in webex and goto meeting calls, have made one thing very clear. Any doubts I may have had about the potential longevity of NonStop and any thoughts as to whether the best days of NonStop are behind it are incorrect and quite misleading. It’s always easy for competitors to downplay the significance of systems and platforms – just look at the angst being expressed among the IBM mainframe supporters of late. Not to make too fine a point of it, but for as long as I can remember, I have been questioned over my support for NonStop and as time has passed there have been days when I may have had my doubts. But no longer!
When driving America’s highways it is hard to miss the impact that trucks, SUVs and crossovers have had on the driving population. Trying to find a coupé or even a sedan is proving harder to do as this niche market addresses those who rarely take their vehicles any further afield then their office. Or the airport! As for the humble station-wagon, fuggedaboutit! What is more surprising is that time and time again, there is only one person occupying the vehicle and while these automobiles are often filled with equipment or towing a trailer loaded with materials, it is still significant that the go-to vehicle of today is big, brawny and gas guzzling 4 X 4 whose owners expect to use them in many different roles. And so it appears to be happening within IT. No matter how we look at it, cloud computing deployed on-premise looks every bit as big as the largest systems we deployed back in the heyday of mainframes. Yes there are collections of industry standard servers but just take a look at the pictures used to illustrate the server farms supporting on-premise clouds and the racks of servers disappear far into the distance.
Point is, big is back and the distributed systems of just a few years ago are being pushed aside in favor of much larger configurations. Of course, we cannot ignore for one moment the huge uptick in volumes we are dealing with from our online networks, as everyone is connected. Everywhere! Nor can we ignore the waves of change heading our way as we begin to deal with IoT and the intelligent edge. The technology pendulum we know so well is swinging back to bigger centralized on-premise system complexes. Did we see this developing just a decade ago? As we turned the corner and entered this century, the populist thoughts were all on the network as the system where client / server computing prevailed. Certainly, aspects of what was talked about, all those years ago, remains but nothing really prepared us for the uptick in big systems that we see being deployed today.
When it comes to NonStop systems and where the NonStop community is headed, there is a developing wrinkle to this story. Consider NonStop Technical Boot Camp platinum sponsor, OmniPayments, who is happily populating their clouds with NonStop X systems. A very unique situation, but one worth watching all the same and yes, at TBC, I am sure we will hear from Yash about some of his recent successes originating from his ability to offer OmniPayments as a SaaS. But Yash is not alone. Already there are discussions at vendors as diverse as comForte, IR and even DataExpress about the value that might be realized in offering their products on the basis of IaaS / SaaS. In so doing, of course, adding the capability to support multiple enterprises can only be effective if they scale up their servers to meet the demands that could materialize.
Are we ditching our economy boxes? Are we retreating from our niche servers? The short answer is yes, we are. And it’s all about the value proposition of commercially available, off-the-shelf, hardware. As one source states, “Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization, without the need to commission custom-made, or bespoke, solutions.” So yes, as one of my former bosses used to tell me, “The gigs up!” You either support COTS or you find another line of work. Really? Yes, really – in less than a decade, the NonStop systems we know so well will be relegated to museums even as virtualized NonStop permeates many enterprise clouds. Too dramatic – well, let’s just see. When TBC kicks off and we get past the opening keynote presentations, come visit me (I will be part of the Striim team, working the Striim booth in the Partner Pavilion, Booth # 52) and let’s have a coffee and talk about it. I think it will be hard to escape the inevitability of a substantial change in focus for NonStop development.
It is not so much a case of pursuing a path that takes us back to big general-purpose computers but rather the array of processes strung together in support of a cloud (or cloud-like) to provide more flexibility which allows enterprises to run pretty much everything they have needed in the past. COTS open the door to containers and virtual machines and whatever is your preference, you can fire up a configuration to suit even the most custom application you may have. In the same way we are headed to autonomous, driverless, if not totally boring but ubiquitous motoring experiences, so too we are headed to autonomous, operatorless (thanks to AI, machine learning and the like) and yes, ubiquitous computing experiences. Move some icons around a screen and Voila! There you have it – your computer provisioned just the way you like it …
Of course, none of this may take place in the immediate future and the market that NonStop serves so well today is notoriously slow-moving, but my reading of the tea leaves suggests it is inevitable. And I am happy to see that as niche markets, even those dominated by boutique players, eventually close down. Disappear! Giving NonStop wings to fly inside every cloud well – isn’t that a world we all have wanted to see for as long as NonStop has existed? The picture atop this post is of me in front of both an S-Series (note the Tandem badge) and an Itanium Blade system – the S-Series is pretty easy to identify but the older Blade system? Not so much; in the future, it will be next to impossible to locate where NonStop is running because the simple truth might very well be – it is running everywhere!
See you at TBC 2017 and safe travels!
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