This
is the time of year when the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC)
dominates many discussions – but what is coming next and are there further
surprises install for the NonStop community?
We are happily settling into our new and very temporary working life here in Australia. It’s been such a long time “between drinks” as they like to say down under, but there is no doubting the lifestyle that the average Sydneysider enjoys. With beaches stretching north and south and a harbor that penetrates the distant western suburbs, not forgetting too that the Blue Mountains frame the far west of Sydney, it is a city unlike any other on earth. Comparisons have been made of San Francisco with Sydney but clearly they were made by folks who really hadn’t spent time in Sydney. San Francisco is more like other bay cities, including Melbourne, but Sydney is a deep water harbor framed by rocky sandstone outcrops creating changes in elevation everywhere you turn.
Every time I return to Sydney there are the same old stories circulating in the press about one new development or another and how one high rise or another will detract from Sydney’s charismatic appeal and yet, somehow, through the years, the changes have usually ended up blending in to give Sydney the skyline familiar to us all. This time it’s all about infrastructure and how it’s all being done at once – a new light rail system through the heart of the City Business District (CBD), a new bypass tunnel running beneath pricey suburban homes, a whole new city supporting Sydney’s second airport. And so it goes on, but Sydney is always about the future and even as the city continues to climb upwards, there are still many new trees being planted and roads being repurposed as walking paths.
In many ways it is a shame that the timing of the events I committed to supporting meant that I will miss out on a couple of the big ones. I will not be making it back to Madrid for HPE Discover later this month and I will not, unfortunately, make it back for the NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC). I know that there will be sighs of relief in some corners upon hearing this but as we draw up our plans for the end of the year, initially it meant three trips to Sydney with a side trip to Madrid, none of which looked enticing, but we will certainly miss the TBC. Over the years, there have been many surprises and the NonStop options available today would have been hard to predict just three years ago. Nevertheless, having options is always good and it would be naive to think that it’s all over and what we see today is all that NonStop will be offering in the coming years.
On the topic of naïve, I have been posing the question to business folks I have been around “what are your doing to prepare your IT for the post-cloud era?” Talk about generating blank looks and a certain smirking visage that clearly communicates their thought of me “being out of my mind”, but for the NonStop community that has been around NonStop systems for as long as many of us have been, we know there will never be an “end game” for IT and that the current trends we are witnessing will in time give way to what’s next.
Today it’s all about the Edge and the Core, including hybrids and clouds. But what does it all mean? There is so much talk about open platforms and open solutions but what is the real question here? It’s pretty much a continuation of the search for lower costs, greater flexibility and agility and yes, even more productivity. If we can’t get ahead of the curve, then it will peak and come crashing down on us as I heard one speaker suggest at an event a week ago. Coming as it did from a building close to the cities beaches, it was an image not easily dismissed, but there’s more here and it should be of interest to every member of the NonStop community.
We know, for instance, without a doubt, that the world will be virtualized – there will be a gulf between the physical world and the world we see from interacting with our applications. We know too that the clock is winding down on Moore’s Law – there isn’t a whole of wiggle room left to keep shrinking the number of transistors per square meter even as we extract more and more performance. For NonStop the move to virtualization has tremendous follow-on impact. And by this, I am implying that in a very short time NonStop as we know it today will essentially disappear. Hidden in between layers of software isolating the metal making up the real world from what we interact with on a daily basis.
Think NonStop being everywhere and not just present on isolated systems and ask yourself, how would you approach a market that was universal? If business had the option to run fault tolerant or not, with no price premium, what do you think business would select? What would business do if all the tools, utilities, languages were impervious to running NonStop with the advantage of there being new levels of SLA achievable just with a few clicks of a mouse (or fingers)!Over time, business always gravitates to what’s best and what’s easy and yes, what’s on offer without a premium. To this end, just as we are seeing Linux distributions that include hypervisors, ask yourself what you would be doing if popular Linux distributions went one step further, and included the option for fault tolerance?
We have gone from NonStop needing specialized hardware to where it can run on any x86 motherboard with sufficient Ethernet bandwidth (and more than one) to where it can run virtually on any number of hypervisors. So what is stopping NonStop becoming part of Linux and available to all businesses looking for open platforms? The just-announced decision by IBM to buy Red Hat came as a surprise to many. At SIBOS Sydney 2018 I interviewed executives from Red Hat and they played it very straight – I had no idea (and yes, the story I wrote had to be discarded)! I have a sense that IBM is pretty desperate and this purchase represents a very big roll of the dice but what if Red Hat becomes even more proprietary, populated with key IBM middleware offerings, such that business turns elsewhere for product. IBM no longer generates the fear among CIOs it once did so who knows what’s going to happen.
However, what I am certain about is that once the dust clears from our infatuation with Edge and Core and once we start looking at what’s next, it’s going to be all software, all virtual and yes, all Linux like with distributions catering for marketplaces from mission critical to the completely casual operation. Software, virtual and open – we have seen this on whiteboards for ages but the reality is that we are only now getting our heads around what this implies. And I see the door opening for HPE to throw NonStop into the world of open with NonStop running everywhere. With Red Hat going proprietary (I can say that!), what of Susie? Debian? Ubuntu? Fedora? And many more? While not all are targeting business, there will be many that will be targeting the enterprises where NonStop could readily find a home.
Point is, there will be a world beyond Edge and Core and there will be new models appearing that will differ vastly from what we are keying into today. It’s just business as normal for IT – change is ever present and for vendors, it can be very fickle. I chose the photo at the top of the page quite deliberately – a ferry pulling away from the wharf. Away from the safety and protection of the harbor! As we pull away from traditional computing and into hybrid IT, the Edge and the Core, Clouds, etc. can we truly say we know where we are headed? I am no longer sure we can say we do, but what I know with more assuredness than I have enjoyed for quite some time, with NonStop a software solution and with NonStop running virtualized, there are now no limits to where HPE can take NonStop. And with that, let’s enjoy the ride and let’s just see what HPE has to say this week at TBC!
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