So,
another three years have passed by and I find myself writing a preview of what
I will likely focus on in eighteen months’ time – my next three wishes for
NonStop!
It wouldn’t be fair on my family if I said 2019 had
been a routine year for Pyalla Technologies. It started with the return flight
from Sydney, Australia, and continued with three separate trips to Europe plus
a lengthy road trip to Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2019 combined with stops in
southern California and participation in N2TUG back in Texas. The miles have
added up but all the while even as the adventurous life continued to unfold,
there was so much news coming out of HPE that scarcely a day passed without a
discussion or two over what it all means.
Margo and I have our roots firmly anchored in NonStop, dating back to Tandem Computers where Margo had risen through the development organization all the way to the COO role under the stewardship of Bill Heil when Bill headed the NonStop Software BU. As for me, I sampled Tandem from inside almost every group within the company, starting with roles in sales and marketing in a country outpost, followed by a program management role in development, a short stint in product marketing all followed with a management position in product management. All of which is to say, between Margo and me, we have seen an awful lot happening with NonStop over the many decades we have worked with the platform.
Then again, according to my family, whereas Margo knew exactly where she was headed I was always on the lookout for the next fork in the road. However, being part of the original S-Series program team, representing networking, I was privy to the major pivot away from traditional packaging of systems to where we introduced ServerNet, externalized WAN connections while integrating LAN connections and yes, switching from custom chipsets to MIPS Risc processors. Listening to Bob Horst explaining “worm hole routing” was an experience all of itself and in case you ever wonder about it, the introduction of ServerNet led to InfiniBand.
I recently came across an interesting explanation in a Linux focused Gentoo Wiki article:
Margo and I have our roots firmly anchored in NonStop, dating back to Tandem Computers where Margo had risen through the development organization all the way to the COO role under the stewardship of Bill Heil when Bill headed the NonStop Software BU. As for me, I sampled Tandem from inside almost every group within the company, starting with roles in sales and marketing in a country outpost, followed by a program management role in development, a short stint in product marketing all followed with a management position in product management. All of which is to say, between Margo and me, we have seen an awful lot happening with NonStop over the many decades we have worked with the platform.
Then again, according to my family, whereas Margo knew exactly where she was headed I was always on the lookout for the next fork in the road. However, being part of the original S-Series program team, representing networking, I was privy to the major pivot away from traditional packaging of systems to where we introduced ServerNet, externalized WAN connections while integrating LAN connections and yes, switching from custom chipsets to MIPS Risc processors. Listening to Bob Horst explaining “worm hole routing” was an experience all of itself and in case you ever wonder about it, the introduction of ServerNet led to InfiniBand.
I recently came across an interesting explanation in a Linux focused Gentoo Wiki article:
“InfiniBand
is a high-speed serial computer bus, intended for both internal and external
connections. It is the result of merging two competing designs, Future I/O,
developed by Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, with Next Generation I/O (ngio),
developed by Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. From the Compaq side, the
roots were derived from Tandem's ServerNet. For a short time before the group
came up with a new name, InfiniBand was called System I/O.”
I only reference this explanation over the origins of
InfiniBand as I have been asked about it many times ever since NonStop X was
announced, but the story continues as today NonStop also supports RDMA over
Converged Ethernet (RoCE) which is proving to be very important for the future
of NonStop. When it comes to predictions and wishes it’s good to know about the
underlying mechanics. After all, as this is important when it comes to breaking
down barriers and giving NonStop the new label I have really warmed to,
NonStop: No Limits!
With this reference to predictions and wishes, I am not
entirely sure when the idea came to me to speculate on the future of NonStop but
it was back in February 12, 2008, with the simple post, "My
Wish" for NS Blades. In that post I wrote of
the three wishes I had for the NonStop of the day and every three years since
that post, I have provided an update under the general heading My Three Wishes
(for NonStop) and you can click on the label Wishes (right-side
of blog and all the way to the end) to see them all. However, predicting the direction in which HPE will
point NonStop every three years left a whole lot of time without any further
updates so it was only in the July 19, 2013, post Are
our wishes still important? that I started previewing
what to expect in the next update, eighteen months later. To see those prior
previews, just click on the label Wishes
- Preview.
With this introduction complemented with a little
background information, what then will I be wishing for in February, 2020? In my previous post of July 25, 2019, to this
blog, Working
on my rewrite; NonStop evolving its endgame (for now)! I
let slip a couple of ideas that I had, not the least being the complete
morphing of NonStop into a feature accessible by everyone needing solutions
that run 24 x 7, forever. I referred to this as one possible goal for NonStop
labeling it, NonStop: Endgame a play, obviously of the success of the film,
Avengers: Endgame. But before providing more details about what my three wishes
for NonStop will likely be when they are addressed in February 2020, let me be
very clear.
In this previous post already referenced above, I do add the words, “for now!” And that’s important too as there will be many more endgames to follow. For now, however, focusing on the immediate future makes a little more sense as we should be able to see how any outcomes covered here could come to pass. Wishes are only of interest if the connections to them are real and the leaps of faith required are anchored in believable technology. Although, when I wrote that first post, "My Wish" for NS Blades I predicted that when it comes to wishes:
In this previous post already referenced above, I do add the words, “for now!” And that’s important too as there will be many more endgames to follow. For now, however, focusing on the immediate future makes a little more sense as we should be able to see how any outcomes covered here could come to pass. Wishes are only of interest if the connections to them are real and the leaps of faith required are anchored in believable technology. Although, when I wrote that first post, "My Wish" for NS Blades I predicted that when it comes to wishes:
“…my
first wish is to see HP BCS deliver on the slideware Martin Fink first unveiled
as the “Shared Infrastructure Blades” package. This is where any mix of
NonStop, HP-UX, Linux, and Windows Server OS’s will be supported.
“…my
second wish is to see a hypervisor introduced where NonStop can be configured
as a “guest OS” in much the same way z/VM is used on the IBM mainframe. The
trick here is to see this introduced without marginalizing the traditional
association between NonStop and the hardware with respect to being fault
tolerant.
“…
my last wish … then wouldn’t it be advantageous to users if interrogation of
the incoming transactions would direct mission critical transactions to
NonStop, important informational but not quite mission-critical to a Unix or
Linux, and voluminous inquiries to Windows? A variation on today’s workload
balancing products, but supporting a transaction profiling capability that once
set up, learns about the overall mix of transactions, and automatically adjusts
the OS configurations on the fly?”
Remember, I posted this back in February 2008 following
the announcement that NonStop would be running in HPE Blades. This was at least half a dozen years before the announcement of NonStop X and well before there was any
discussion about the potential for virtualized NonStop (vNS). So, where is NonStop headed? In general, the
die has been cast. In my opinion then we have passed the stage where NonStop as
software any longer surprises. That horse has definitely left the barn and you
can barely see the dust it kicked up in the process. However, here is where it
gets very interesting – the go to market plans and the sales channels. HPE has
done a good job with the architecture and the technology but the shift in focus
is going to be on selling NonStop far and wide. As HPE CEO Antonio Neri is
telling us at every opportunity of how HPE is pursuing high-value opportunities
for HPE products and is no longer building for the high-volume market place.
Nothing in the HPE portfolio provides greater value to IT and the business than
NonStop.
Here’s the scoop – HPE is transforming technology, people and processes and economics. This in the eyes of HPE executives is a sustainable journey and as such, brings focus on data, the edge and cloud. Three families of systems – ProLiant, Synergy and Apollo provide the building blocks and address what’s needed on this journey. Anticipate therefore, that the NonStop: Endgame (for now) will see NonStop on ProLiant, Synergy and yes, Apollo – all driven naturally enough by customer demand. We still have the topic of memory-driven computing that leverages The Machine and that too will see potential for NonStop but that is a technology that will find its way into the Apollo platform. SGI, Cray and maybe more will all have access to The Machine and it will push specialty processes including GPUs and perhaps Quantum to the perimeter of massive amounts of memory. But even here, when you study the details of the graphics provided by HPE to date, there is a space to plugin NonStop where situations call for 24 x 7 message handling (and yes, data).
Here’s the scoop – HPE is transforming technology, people and processes and economics. This in the eyes of HPE executives is a sustainable journey and as such, brings focus on data, the edge and cloud. Three families of systems – ProLiant, Synergy and Apollo provide the building blocks and address what’s needed on this journey. Anticipate therefore, that the NonStop: Endgame (for now) will see NonStop on ProLiant, Synergy and yes, Apollo – all driven naturally enough by customer demand. We still have the topic of memory-driven computing that leverages The Machine and that too will see potential for NonStop but that is a technology that will find its way into the Apollo platform. SGI, Cray and maybe more will all have access to The Machine and it will push specialty processes including GPUs and perhaps Quantum to the perimeter of massive amounts of memory. But even here, when you study the details of the graphics provided by HPE to date, there is a space to plugin NonStop where situations call for 24 x 7 message handling (and yes, data).
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