An
uptick in blog posts and even video clips helps ensure the story of NonStop
continues to resonate with IT professionals even in times severely impacted by
global events.
There
has been a constant reminder in our neighborhood that we each are looking at
the world differently. The global pandemic has forced us all into thinking
about how big our social network should be – do we have enough friends? Do we
need to reach out to even more colleagues and acquaintances? Is there a minimum
set that ensures our happiness? A maximum? Can our emotions scale accordingly,
such that our friendship is all embracing without breaking down into an inner
circle and a perimeter?
This
weekend we saw an impromptu performance taking place on a neighbor’s driveway
that attracted a number of passersby. A simple guitar was all that was involved
and yet those listening to his performance considered it good enough to stop
whatever else they were doing. Our next door neighbors arranged a number of
deck chairs on their backyard lawn, the better to maintain social distancing,
for an opportunity to roast s’mores.
With
very few breaks we have watched golfers walk by, isolated as they are in
individual golf carts, all the while practicing social distancing as they take
turns to sink those final putts. Colorado weather changes in the
blink of an eye; it was only a week or so ago that the course was covered in
snow.
The
world, however, isn’t the same as it was as we still have cars sitting in the
garage on battery tenders as we wonder when next we can plan on driving to a
NonStop Regional User Group (RUG) event. The latest update on planned events for
2020 that we received from Kathy Wood was depressing as we scrolled down
through the list of cancelled and postponed meetings.
What hasn’t changed in these times, however, is the need for our infrastructure to remain reliable. It would seem that with each government initiative that is announced, the supporting infrastructure runs into problems. In Australia and the US, program beneficial to the community seem to have run fowl to the collective inabilities of applications to scale up to handle the rush of responses each program created. Higher education bodies have struggled to support student populations working from home.
What hasn’t changed in these times, however, is the need for our infrastructure to remain reliable. It would seem that with each government initiative that is announced, the supporting infrastructure runs into problems. In Australia and the US, program beneficial to the community seem to have run fowl to the collective inabilities of applications to scale up to handle the rush of responses each program created. Higher education bodies have struggled to support student populations working from home.
All
the while financial institutions we have put our faith in have likewise
struggled to provide the reliability we expect at a time when accessing the
dwindling amount of cash we might have becomes a priority. In her May 1 post to
the HPE Community blog, Unplanned
downtime and outages can happen. But not with HPE NonStop Karen Copeland, Manager,
Worldwide HPE NonStop Product Management, references recent outages at
well-known fintech, Robinhood.
“Popular investing
app Robinhood went down in early March,” said Copeland. “According to CNBC, the commission-free trading platform
experienced a massive outage on March 2 that resulted in clients unable to
access the market during a huge rally. The service faced downtime again on
March 9 before managing to restore its systems. CNBC noted the firm blamed the
outage on an ‘unprecedented load’ on its infrastructure caused by volatile
market conditions, record trading volume, and a piling in of new users.”
Copeland
also referenced another source, Cointelegraph, and quoted Pankaj Balaji, Delta
Exchange CEO, who said, “The technology needs to be built in a fashion that it
is able to distribute the load and handle such spikes. These frequent outages
expose the fact that there are issues with Robinhood's technology and its
ability to handle volume spikes in such high volatility environment.” For
the NonStop community, the collective sucking noise as we gasp at such
statements should be heard worldwide. Surely not – unable, you say, “to
distribute the load and handle such spikes?”
If
you have trouble accessing this post via the hyperlink above you can cut and
paste this url into your browser –
Availability
has always been the strong point favoring selection and ultimate deployment of
NonStop systems. As a very modern interpretation of a fault tolerant
architecture that has proved reliable for decades, it still surprises many that
so little is discussed about the suitability of NonStop to support applications
in a way that no single point of failure will bring them to a halt.
While
other vendors promote the level of redundancy built into their systems, and of
how such redundancy extends to duplicate power sources being supported, fault
tolerance is so much more. What HPE has with NonStop is an integrated system
from the metal to the operating system to the middleware stack – it’s all
integrated in a manner that application failings don’t bring the system down.
How
often do we have to remind ourselves that it is take-over and not so much
fail-over? NonStop simply steps in and intervenes whenever situations arise
that NonStop deems likely to end in a failure of one type or another. However,
availability is only one part of the story. As a massively parallel processor
with a shared-nothing architecture with NonStop, scalability no longer is an
issue.
In
an upcoming article to be published in the May, 2020, issue of NonStop Insider,
HPE NonStop Sales Specialist, Steve Kubick, promotes his most recent video
posted to LinkedIn on Integrity
and Inheritance. “When it comes to availability we measure it as being
five nines (of availability) – three seconds of downtime a year. When it comes
to maintenance or planned downtime, NonStop does that on the fly – all those
things you need to do to maintain a system (can be) done online,” says Kubick.
Just
as importantly, Kubick continues with the observation that, “Without an outage:
NonStop delivers AL4 uptime. And it does this while still providing a level of
scalability that delivers 98% of each added processor resource (up to 4080
processors) – all in a single system image. So imagine what you could do with
NonStop.” When others are struggling to scale-out to handle the unexpected
volumes that come with business spikes, as we are seeing happen more often of
late, NonStop takes such spikes in its stride.
For those relatively new to NonStop, you may have not realized that in the stock market crash of 1987, Black Monday, when the market dropped 20% in a single day, processing of orders were being performed on a NonStop system. Through planning, the exchange had additional processors on hand and then-Tandem engineers were able to add these processors online and without any necessity for an outage of any kind. The exchange didn’t stop trading that day because of a lack of scale but rather, its famous stock ticker couldn’t keep up.
For those relatively new to NonStop, you may have not realized that in the stock market crash of 1987, Black Monday, when the market dropped 20% in a single day, processing of orders were being performed on a NonStop system. Through planning, the exchange had additional processors on hand and then-Tandem engineers were able to add these processors online and without any necessity for an outage of any kind. The exchange didn’t stop trading that day because of a lack of scale but rather, its famous stock ticker couldn’t keep up.
Comments