The NonStop community is fully aware of the danger that comes with making assumptions about NonStop; it’s time IT professionals draw similar conclusions.
For the past couple of weeks I have been the primary
care giver to Margo. As reported to various sites, the Friday before Christmas
Day Margo broke her leg. Badly! She has been convalescing at home following
surgery and while she is making great progress, she still looks to me for
assistance with almost everything she wants to do. It’s been a tough job
keeping her out of her office but she has been keeping visits to her place of
work to a minimum.
Having said this, I have paid a price albeit minor in
comparison. Thinking I know the layout of our home, I have managed to hit
almost everything I pass from my feet to my elbows to my hands. Turns out,
apparently, I am making assumptions about the placement of items and the image
I have in my mind is not accurate. Ouch!
Over the course of my career I have made a couple of
choices that in hindsight really didn’t help advance my career. Recently I read
that following your passion isn’t a wise decision. According to Mark Cuban, it
is “easily the worst advice you could ever give or get!” Several years ago,
Forbes magazine went so far as to write:
When
someone in your life is asking the important “What should I do with my life?”
question - have you ever told them “Just follow your passion”?
If
so, please stop doing that. Yes, completely, and forever. Because it’s garbage
advice. Among the worst out there, right next to the original food pyramid and
playing hard to get after a date.
Of course, the assumption here is that you will turn
your passion into something quite lucrative but that isn’t always the case. For
two decades I would only look for jobs working with IBM mainframes even though
I viewed it as a job. Back then my passion was sailing – yes, delaying the time
of my first wedding by a few hours so I could compete in the last event of the
year – and yes, cars.
I had a passion too for rugby securing a prelim
contract to join the feeder system of a Sydney pro rugby league team (that,
fortunately, my parents wouldn’t sign). I even had a passion about travel and
to some extent, photography. But my passion for sports, travel and yes, cars
were never going to lead to anything sustainable over the long haul.
When it comes to NonStop there are numerous assumptions
routinely made that border on the absurd. Don’t touch the NonStop system; don’t
connect it to anything else; don’t add a second application – in other words,
it does what it does but don’t mess with it.
There was a time when one vendor supported (and
essentially insured) applications that moved enormous sums of money between
banks. This vendor would guarantee the applications will work faultlessly
provided the customer did not touch anything on the system. Perhaps it was
their insistence over not touching the NonStop system that has led to these
assumptions being made.
However, now you would think that these flawed
assumptions would simply be a thing of the past. But not so, it seems. With my
background in mainframes, it came as no surprise to see as many NonStop systems
as there were connected to mainframes. Expressions like the intelligent front
end or even the programmable front end could be heard on the floor of data
centers.
As I heard at one point in the 1990s, “we only take a
look at the NonStop console when the console printer gets really noisy!” What
was also common knowledge among my mainframe colleagues was that there wasn’t
another system that offered as many connectivity options as NonStop. When it
came to integrating NonStop with the mainframe, it was very easy to do.
It’s time then to debunk the assumption that NonStop
remains an island and that connecting it to today’s core shouldn’t be
contemplated. Nothing could be further from the truth. NonStop systems continue
to be very easy to integrate into any operational environment and their ability
to support continuous operations 24 x 7 is of value to any enterprise dependent
upon supporting mission critical applications around the clock.
But what about integrating with clouds – private and
public? What about manageability and continuous oversight of NonStop
applications from what’s commonly referred to as a single pane of glass?
NonStop systems haven’t presented a closed environment
ever. Their success right out of the shoot was based on the ease with which it
could become part of the whole data center. And that continues to this day.
Connection to remote storage, remote network resources and remote systems has
continued. More so today as NonStop embraced common standards and open systems.
Languages, utilities, libraries, APIs – it’s all there.
There hasn’t been a call with analysts or customers where concerns were raised
that NonStop was different well, yes, there are differences. But that’s the
architecture of a fault tolerant system and few enterprises want to stoop to
building their own products directly on the OS!
And here’s the kicker and another assumption we can
debunk; there really isn’t any price premium to running mission critical
applications on NonStop. As I found out during the work I did preparing the
paper and subsequent presentation on the TCO of NonStop in the 2020s, on
average it’s about two thirds the price of an Oracle RAC of equivalent
performance and that does not include the price of the hardware. It’s just the
Oracle software!
Perhaps the biggest gain to be made in selecting
NonStop is the number of Oracle support licenses that can be terminated – just
ask HPE IT about the savings they made by doing exactly that – with no loss of
functionality.
This leads us to a final assumption needing to be
debunked. Just as NonStop was easy to connect to the mainframe and as easy as
it was to integrate applications and data in both directions, treating the
cloud as just another resource is easy to do. Furthermore and not to be
discounted in any way, NonStop today is a software solution where running
virtually within a private cloud is no longer out of reach.
Don’t stop your dependence on NonStop because clouds
are looming large; take NonStop with you on your journey to the clouds and
remember, cloud computing is just today’s big deal. Keeping NonStop means you
are ready for whatever replaces cloud computing which is bound to happen at
some point.
My hands, feet and elbows are beginning to heal even as
I continue to bump into other items around the house I had assumed were further
away than they were. Margo continues to heal and shortly will be up and about,
as active as she ever has been. My misadventures arising from too many
assumptions being made on my part will shortly end but for data center managers,
it may take a little more time to totally debunk the many assumptions that may
still carry concerning NonStop.
Isn’t it good to know that NonStop continues to evolve;
NonStop continues to provide levels of price (and cost) performance outpacing
competitive offerings and isn’t it good to know that a thriving ecosystem of
NonStop partners is at hand to help whenever called upon?
Perhaps the only assumption that we can agree upon is
that well yes, NonStop is here to stay. NonStop systems – traditional,
converged, virtualized have all the bases covered and in so doing, have
outlived almost all competition. With that, we cannot assume that any time
soon, there is not a business requirement for mission critical support that
NonStop cannot address. And ask
yourself, what erroneous assumptions have I been hanging onto for all these
years?
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