Demolishing
buildings may be happening all around you and for some enterprises, taking the
wrecking ball to their IT data center may be in the cards.
But the cloud
experience is making sure hybrid IT prospers and with it, NonStop systems as
well …
During a trip back to Australia with a short stay on
the state of Queensland’s famed Gold Coast, it was simply amazing to see the
transformation of the skyline of Surfers Paradise. It was my longtime favorite
holiday destination as a teenager and with memories of the many multi-story
rentals that rarely rose to ten stories, to stay in a recent addition that
towered 104 stories above that famous surfing beach was simply amazing!
However, back down at street level it was almost as
amazing to witness the continuous demolition activities underway as that
skyline of my youth was being systematically reduced to rubble. Replaced with
skyscrapers lauded for their modernistic approach to design – all glass and
shiny chrome girders! However, it’s not just what charmed us most but rather,
the benefits that came with the former architecture in terms of around the
clock sunshine? Who wants to sunbathe on a famous beach that spends most of its
time bathed in gloomy shadows not caste by clouds but the buildings themselves?
If like me you read technology updates from a variety
of sources, be that the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times or the
Australian Financial Review there are times where all we can see is the
approaching wrecking ball swinging freely and headed towards the data center.
Who needs to tie up valuable real estate in support of
on-prem IT? Indeed, in the twenty first century has IT truly been outsourced to
where the enterprise is dependent on their applications running on someone
else’s hardware? Not on the basis of traditional outsourcing as was popular a
couple of decades ago but rather, on the end of a communications line going to
goodness knows where. Isn’t moving to the cloud exciting?
With as much talk as there has been of late about
enjoying a cloud experience, it would seem that the plight of traditional
systems is not looking good. The whir of that wrecking ball swinging freely,
coming closer and closer! For enterprises depending on IT to underpin their
every business endeavor, the thought of retaining traditional systems is under
scrutiny unlike any other time in IT’s relative short history.
Who could have imagined a decade or so ago that these
enterprises would be giving serious consideration to decommissioning the
systems that powered their enterprise for all those years? Then again, as the
comics and cartoonists point out, the global pandemic accelerated change on
multiple fronts not the least being the role of clouds in any plans for digital
transformation.
Then again, there is a growing suspicion that it is not
the cloud that excites but rather the cloud experience. By this, it is the
flexibility provided by cloud services vendors to scale up and down according
to the workload needs of the day. It is the adaptability to changing market
needs together with the capacity to give access to new technologies. Since the
very earliest of days for IT the dream was always about moving icons around a
screen in a manner that created new ways to process data; on the fly as it were
with the understanding that these icons would replace any need to code.
Guess what? It’s now happening in a data center near you! Balancing the needs
of the enterprise with the experience and knowledge of those overseeing IT,
hybrid IT is not only flourishing but it’s driving change much faster than
simply handing everything over to your favorite cloud services vendor. And you keep
control over your IT which you can secure it in a manner that few cloud
services vendors have the capacity to address for an equivalent price. You know
what you need and what to protect better than anyone else!
It is this experience we are accumulating with exposure
to clouds together with a yearning for even greater operational simplicity that
is fueling this trend towards bringing the cloud experience to traditional
converged systems. Why would you want to take a step back and run the risk of
an interruption to the services you provide all for the sake of looking good on
the CEO’s briefing PowerPoint slides?
“For the HPE NonStop community, the
recognition that it is the cloud experience that enterprises are keen to
embrace is well understood. We have heard the requests from our NonStop
customers wanting the simplicity of the cloud experience, but on-premise,
preserving security and performance.”
If as yet you haven’t read the post of April 15, 2021,
to the HPE Community blog then you may want to check out Welcome
to the cloud experience with HPE NonStop SQL . In this post by HPE
NonStop Product Manager, Roland Lemoine, you will gain insight into the program
the HPE NonStop team has pursued to ensure that NonStop SQL remains not only
modern but provides benefits we normally only attribute to something a cloud
services vendor might provide.
“The
arrival of HPE NonStop SQL
Cloud Edition is
a timely reminder that NonStop possesses a database offering that is completely
in step with the times.
“Leveraging
the newly-implemented support for multi-tenancy, whereby database deployments
can be achieved in a matter of minutes, HPE NonStop SQL Cloud Edition bundles
SQL/MX Database Services (DBS) with a new API for Workload Managed Services
(WMS) together with NonStop SQLXPress for the highest level of security— plus
NonStop Database Analyzer (NSDA) for real-time database workload monitoring.
“With
NS SQL Cloud Edition the NonStop team is delivering a turnkey database software
bundle that brings the simplicity and agility of the public cloud experience on
your premises. It completely abstracts clustering and distributed SQL complexity
while combining the highest levels of availability, scalability, data integrity
and performance out of the box.”
What is most relevant for the NonStop community is that
with the NS Cloud Edition enterprise IT can point to how to effectively leverage
capabilities associated with cloud services offerings with products deployed
on-prem and highlight how operational control and enterprise security have been
retained in-house. In other words, a NonStop system can be relied upon to
support database access from anywhere and on any system, 24 x 7 and do so more
effectively than any other database offering. It’s why HPE IT today relies so
much on NonStop and NonStop SQL as the database all other applications call
upon for current data.
Enterprises can keep their data centers. Business can
be assured of access to uncompromised data around the clock and developers can
access NonStop SQL using “common access APIs, ODBC and JDBC” where
compatibility with other popular databases is included:
“There
are now specific database compatibility features including PL/MX and Oracle
data types and functions that are contributing to making it easier to work with
NonStop. These features have now all become available with NS SQL Cloud
Edition.”
The need to turn to the wrecking ball may be avoided;
as the spotlight continues to illuminate the value that comes with enjoying the
cloud experience, NonStop systems are shining brightly and for good reason.
Nothing deploys like NonStop and nothing offers database services like NonStop.
In fact, as it is so often stated, even under the brightest of spotlights,
nothing stops NonStop.
Again, if as yet you haven’t read this latest post by
Roland Lemoine, then take a little time off to check out. If the hyperlink included
above, feel free to cut and paste this link into your favorite browser:
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