You move house and it’s traumatic; you migrate systems and it is less so – with NonStop system migrations, what to consider next?
When we moved into our home in Windsor, Colorado, a
small village to the east of Ft Collins, we focused on the actual move itself.
Our primary goal was to transition furnishings from one home to the next
whether they were right for the new space or not. Perhaps even more
fundamentally, did the furnishing even worked with the new home’s layout?
Looking back such a migration that focused on just the home and keeping all
else the same ultimately saved us a lot of headaches.
When it comes to migrating systems, much the same can
be said about such a move. As the first stage in any planning session, keeping
the current operating environment intact always seems to be the smart move. Get
it all across to the new system then step back and see what is needed and what
really contributes to the day-to-day operations. Trying to juggle a move to new
hardware together with the introduction of new applications may be the goal but
from the experiences of those who have done such a move and that have been
shared with the industry, it hasn’t gone quite to plan.
Why can I hear Ringo singing:
I don't ask for much, I only want your trust,
And you know it don't come easy.
Still applies even today, doesn't it? House moves and systems migrations - trust and making it easy still apply.
When working in Australia there was much fan-fare in
the late 1980s surrounding the Westpac decision to do everything at once –
launching its own core banking system, CS90. As reported just a few years later
in an industry article, The
enormous cost of IT project failure, the authors asked whether we are
doomed to keep repeating IT failures? “Software has reshaped the world, but the
price of that success includes a long series of big, expensive failures.
Despite the experts’ best efforts, IT project failures keep happening,” said
the authors, Beverley Head & David Walker.
“That same year, a young US software engineer named
Steve McConnell was pondering why some software projects succeeded and others
failed. These failures seemed startlingly common, especially in big programs
for large organizations (‘enterprise IT’), and he wanted to know why,” the
authors noted. “By the late 1990s, he had compiled a long list of project
failures, with CS90 as one of the prize exhibits. “Even Vegas prize fights
don’t get this bloody,” he wrote in 1998.”
Much later, but still in Australia, ANZ began a serious
attempt to replace NonStop systems – and they had a lot of them – with a
Microsoft / Intel (Dell) solution but apparently, they ran into issues of
scalability and prematurely ended the project. Searching for updates on this
project the information seems to be buried quite deep within news organizations
but I was on the sidelines during this exercise and can attest to the fact that
it cost the then-CIO his job. It seems that pursuing large IT projects isn’t
for the faint of heart or so many IT executives can attest to.
HPE continues to pull out all the stops whenever new NonStop systems become available. Backward compatibility is a given as is no loss of industry leading levels of availability and scalability. Even so, getting the news out continues to be difficult – there are no Gartner analysts assigned to tracking NonStop. Not a one; trying to find out who tracks the verticals where NonStop dominates the market – payments solutions, for instance again, not a one.
Gartner realigned
its organization such that the need for analysts to understand products and
platforms that exist with little competition is no longer a priority.
Thankfully, as a community, we still have IDC tracking Availability Levels,
although of late they have watered-down considerably the eligibility. IDC
couldn’t leave Oracle out of the top ratings, now could they?
What is really important to recognize with NonStop is
that with each new system what may have changed behind the covers rarely
reveals itself to the end user or even the operations staff. Backward
compatibility goes hand in glove with transparency. And all the time, security
is being improved to ensure NonStop today remains the most secure system on the
planet – a recent Google search on HPE NonStop security breached revealed not a
single case of a breach occurring anywhere in the world. And these latest
NonStop systems where HPE working with Intel have made the potential to be
breached even more remote.
The recently introduced NonStop NS8 X4 and NonStop NS4 X8
represent the latest NonStop systems in a long line of fault tolerant systems
dating back to the time the first system was shipped to Citibank in 1976. Is it
any surprise then that the very first customer was a bank? Perhaps it has
skipped our minds but is there any other industry that lives and dies on
security – robbing a bank is still synonymous with security as is the
expression of ultimate safety whenever someone tells us that “we can take it to
the bank!”
It has only been a couple of years since we moved into
our Windsor home but already we have upgraded the furnishings one room at a
time. Very early on we came to the conclusion that we needed an additional
office and that was the catalyst for finishing our walk-out basement. That
decision led to us purchasing new furniture as we didn’t bring suitable items
across. Then again, this took place a full year after we had made the move so
we had time to look around to see what might work with the space we now had.
That’s right, we changed the hardware – the house –
moved in the software – the furnishings – and began considering what new and
modern applications – the décor and artwork – would work for us. We managed to
get rid of the swarm of bugs that arrived unannounced and it was time to think
of the future. Yes, we embraced multiple streaming services as we added smart
TVs everywhere.
When it comes to moving to the latest NonStop system, the move itself is the most important consideration. Stepping up to bring in new hardware used to be fairly traumatic for all involved but HPE has made this simple for the reasons already noted.
However, only after the hardware
migration has been successfully completed should we step back to take another
look at our software investment and to what still works and what may no longer
be contributing to the business. Perhaps the most critical element to take a
good look at is how we handle data.
Data? For some time now I have been a big fan of flash
memory. When it comes to expanded storage needs with super-fast access, how
about installing solid state disk drives? When it comes to storage options this
is one aspect of the NonStop systems that is changing rapidly where Solid State
Disk (SSD) will become more popular. Perhaps we will soon have flash modules we
can access. Point is, storing large amounts of data seems to be less of an
issue for NonStop going forward.
Where this leads is to consider onboarding some
critical processes none more so than simply analytics. Pushing data to the
cloud or to commodity servers on-prem or elsewhere does open up the prospect of
ransomware. Hackers may not get to NonStop but they certainly can get to
adjacent systems NonStop applications have come to depend upon, none more so
than those analytics processes. In the world of transaction processing where
some algorithms and models appear straightforward, wouldn’t it be prudent to
rethink what we connect to and what external dependencies we have?
This is probably not for everyone but as you take a
good long look at the new NonStop system you have migrated to and absorbed how
much additional storage you can access and even how performance continues to
improve, perhaps there is still more furniture to move into the house. Perhaps
too the thought of running hybrids virtually needs to get real – what better
approach to consider than running it all real on your new NonStop?
This may very well fly in the face of conventional wisdom but then again, the
success of NonStop in the marketplace comes from flying in the face of
conventional wisdom. Latency has always been a concern for mission critical
applications and setting up home in a single family dwelling might now make a
whole lot of sense. The only flaw in this argument for now is that in truth,
there is little to no effort being expended on supporting analytics on NonStop.
Will that change? Only if you ask for it, of course!
There are many things that you can take to the bank as being certainties. The most obvious is that NonStop will continue to thrive. Migrating to the latest NonStop systems has been made easy to do and in so doing, as we migrate the applications, isn’t it time to take another look at all that NonStop can deliver?
Isn’t it time to extoll the virtues of NonStop up
and down our enterprise? Security is covered as is availability and scalability
– how about adding vast amounts of data and relevant analytics into the
equation; it’s just got to be as easy to do as everything else associated with
NonStop has become. Now you can forget all about humming the lines, “you know
it don’t come easy!”
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