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NonStop: the solution is at hand!

Pouring a good measure of any adult drink over ice cubes is a common enough practice. Mixologists will tell you that for some drinks it’s better to pour from a chilled bottle to lessen the impact of a warm fluid on the ice. Then again, for most of us who from time to time imbibe on such concoctions, such a dilution process is welcome. In our household, an evening cocktail has become part of our routine. Disclaimer: it is neither an encouragement to do the same nor a suggestion that it is required.

Eventually, the understanding of the humble martini comes down to simple chemistry where the eventual solution proves to be to our liking. And with that, comes the chemist’s clarity that “you prepare a solution by dissolving a known mass of solute (often a solid) into a specific amount of a solvent. 

For the NonStop community, its successful history is liberally littered with solutions of every kind. These are solutions of a different nature, obviously, and yet, to succeed they have always been a mixture; a combination of software driving hardware. Even as HPE has made enormous strides towards having NonStop become a software only offering, eventually you become aware of the symbiotic nature of hardware, the software stack and the application working together to satisfy enterprises’ most difficult but important mission critical business challenges. 

In this first part of the two part series of posts, we will be looking at the past history of NonStop and solutions that have contributed to its longevity. When it comes to what’s happening today it is therefore good to know of the numerous vendors that continue to embrace NonStop in support of their applications. The resulting solutions are being recognized for the value they provide even as in some cases they are making inroads into new markets for NonStop. More important still is how these applications are embracing modernity, even as they pave the way for future application offerings, is how they fit into the new world of HPE GreenLake.

In case you missed reading recent headlines, the respective GreenLake and NonStop teams are in open dialogue and the divide that may have been present in the past is clearly behind them. The goal of GreenLake was to offer an alternate to traditional solutions offerings where large upfront capital expenditures were required to where you only pay for what is being used in the moment. It certainly provided challenges for the NonStop team but these are being overcome and as a result, there are now two key solutions that can be acquired the traditional way or as part of GreenLake.

One of these solutions builds on the tradition of NonStop insofar as it’s addressing today’s needs of financial institutions. Lusis Payments is now offering Payments as a Service and in so doing, opens the door to even the most humble of financial institutions having an opportunity to leverage applications that otherwise were the domain of the biggest banks. All without a heavy investment in technology that might be foreign to them and where access to skillsets formerly associated with NonStop are significantly lessened.

The other solution has just recently stepped into the spotlight as it evolves to better support its major customer. In this instance, abat+ has made significant progress towards providing manufacturing applications on the basis of Manufacturing as a Service. It is hard to ignore the investment that Mercedes Benz has made in NonStop!

In a post to the HPE community blog, The frictionless future of payments, Jennifer Smith, HPE Global Lead, FSI Marketing and Vikas Kapoor, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, HPC, AI & Labs, there is no hiding how enthusiastic these bloggers are about solutions incorporating NonStop:

“HPE GreenLake for payments delivers high performance and security on a modern cloud payments platform that’s always-on and built to evolve.

“It combines the cloud-centric, open SOA-based payments knowledge of Lusis TANGO, a modern, flexible and future-ready payments platform, with the proven, fault-tolerant, distributed transaction processing of HPE Nonstop. HPE GreenLake adds cloud experience and flexibility.

“In short, it’s a unique, fully managed, pay-per-use solution. All the benefits of a cloud-based system with none of the drawbacks.”

As for the reaction coming from Lusis executives, it was Philippe Preval, President and CEO of Lusis, who made the observation: 

"Our initial collaboration with HPE was an important factor in bringing the value and flexibility of Lusis Tango to a much broader international marketplace.

“As we continue to expand our presence in Financial Institutions worldwide, our partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the HPE GreenLake for Payments service is becoming ever more strategic for us as our joint clients start to adopt the ‘as a service’ model for critical applications." 

Earlier this year and in a separate post to the HPE community blog, Experience data-driven smart manufacturing with abat+ and HPE NonStop, Prashanth Kamath, HPE Product Manager, HPE NonStop, expressed similar sentiment about abat+ and the doors that this company will be opening as a result of the work that has been done in supporting Mercedes Benz:

“Founded in 2010, abat+ acquired the services and operations from Mercedes-Benz AG and abat+ has continued to support this manufacturer with solutions based on NonStop.

“Today, around the globe, wherever there is a Mercedes Benz manufacturing plant there is at least a pair of NonStop systems to be found. Its presence is in 14 countries supported by a team of 200+ personnel that have accumulated the equivalent of 1,200 years of experience in manufacturing.

“Key to their success has been the speed with which they have embraced modern methods even as their experience and knowledge ensure their continued presence in a manufacturer such as Mercedes Benz.”

The reaction coming from abat+ executives is no less restrained than that coming from Lusis. According to abat+’s CEO and Founder, Peter Grendel when it comes to their solution, it is:

“A story of the back-end being NonStop. (abat+ Plus) systematically combines the areas of planning, manufacturing and production.

“We have been working in a modern DevOps setup since many years. Short software development cycles paired with intensive involvement of a wide range of stakeholders shape the success of our team-centric software development strategy.”

However, it isn’t just a case of using modern tools and utilities. For abat+ Business Unit Manager, Thomas Oberst, it is about what the application can do:

“Machine data for predictive maintenance; we can predict when machine maintenance has to be performed based on historical data. We can predict errors on components or car bodies based on historical data as well; defect locations and types can be predicted and thus avoided base on the type of car body.”

Lusis and abat+ were active participants at HPE Discover 2022 and for both vendors, having them present solutions that had become available on the basis of as-a-Service was the realization of what many within the NonStop community wanted to see; new and exciting ways to leverage NonStop solutions without the added “tax” of having to find the skills and yes, the dollars.

Looking further ahead and having had discussions with the NonStop leadership team, it is clear that with access to the GreenLake server, the availability of APIs and finding acceptance rapidly, the support from GreenLake Management Services, the obstacles to running any solution that features NonStop are diminishing. Will we see a breakthrough for NonStop in healthcare? Or will NonStop be more involved in transportation and distribution? With the supply chain mess brought on by the global pandemic it isn’t too big a stretch to imagine those charged with overseeing supply chain modernization might find solutions on NonStop very attractive.

The history of NonStop has always been about the presence of solutions; that special mix of hardware, software stacks and applications that we have come to expect with NonStop solutions. The modernization of NonStop is complete with as many varieties of tools and utilities available on NonStop today as there are advocates of their value. The support for solutions as a service is in its infancy but this will mature rapidly and will create a more palatable landscape for future sales of NonStop.

Look for the second part in this series of posts where we consider the impact on NonStop as key middleware offerings become solutions in their own right. Additionally, we will consider too how NonStop will extend the cloud experience to more than just what is on offer today. But for that, I will leave you to think of the bigger question. The new normal is all about 24 x 7 global presence where all solutions have become mission critical so where will fault tolerance not be valued and why should we ever consider putting boundaries around what NonStop can achieve?   


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