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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