Driving along a desolate stretch of Interstate 70
taking us eastbound out of Utah, there is an exit that has intrigued us ever
since 2006 when we began commuting between Colorado and California. On this recent
occasion we were returning from the HPE Discover 2022 event in Las Vegas. At
first sight and ignoring the reference to Emery, seeing the exit to
Mussentuchit always gets us talking. Perhaps it is the exit to a cattle ranch
seeking a unique identity. But just pronouncing it brought a smile to our faces
– “Mustn’t Touch It” seemed pretty obvious.
Margo and I smile as it seems to be an oblique
reference to the history of NonStop and before that, Tandem Computers. For as
long as both of us could remember, the mantra among many in the NonStop
community on deploying a solution on NonStop was the warning to all others in
IT that given the nature of the mission critical applications, no IT
professional was to touch it. Interfere with its operations at your own risk.
Connect it directly to the Internet and your sanity would come under scrutiny.
NonStop is a fault tolerant system and as such any perceived risk to its 24 x 7
x forever operation was not worth any proposed reward.
This is the second part of a two part series of posts
on solutions. In the previous post, NonStop:
the solution is at hand! I wrote of how good it is to know of
the numerous vendors that continue to embrace NonStop in support of their
applications. The resulting solutions, I said at that time, are being
recognized for the value they provide. In some cases they are making inroads
into new markets for NonStop and that’s always good news for the NonStop community.
Well then, is
the presence of these solutions more a reminder of the past than pointing to a
renewed future for NonStop? Before digging deeper into the topic of solutions,
there will be NonStop community members who will sigh and note that discussing
the merits of solutions versus applications versus middleware and
infrastructure has been going on for a very long time. So, what has changed of
late?
For starters, tNonStop’s era of “Mustn’t Touch It” is
waning rapidly. In part this is because the data created on NonStop is sought
after by processes outside of NonStop. But it is also that data required of
NonStop similarly lies elsewhere in the network and considering the growing
acceptance of an edge to cloud, hybrid IT model, it’s unlikely we will ever see
a return of NonStop applications being silo-ed. It is as if today, everyone has
a real requirement to touch NonStop.
Gathering of code and data into a package delivered as
a Commercial, Off-the-Shelf (COTS) offering is just as rapidly waning as well.
What was once considered a solution more often than not reflects on a past
steeped in legacy thinking. And yet, that is how NonStop has navigated its way
to the success it continues to enjoy. Solutions that were mentioned in the
previous post – Lusis, abat+ and even ACI’s Base24 – maybe pillars of success
for NonStop but the concept of enterprises requiring more COTS is witnessing
the parallel thinking around the gathering of middleware, infrastructure, tools
and visualization as an alternative.
When I first began pulling this post together my
thinking was that the concept of solutions we all know so well will likely see an
increase in offerings as more vendors are describing middleware, infrastructure
and even tools as solutions. After all, if you address a business requirement
and solve the problems you are facing, surely any enterprise IT organization
will describe such offerings as a solutions, right? Maybe not; NonStop vendors
have as many points of view as there are vendors when it comes to labelling
their products.
Perhaps there is no bigger influence on the direction
NonStop vendors are taking than talk of tapping unlimited resources afforded
them via cloud services providers. “We have tested BackBox in the cloud;
nothing changed in BackBox in order to support clouds,” said ETI-NET COO,
Sylvain Tétreault. Taking its first baby steps towards capitalizing on cloud
services to better optimize overall user costs ETI-Net is “exploiting the
capabilities of AWS S3 gateway. While no NonStop users have requested it so
far, ETI-NET is looking into whether there will be user demand for BackBox to
support the S3 driver directly within BackBox.” AWS may describe S3 as its storage
solution offering, “we don’t perceive our expanded BackBox offering as a solution
according to the traditional definition,” added Tétreault.
And yet, in email exchanges with @CTOAdvisor and HPE
Influencer, Keith Townsend, when it comes to something like AWS S3 given how, “S3 can now be used as a database,
I don't know if you'd ever call S3 middleware up until we get to see S3 functions
as a service where we could trigger code from S3 events.” According to Keith
then given this, “AWS S3 essentially became a messaging bus and now has moved
to an application in itself.” But a solution? Again, touching the line but perhaps
not crossing it as yet!
More recently in conversations with Tim Dunne, NTI’s Global Director Worldwide Sales, “it really does come down to how the NonStop customer perceives the product offering. Where it addresses business needs then, for this customer, they may indeed consider the offering as a solution.” As NTI embraces continuous adaptation, could the changing IT landscape suggest that the meaning of solutions is likewise changing?
“Consider the combination today
of DRNet®/Unified for Business Integration with Kafka support, the
visualization provided by a tool like Grafana and Hybrid IT now looks like it
covers a heterogeneous deployment of middleware, tools and visualization.
However, is this enough for the product offering to be considered a solution?”
This begs the question as to whether describing any
collection of functionality as a solution makes sense any longer? Indeed, it
might be the NonStop user who positions such functionality as a solution but
like stating a strategic direction, this is solely the domain of the user and
not something that vendors necessarily need to brand as such. Hybrid IT really
does have implications for everything we do and applied to the modern mix of
hardware, virtual machines and containers, the operating system and more, does
any one application address all the needs of an enterprise?
“I see the application sphere as being best described
as having standard and differentiated IT solutions,” wrote HPE Distinguished
Technologist, Keith Moore, in an email exchange. In this instance standard does
apply to what we are familiar with in addressing market verticals like finance
and manufacturing whereas differentiated applies to that which we see coming
out of the Agile deployment field. In other words, differentiated is the offering
that “usually provides a piece of a complete business IT functionality.”
As for the question as to whether today’s middleware, infrastructure, tools and visualization have crossed the threshold to become solutions in their own right, “The original question was squarely aligned to what I am calling a “standard” (undifferentiated) IT which some (many) IT deployments are still locked into,” said Moore. “I wanted to explicitly point out that it is a matter of business perspective whether you can (will) embrace an alternative to COTS/SaaS, or (continue with) legacy.”
Clearly the arrival of cloud services in combination with Agile and the myriad
variety of open source offerings and blurring the lines completely. What is a
solution, then? This was referred to by HPE Master Technologist Justin Simonds
as the ability today to “assemble the components you need to offer a business
function/service. After a fashion if you want to go back to former times,
it is not too different from the old Pathway/serverclass model back when
customers developed and differentiated on what the NonStop team provided.”
Modern NonStop vendors are embracing open, Agile even
as they are beginning to embrace clouds. This is a move away from standard to
differentiated where the NonStop user will be making decisions as to the best
fit for their enterprise. Then again, much like some still talk about the times
when there were forces pulling these same enterprises towards distributed and
away from centralization there will always be the potential to once again
embrace standard purely for the simplicity and uncomplicated way it addresses
today’s business requirements.
Answers: Continue with legacy and products aimed at a
market vertical? Steer away from COTS / SaaS? Enterprises no longer look to
just automate payrolls or connect ATMs. The business drivers for IT are much
more complicated and interconnected than that, with regulatory and statutory
edicts to consider as well. Perhaps a closing comment from Moore says it best.
“If I was a newly hired CIO/CTO of a company, I would always first discover
which of these two directions the company is established with and would assume
my decisions would be influenced by that status quo. Not surprisingly, legacy
and the mix of different user needs dictate that most enterprise IT have a mix
of both.”
You may never pull off the highway to visit Mussentuchit,
but on the other hand when it comes to NonStop, Mustn’t Touch It no longer
applies. To the contrary, NonStop systems have participated in the pursuit of
greater integration with the rest of the enterprise. No longer silo-ed running
a self-supporting solution but part of the whole of IT. In the end, the concept
of solution may need to be revised yet again as it suggests legacy and a model
for deployment waning in popularity.
It may not happen all at once but for the NonStop community the continuous adaptation we often talk about continues for NonStop and for that the ease with which it has embraced modernity, the HPE NonStop team deserves our sincerest thanks.
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