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NonStop: the solution is what we call it!

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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