With summer in full swing and with temperatures
climbing higher than we have seen in quite some time, it’s hard to imagine that
seasons will be again in transition in oh, say three months’ time. Living
alongside the Rocky Mountains we have come to expect anything and, each day we
step outside, we can be at a loss as to what the will weather do; clear skies
aren’t all that helpful.
It’s not all that often that I start with a weather
commentary but this year, it’s getting harder to ignore. Floods in Australia
and fires in Portugal! Tornados in the US and more fires even as there are
swarms of jellyfish in the eastern Mediterranean! Predicting the weather so it
seems remains as much a hit and miss exercise as it has always been; here in
Colorado the story goes that “if you don’t like the weather, just wait five
minutes and it will change.”
At the end of August I will wrap up fifteen years of
posting to this blog, Real Time View. Shortly I will begin my sixteenth year
and you will find me still writing posts about NonStop. As I look back upon
this journey, one thing strikes me more than anything else. We continue to have
a thriving NonStop community even as there are so many more media channels
within which you will find a constant stream of updates and predictions on all
things NonStop! On the other hand, it has never been about waiting five minutes
to see if the NonStop journey will change.
The NonStop community, unlike the weather, is rather
predictable. Change often seems to move at glacial speeds and yet, when you
look back to August 2007 and to that first post to this blog, so much has
changed with NonStop. We have seen it all; racks, blades, pizza boxes, dumb
chassis, smart chassis, disks that were once solid state are now flash drives
and yes, NonStop entered the world of virtual machines. In little over a
decade! Amazing when you look at all the options we have today.
Early next year I will once again pen my three wished
for NonStop. I have done this every three years following the first post back
in February, 2008. It has always proved to be a fun project for Margo and me as
we consider what might happen in the following three years. More often than not
we like to stretch the goals we have for NonStop, but with the passage of time,
many of what we wished for have indeed come to fruition. Put it down to the
glacial speed perhaps and the fully visible path already trod, but no matter,
the mere fact that we can openly discuss what might be ahead is testament
enough to the future of NonStop remaining rosy.
While this isn’t about the three wishes that we will
address next year it is a sneak preview into what we have listed as
possibilities. If you want to revisit either the three wishes posts or simply
look at the previews, just tab over to Labels and scroll down to the entries
for Wishes
and Wishes
– Preview. But here’s a headline for you – the list of candidate
possibilities for what will be included in our predictions as three wishes has
never been longer and that too is an encouraging sign.
What has made the list to date (and I am sure between
now and February 2023 new entries will appear) and what will we be
prioritizing? For now we have five entries but with NonStop TBC 2022 upcoming
as well as with what we are still digesting following HPE Discover, expect to
see two and maybe three more entries added to the list. But what did we cover
in the three wishes posted February 13, 2020? Would you now be surprised that
we covered topics that included new systems options for NonStop (not just
ProLiant but Synergy and Apollo), NonStop’s presence in GreenLake and yes, the
gradual disappearance of NonStop within virtual machines.
What we did miss is the option for NonStop to run on
EdgeLine systems (EL4000 and EL8000) which has us excited as well as appearance
of NonStop applications on the basis of “as-a-Service.” Also missing from our
observations was the organizational shifts that occurred, with NonStop an
integral part of High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Headed
by Justin Hotard and together with a new Senior VP and Chief Product Officer
for the group, Trish Damkroger, where oversight of NonStop will reside, it
leaves open the bigger question of what comes next for NonStop.
There is no better way to introduce the candidates that
made the list than to say that organizational shifts present opportunities as
much as they simply suggest change. As Tom Petty used to sing, “the sky was the
limit” even as he added, “Into the great wide open; Under them skies of blue”
the future for NonStop may be so bright, as another popular singer suggested,
“I gotta wear shades.” With changes too in the sales organizations, “things are
going great and they’re only getting better,” seems more than an appropriate
line to add. With Neil Davis in EMEA, new arrival Karen Ramirez in North
America and Suresh Menon in APAC, I have a sense that there will be additional
logos added to the portfolio by the time we post next February.
Making the list? How about Partnerships. Neil has done
a great job in bringing Manufacturing-as-a-Service through abat+ and
Payments-as-a-Service through Lusis to market. The next year or so will be
telling with respect to the traction developed by the presence of these
applications. Seriously, though we need a lot more and in this regard, I am
wishing for HPE to provide additional seed money to select vendors to bring
them into partnership with the NonStop team. There has been considerable talk
of late about doing something like this, but seriously, it is time for action
and I am hoping we hear more on this topic at the upcoming NonStop Technical
Boot Camp, 2022.
The NonStop community itself is a candidate as we wish
for a continuation of the unity that Connect provides through its publications,
events and forums. Sharing knowledge is incredibly important and remains the
sole voice for every member of the NonStop vendor community. Margo and I have
been involved with user groups for decades and view them as a vital instrument
in fostering shared experiences across all regions and within all market
verticals.
GreenLake will remain a candidate even as I am looking
for feedback from the community as to the level of interest in moving from
CapEx to OpEx. Only paying for what you need is a message appearing everywhere
you turn these days, but for those running mission critical applications
requiring permanent availability there remains some doubt as to the advantages
of re-implementing on this basis. Perhaps there are some financial services
organizations enamored with running applications on private clouds where
security might be better but even so, the move to GreenLake by existing NonStop
users will probably take many years.
The path to being able to run anywhere and everywhere
on virtual machines more or less at the touch of an icon is still a very long
way off. However, the potential to add yet more layers of abstraction such that
it matters little as to the fabric on hand with NonStop being able to leverage
whatever technology is being provided quite transparently. This has been a goal
of mine for some time as we moved from ServerNet to InfiniBand then Converged
Ethernet/RoCE so why not support it all? There are still obstacles in the way
of those wishing to be able to run NonStop in public clouds but adding this
transparency couldn’t hurt. And there is still the issue with how fine grained
you want your fault zones to be, but like fabrics, there are choices that can
be made in this regard.
Finally, the name NonStop. Surprise you to read that I
think it has served its purpose and we need to move on. While I am not
suggesting a return or reintroduction of Tandem or of the image of the Tandem
bicycle, but rather, NonStop is really an attribute and simply adding HPE
doesn’t help a whole lot. Introduce the former Tandem chevron, but this time,
in green? Call it the Green Machine (ohm, perhaps not)? HULK: NonStop – after
all, he has never stopped and he is green for good measure! Whatever the
branding folks consider new and fresh doesn’t bother me but isn’t it time to
give NonStop a new coat of paint, re-launch, and set it on a new course?
These are all preliminary candidates to make my short
list for the upcoming post on my three wishes. I am sure there will be work
still left to do before finalizing that list and should you like to influence
the direction in which I am headed just let me know. Until then, there is lot
to think about and in simply thinking about NonStop means we all see a bright
future for the product. So yes, can you spare a set of shades as it could
become a lot brighter than any of us could imagine!
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