Nothing too surprising running across this sign other
than thinking more about where it was placed. A pleasant enough location you
would think but hiding a secret albeit wrapped in a little humor. Situated
close to the Intracoastal Waterway along the Florida panhandle, it fronts a
small dock in a marshy estuary tidal known to be frequented by Alligators.
Having already overheard locals advising holiday makers not to enter this part
of the waterway to paddleboard, clearly strapped into a kayak makes a whole lot
more sense. Like going in for kabobs made up of cubes of meat pierced by a
stick came to mind.
As an Australian who has spent time in Queensland’s
far north, we know all too well the unpredictive nature of the local giant
salt-water crocodiles, I have a healthy respect for these reptiles, be that
alligators or crocodiles and there is nothing indecisive about me thinking
about mucking about with boats this close to where sightings have occurred.
With Hurricane Debby having missed us, even as we were subject to a series of
afternoon thunderstorms, I can only imagine how the gloominess of evenings
would have provided perfect cover for these finely tuned predators. Turning
your back on the water, inside a kayak or not, has all the hallmarks of very
foolish behavior.
As a body of enthusiasts, the HPE NonStop community is
about to head to the annual NonStop Technical Boot Camp event for 2024.
Otherwise known simply as NonStop TBC2024, it represents a big opportunity to
spend a lot of time with likeminded folks focused on all things NonStop
related. New hardware? New Operating System features? New middleware and
infrastructure? Virtualization? It all will be addressed as these enthusiasts
warm to just how much energy HPE is putting into NonStop as a system, a
platform and for some astute observers of the value of NonStop, an
opportunistic edge solution.
As one
colleague, who remains steadfast in his opinions about NonStop, recently wrote
in an article submitted to the August issue of NonStop Insider about how, “The
first real computer that (we) can associate with enterprise workloads is at the
edge. Critical needs are: availability, scalability, and security. These
IoT Edge services are often placed into the network side of the enterprise
where the requirements are for high speed.” The author is Keith Moore, whom I
respect immensely, and such an opinion resonated strongly with me – in a world
that is polarizing around cloud and edge, surely the bigger opportunity for
NonStop is the edge.
With what we are witnessing today, the division or
separation that exists between the cloud and the edge has become decidedly
murky waters and with only a few steps into this murkiness we can end up being
“Up to our A***s in Alligators, to paraphrase a popular adage. More
importantly, it comes back to what an enterprise references as a division and
from what we have read of late about the poor performance of critical cloud
services decidedly affected by poor QA processes not to mention DDoS attacks,
the need to make the edge more robust and perceived cloud-like even as the
cloud needs to be as well-managed as the edge, perhaps establishing boundaries
that separate has become a moot point.
Referencing existing HPE product offerings and
prototypes already demonstrated (remember NonStop TBC2016 and 2017?) Keith
Moore then wrote in his article to NonStop Insider of how with, “Industry 4.0 or “4th Industrial
Revolution” is a current concept that seems to be taking hold. It assumes an
edge compute will handle significant workload in the 4th Industrial
Revolution. And the work done on EdgeLine and NonStop should be able to play a
part in that next gen industrial age.”
However, it’s worth considering how NonStop approached
market verticals back when it was founded, five decades ago. Consider the
mainframe and how NonStop was introduced more or less as an intelligent
front-end capable of processing ATM and POS transactions even as the link to
the mainframe failed. Yes, it’s also worth remembering too that at the end of
the 1970s and well into the 1980s, mainframes represented a single point of
failure and they failed; barely delivering three nines of uptime. The lessons
learnt all that time ago are as relevant today as they ever were back in the
day.
For all the technology talks and the promotion of
great advances in software, the price that enterprises are paying is still just
as relevant as the lessons learnt. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) packaged with
an increased appreciation for an OpEx option alongside the more traditional
CapEx option has heavily influenced the rise of the cloud. Elasticity of
service supported by the preferred pay-as-you-go model (something I am being
led to believe will likely be covered by the NonStop team at NonStop TBC 2024
with NonStop embracing a similar model), is keeping the lid on price hikes.
Just as importantly though, when NonStop becomes a
consideration as a network or edge participant, the pricing models of the past,
more reflective of mainframe pricing, begins to break down with enterprises
demanding more from participating vendors, including HPE and the NonStop team.
IBM used to promote a model where the device in hand was priced in the tens of
thousands, the intermediate or regional processor was priced in the hundreds of
thousands leaving the mainframe to comfortably support price points in the
millions is a failed model. However, even today under the guise of value
pricing, some of this former model from IBM continues and this needs to be
readdressed by the NonStop community.
All of the NonStop community, mind you. Not just the
NonStop team but NonStop vendors as well who for the most part have remained
outliers for any such price rationalization pursuit. It isn’t that enterprises
no longer value the solutions supported by NonStop, but rather are looking for NonStop to step in line with
the competition. And nothing ostracizes a competitor than being too costly, no
matter the arguments provided about the reduced, even declining TCO.
It is now time to take decisive action. And in so
doing, make it easier for the entire NonStop vendor community to participate,
worldwide. Whereas the addition of a small selection of vendors to the HPE
price book addressed one question raised by NonStop customers with regards to
simplifying the invoicing conundrum, it did very little to address reducing the
TCO.
In fact, it could be argued that combining the good,
the bad and the ugly in this manner exacerbated the problem, hiding the real
cost of the solution in such a way as it was even harder to sort out what was
being provided. Leave bundling to the insurance or even the auto industry – it
has no place in technology. Due diligence remains an absolute must as does
having a best of breed mindset.
Where does this take us? Spending time in Florida, as
we are now doing, we are reminded that we have encroached on the swampland that
was home to the alligator. So why should we be surprised when we encounter such
a reptile? For as long as I can remember, images of data centers and the
networks and interfaces they support, the image that comes to mind is of a
spider’s web. So why should we then be surprised to feel trapped?
And as anyone born and raised in Sydney knows, there’s
always the risk of running into a Funnel Web Spider that like the alligator,
has the ability to kill you if provoked. Swamps, spiders’ nests, and perhaps
worse – who doesn’t remember an encounter with a technology shark only too
happy to devour you with fees and charges that, at some point, were simply
unimaginable. Looking back at the bad old days of the late 1980s, these
predators were seen circling unsuspecting technology prospects making
unrealistic, over-the-top, optimistic promises only to pass on to consulting
companies to sort out the mess they left behind.
Does this still happen today? Unfortunately, many of
them have surfaced promoting cloud solutions for the enterprise ignoring the
simple fact that IT as a resource is simply too valuable to be left to someone
else goodness knows where. For the NonStop customer, experience has been hard
fought and recognition of exemplary vendors within the ranks of the NonStop
community has become much easier to do. Recognition that oftentimes takes you
down a different route as espoused by your overly ambitions NonStop sales team
where decisive decision-making gains immediate rewards..
Yes, I will be presenting at NonStop TBC2024 and my
thanks go out to NTI for all their support in 2024. As we celebrate the golden
anniversary of NonStop I continue to set my eyes on what NonStop will look like
in fifty years as we will celebrate its centenary. As I do, the one item that
continues to jump off the page is how NonStop will eventually be everywhere and
in so doing, it will reside even closer to the edge. Perhaps we will all be
augmented with NonStop technology at some point.
But before that day arrives, looking at new market
verticals for NonStop takes us back to the past and in so doing, elevates the
conversation of NonStop on the edge, keeping enterprises in business, no matter
what happens in the cloud. Are you ready for that time? Is your current vendor
looking to work with you? Or, is your journey taking you deeper into the
murkiness of the swamp. It’s time to take those decisive decisions.
Look too for more on this topic in the upcoming August issue of NonStop Insider and make plans to join with the rest of the NonStop community the gathering in Monterey for NonStop TBC2024.
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