A post late last year
following NonStop TBC 2023:
“Wherever travel takes
Margo and me, I often take photos
at that location. A reminder of where we have been
and a
way to start conversations with family and friends.”
With the upcoming NonStop
Technical Boot Camp 2024 (NonStopTBC24) being a matter of only a few days away,
travel continues to dominate the conversations at home. This year, we drove our
SUV from Florida to Colorado where we prepped for the conference completing, as
was needed to do, the presentation I will be giving on Tuesday, 9/24/2024, at
1:30PM. Will I see you there? Sure hope so – it will be new and will tackle a
couple of interesting developments within the NonStop community. Ingenuity? It
is certainly taking center stage as the modernization of NonStop continues.
Colorado, however, was just
a midpoint in our trip to Monterey, California. Preparation completed to drive
to Monterey; it was a case of loading our sports car for the trip to the west
coast. It’s the second time in 2024 that we have undertaken such a
cross-country trip and it never ceases to surprise us. There’s always something
to talk about each time we hit the highway. The NonStop community will be
celebrating its Gold Anniversary at this conference and with Margo and me
having been closely associated with NonStop since early on, when it was Tandem
Computers, our combined time spans some seventy years.
While this is important in
itself, it’s a reminder to both of us of just how well NonStop has stood the
test of time. I am not sure even the staunchest of NonStop fans employed back
in the late 1970s would have ever thought that there would still be as big a
fan base for NonStop as exists today. At every Regional User Group (RUG)
meeting we see the NonStop community turn out to support it. Whether the
interest is in hearing more about the NonStop product portfolio and the
roadmaps for each participating product or simply to catch up with friends, the
result is always the same.
From networking
opportunities, as a community, we inevitably grow as a result of
shared-experiences, even as we take the time to explore the latest innovations
from the many NonStop vendors who support conferences and events worldwide. But
who among us in the 1970s truly believed that all the convenience items we
treasured most would one day fit into our phones and yes, even our watches; from
Walkman to games to cameras to telephones and answering machines to compute
power in support of apps. Unbelievable! Miraculous!
Which leads me to the
question about the near-term future of NonStop. Some time back I looked at
where NonStop might play a role in fifty years’ time – the past is always a
time of nostalgia and that’s all good but for me, I am always looking ahead. We all know how it was Baseball’s great Yogi
Berra who once said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about
the future” and yet we persist. So whereto NonStop? In a world that is
increasingly separating technology into a presence either in the cloud or out
on the edge, where does NonStop fit?
There has been positive
moves on the part of NonStop development to provide an environment better
serving NonStop developers from within public clouds. And that is a great start
– the traditional, well-documented elasticity of provisioning such an integral
part of the cloud experience – is proving well suited to developers. However,
for major application deployments, probably not the best option.
We continue to hear horror
stories about both AWS and Azure over reconciling the monthly invoices with
what was contracted and about expectations being overshadowed by nervousness
over security. To pull together all the cloud resources to run applications 24
X 7 well, that’s not for the faint of heart. However, changes are taking place
for NonStop that might make this an option going forward, as the transition
from InfiniBand to RoCE to Ethernet may be the catalyst for running NonStop in
the cloud.
On the other hand, what we
are witnessing in terms of new applications for NonStop where it is the support
of end-user devices, it would seem the best way to go about selling NonStop in
volume is to get closer to the edge. This was the subject of a number of
articles in the latest issue of NonStop
Insider – did you get a chance to check out the opinion columns included
specifically addressing this topic?
It's highly unlikely that
future miniature NonStop systems will find their way into end-user offerings
(although, having watched the progress being made by phones and watches, it may
be too soon to rule anything), taking a small step back to where oversight or
orchestration is needed, perhaps the big potential for these future NonStop
sales will happen closer to the edge than the cloud.
Look at manufacturing –
NonStop may not control a manufacturing robot directly but NonStop is a
platform ideally suited to supporting many such manufacturing robots proving
advantageous when changes have to be implemented in real time right across the
factory floor. And there are other examples that come to mind. NonStop may not
make it onto a container ship (although, according to folk lore of NonStop,
such NonStop systems were present on ferries at one time), but rather dockside
up and down the unload, transport and distribution pathways. Possibly multiples
of NonStop given how many container offloading cranes are typically activated
for a given container ship following docking.
The photo atop this post was
taken looking out the back of our rental villa in Florida. We are coming to
terms with living in Florida, especially during the summer months, is not a lot
different to living in Colorado. Now that we have concluded that we need an
abode in both locations – one next to the grandkids, the other next to sea
level atmospheric pressure – it is a stark reminder that there is just as big a
difference as there is with the cloud versus the edge.
It's not to big a stretch of
the imagination to view a home (in Florida) as something similar to a cloud
experience with everything you need to live readily at hand. Viewing a condo or
a studio flat much closer to family (in Colorado) as akin to the edge isn’t all
that difficult to imagine. The image may stop with that as the comparison
doesn’t lend itself to anything further and yet, for now we have all of our
transportation needs met with more vehicles parked nearer to the condo than the
home in Florida.
But the question remains.
Where will you anticipate seeing NonStop carve out a sustainable future assured
enough to add another fifty years to its history? Will we get to closer to
finding out when we gather in Monterey for NonStopTBC24? If nothing else happens
at least there are bound to be conversations as I am anticipating that there
are just as many opinions on this topic as there will be conference
participants.
And yes, don’t forget to plan on joining me when I consider on behalf of NTI the topic of business resilience and how it will be the NonStop vendors who perform the heaviest of lifting in the ongoing fight to reduce your TCO. See you all very soon.
Comments