A long time ago, walking around the campus of Tandem Computers we would watch Lockheed P-3 Orion aircrafts returning from their mission of surveillance over the Pacific. One of our colleagues with a military background would explain all this and tested us with a question from time to time as another Orion flew past “and what is its mission?”
Around
that time, I was attending a Meta (now Gartner) conference in Phoenix along
with other participants from Tandem and the night sky was putting on quite a
display. Picking out the constellation, Orion, one of our group participants turned
and playfully asked our military coworker, “and what is its mission?”
And
it continues to resonate with me to this day. I am constantly being challenged on
what is my mission and, in many instances, the context is unclear. Am I looking
at the night sky or am I focused on items much closer to home. When it comes to
missions, they can be given to us or self-imposed. To execute we need to accept
them, of course, and it is obvious that self-imposed ones better be liked.
Missions need clarity of purpose together with a commitment to pursue, against
all odds. Yes, remember Mission Impossible?
For
me, it has become quite clear. Having passed a decade and a half providing
content to a variety of HPE NonStop customers, vendors and on occasion, to the
HPE team, my focus for 2025 and into the following year, will be on the independent
NonStop vendors not included on the NonStop price book. The sun has not yet set
on my time when it comes to my consulting marketing gig given such a
destination lies far away, a horizon barely visible behind distant clouds.
What do I mean when I say independent? A few years back the NonStop made a strategic error – a miscue that resonates to this day. Proposals to ensure all NonStop vendor products could be sourced directly from the NonStop sales team fell short, as under the misguided belief that as a group, HPE team couldn’t take on the responsibility of validating the product offerings and the business worthiness of too many partners.
The concept of the NonStop price list including only select
vendors arose; yet one more misstep. And yet, both NonStop vendor groups within
the NonStop community remain very much aligned with the mission of NonStop –
bringing fault tolerance to a marketplace increasingly intolerant of glitches,
human error and the many reasons for outages as we see being reported of late.
For
2024 I saw multiple presentations given by HPE executives promoting a very
large community of NonStop vendors and I need to thank Casey Taylor, VP &
GM HPE NonStop, Compute, HPC & AI, for the work she did to make such
promotions more than just “slideware.” Fast forward to today and the independent
NonStop vendors, those not being represented on the NonStop price book, either
in part or in full and have no real HPE champions.
Have
we all grown rather numb over the NonStop team’s persistence with resilience?
Whether digital, business, data and more and the effort being made pushing
resilient frameworks? For the NonStop community their efforts have addressed
current NonStop users of on-the-price-book security, monitoring, back up and
D/R solutions, which is all good. Nothing like have a couple of slides for
resilience auditors to look at knowing full well that understanding what makes
a NonStop a nonstop solution, will likely not lead to any meaningful
conversations.
If
you aren’t running a combination of product offerings from Xypro, ETI-NET,
Gravic and more than the presence of a resilience framework is meaningless. No
NonStop customer of alternate products already deployed where relationships
with vendors, particularly independent vendors, is strong and where
contemplating migrations on the basis of PowerPoint slides is highly unlikely
to be pursued.
That
is not to say products like those from ETI-NET, Xypro and Gravic don’t do the
job, as indeed among this mix are some excellent product offerings. Rather,
almost every NonStop customer for instance already has ETI-NET, or Xypro, to
name just two, products installed so it is all rather a moot point. Like
preaching to the converted.
Should
you be a NonStop customer deeply committed to products from comforte, NTI, IR
and more, then hit the check box as you have the necessary pieces of such
frameworks already deployed. Nothing more to see here, as a matter of fact.
Instead of looking over their shoulders at what is being proposed, it would be
a lot better if you reexamined deployed products, reviewing them for
fit-for-purpose for what is now becoming the focus of the IT industry.
It'
no good looking back when all around you are looking forward. This has been
particularly the case at NTI which, working with partners like TANDsoft and
Infrasoft, have repositioned its products to better support the integration of
data with external databases and processes fueling analytics and AI. The
importance of this work for the NonStop community is that its all about
modernization and being proactive in the new data centric world. NTI has turned
its skills at replication to integration with open-source platforms “that
collect, store, and process data streams in real time.”
It
is this need to leverage products like Apache Kafka in support of data
streaming whereby data created on NonStop can arrive at time-series database
for use within AI that has become important to NonStop customers. And just this
past week, NTI finished the PoC (Proof of Concept) test and wrapped up its
contract with first real-world customer licensing the combination of DRNet® with DRNet®/Kafka powered by uLinga.
As
a former Oracle GoldenGate customer, this NonStop customer migrated to DRNet®, where adding DRNet®/Kafka became an easy decision to make – a
next step, if you like, in their modernization journey. Not throwing two
separate products into the mix but capitalizing on an integrated solution
developed together by both NonStop vendors that is supported through
configuration changes.
You
will be reading more of this in the upcoming Spring Issue of the 2% Club
Advocate newsletter - referring to the voice of the NTI loyalty program
– watch for it to be digitally available shortly. Consider this 2% Club loyalty
program as a reward for those who are current, as well as potential future, NTI
customers. This reference to NTI is not
the only instance where NonStop independent vendors are increasing their
commitment to modernization and to accessing open source where it makes sense
for the NonStop customer.
However,
it is among the first NonStop independent vendors to deliver solutions the
marketplace is demanding. Together NTI and Infrasoft are delivering one more
feature. What we call the roundtrip ticket given the presence of full
bidirectional support with Kafka as a data streaming platform – a must if your
data looks for confirmation from external AI processes.
With
this, it is now my mission to address the egregious decision on price list inclusion
of just a small minority of NonStop vendors. This year, you will be reading
from me a lot less – practically nothing at all – about those NonStop vendors present
on the NonStop price book but a lot more about independent NonStop vendors like
TANDsoft, TIC, NTI, CSP, Infrasoft, and more.
A
few posts back, after I was asked about who would be creating more noise in
support of NonStop, I decided to do something different. Let me be very clear,
my mission today is to direct all the noise that I can generate in support of
all those NonStop vendors openly competing with “the included!” That slide of
Casey Taylor’s needs to become the true blueprint for where NonStop customers
can turn to see the broadest range of software available to every NonStop
customer.
Are
you ready to join me and be willing to step in? Will you be making more noise
and taking on a similar mission? With as many global NonStop events as are
planned for 2025 there will be plenty of opportunity, as Jimmy Buffett once
sang:
Comments