My June Journey

 

When this saying of Mark Twain popped up in my LinkedIn feed, I took it as a sign that this month’s post should feature commentary on the journey I took this month. It involved many miles, a conference, and opportunities to talk to well-placed industry experts. Time on the road is also an opportunity to escape routine and in so doing, provides ample time to simply observe what transpires around us – an important element even for the most jaded of IT professionals.

From Florida, drive to Colorado to then fly to Dublin, London and Paris before an extended weekend in the Bordeaux idly drifting on rivers while passing wineries, musing all the time on what is happening today with NonStop. Or should I correct myself and say, with HPE Nonstop Compute. Yes, I am missing HPE Discover this year as I extended my stay in Europe. Put this down as yet one more case where I cannot acquire things ‘by vegetating in one little corner of the earth.’ Not even for a week or two.

The desire to think more deeply about Nonstop has come about following considerable changes happening across the board at HPE. Its also coming at a time when there is a mix of challenges as well as opportunities for Nonstop, not the least being its position within the HPE products portfolio. As a community we have all become comfortable with the personnel changes, including a new organization head among others, but now the time is ripe to see what fruits appear. Clearly, it remains a story about solutions and their presence in targeted market verticals, but again, it still has about it a sense of “is there more to come”. Or, is what we see today all we can expect to see in the coming years?

When news broke that new converged systems had become available, it wasn’t entirely unexpected as numerous “serious, in confidence, sneak-peeks,” had been circulating for almost a year. It all became quite official at the E-BITUG European NonStop Symposium held this month in Dublin, Ireland. As announcements go, it was somewhat routine – new processors, more memory, faster comms, etc. – but what was encouraging for the Nonstop community was the publicity that followed. When you see publications such as the Financial Times feature the news of Nonstop Compute NS9 X5 and NS5 X5 being announced, then you can’t stop being impressed.

However, it was only a matter of a few weeks later that we heard the news about the new logo of HPE where the green element has been replaced with something more stylish. Following the news unveiled at E-BITUG about the renaming of HPE NonStop to HPE Nonstop Compute was all part of a serious overhaul of branding by HPE marketing. After all, it has been ten years since HPE parted ways with HP. In the field of IT, ten years is a very long time. New products for Nonstop; new name for the group with HPE Nonstop Compute and a new logo for HPE – coincidental? Very unlikely.

While I am not plugged into the inner workings of HEP marketing, including the work done by those responsible for branding, I have to acknowledge that what they have delivered is worth our attention. HPE is still to convince me about the level of excitement Nonstop creates within the organization but at least its not OpenVMS or HP-UX. It may not occupy as elevated position as Cray Supercomputers or Aruba Networks – or even HPE GreenLake – but the mere fact that Nonstop entered into the re-branding conversations is encouragement enough.

It is precisely because the market being served by Nonstop is a boutique marketplace where dwells those industries that by the very nature of their operations must run a true 24 x 7 x 365 platform, where both planned and unplanned downtime cannot be measured realistically. In other words, metrics suggesting a few seconds of outage a year become meaningless when there are reference sites that have experienced no downtime whatsoever for 2 or 3 decades. The ideal of there being CIOs who don’t lose sleep of potential outage disruptions is realistic with Nonstop.

The NonStop journey from Tandem Computers to Compaq and NonStop to HPE where today there is both HPE Nonstop Compute (addressing converged systems) together with HPE Virtualized Nonstop (addressing virtual systems) is remarkable in the sense that it remains the unquestioned leader in availability. Other major vendors present startling figures about availability but when you peel back the numbers, they don’t include planned outages. Or for that matter, weekends.

There will always be new markets opening their doors. It’s inevitable. It’s just the way it is with industry as new industrial processes develop. The simple fact is that the world has fundamentally shifted to an always-on business model. Whether it’s finance, manufacturing, transportation or the supply-chain in general, outages planned or otherwise come with a cost. Ultimately, that cost comes down to a degraded end-user experience that can be hard to overcome once widespread outages occur.

To “not lose sleep” seems almost the unspoken attribute of Nonstop. There will likely be more changes to come for Nonstop but the bottom line is that it’s still in the game. It could have been so easy to relegate Nonstop to the dustbin, but HPE didn’t. Throughout its journey, Nonstop has managed to distance itself time and time again from that dreaded label, legacy. I have always considered Nonstop to be legendary but to cement that position in the industry, there needs to be many more followers of Nonstop to come forward with their own stories about Nonstop.

But it is a journey. And perhaps in some future time we might all recall that it started in June 2025. As for Margo and me we are looking forward to returning home even as we have been absent from home when world events unfolded in ways we didn’t expect. For those who might be interested to read given that I am always on the lookout for newsworthy items, we safely walked the streets of Dublin, London and Paris (for more than one day) without a concern in the world. It is this sense of peace we experienced that has influenced this post. The Nonstop community is coming out of the month of June at peace with the future of Nonstop and if that is the only milestone we pass, then that is sufficient for me. Let the journey of Nonstop continue!