It may surprise many to read that as a teenager growing up on Sydney’s North Shore, I was already into cars. I made models of Formula One cars – back then it was a Ferrari “sharknose” and a Porsche (yes, Porsche were an F1 constructor for a number of years) – and I built slot-car circuits. My favorite configuration was the Warwick Farm race track; a circuit in Sydney’s western suburbs that, today, no longer exists. My mate Graham Long and I snuck out to the circuit one Saturday afternoon to see a club racing event and, from that time on, I must admit, I was hooked.
This was the 1960s and it wasn’t long before I became a regular at a slot-car
establishment in the Sydney suburb of Hornsby; nearby to my High School,
Normanhurst Boys High School. I built a model of the Pontiac Tempest –
a later model of which carried the badge, GTO, and it was a wild, overly large
car for a slot car and my crashes were legendary, as an off-track excursion would
take out several other cars. As I prepared for university, somehow this pastime
was left behind and I began to close the age gap to where I could buy a real
car.
A
short time ago I was re-reading posts from numerous Nonstop Compute solutions’
vendors when I came across this post by Peter Grendel, CEO / Founder, abat+
GmbH. “The slot car track we have at the office may look like fun – but it also
stands as a simple reminder of the race many companies are in. And if your
systems can’t keep up, you're no longer competing.” Perhaps overlooked by some,
it came with an important message for us all. “Outdated IT landscapes, rigid
architectures, disappearing expertise – these are the points where momentum is
lost … It’s not about a complete reset, but about evolving in a way that keeps
you moving while preparing for what’s next.”
Following
the recent HPE Nonstop Technology and Business Conference 2025, where a large
group of Nonstop community members were in attendance and where it was Casey
Taylor who set the tone for the event with her message of “Keeping the
Nonstop momentum going … !” This simple message, placed atop one of her
presentation slides, was to highlight a number of points. Among the most
important being, “Accelerate Innovation,” “Harness and Modernize Tooling,” and
“Develop the Talent Pipeline.” Almost a replication of the remarks by Peter
Grendel in his post, referenced above.
What
was missing is perhaps the most important aspect of Nonstop, that being, the
continuation of its fault tolerant architecture – often imitated, never
duplicated. Availability remains the cornerstone of why enterprises
continue to buy, and to upgrade, their operational Nonstop Compute converged
systems. It should be apparent to all that having an architecture that delivers
fault tolerance and to have done so over different generations of processors
and interconnects – including the recent support of virtualized Nonstop (vNS) –
there is nothing rigid about Nonstop and its fault tolerant properties.
There
was a time when working at Tandem Computers, that momentum developed around a
program called Nonstop Availability (NSA). I just happened to be the Product
Marketing participant in the program’s core team, headed by Dr Tim Chou. One
aspect of this program I really liked was taking the message to the world where
my role was to deliver the presentation in Europe. It was while travelling in
Europe, and establishing the premise of Nonstop as being as available as three
important utilities; the electricity delivered to your home, the presence of
water when you turned on the tap and the sound of a dial-tone when you turned
to your phone to start a conversation. The only time this miscued was when
visiting an Eastern European country, a question came from the audience – “you
mean, you can get all three at once?”
However,
the simple message of Nonstop being available 24 x 7 hit a nerve with many
enterprise IT professionals. It was at a time when Unix was gaining a foothold
and when Client / Server models were the topic of the day (in the pre-Internet
times), and where server clusters were gaining in popularity given how they
were typically based on cheap commodity hardware. Ethernet was becoming
prevalent as the modern choice for networking, gradually relegating legacy Token
Ring to just a footnote in history. As we look at what is needed today by
enterprise IT professionals, it’s hard not to think that many of them discount
availability that is, until something breaks or is hacked.
One
of the major telephone carriers in Australia suffered a major outage. As was
reported in the global press this outage was not only not insignificant and
highly disruptive for their customers, but it turned deadly. “Emergency calls
were offline for nearly 14 hours, during which four people died – including an
eight-week-old baby.” This follows a year of outages across almost all industry
segments so much so that we seem to have grown immune to the growing
occurrences of such outages. Whether reported as glitches, failed upgrades,
ransomware, or simply operator error, availability seems to have been pushed
deep into the background. If your systems are not fault tolerant, cannot
continue operation through points of failure, then why even labor over your
messaging when there’s just one outlier delivering fault tolerance?
Surely,
Nonstop is expensive, right? Surely Nonstop is legacy given how long it’s been
in the marketplace? Surely there are more modern approaches to masking outages?
The answers lie deep in our psyche. No enterprise wants to be singled out as
being different. No business can pursue technology solutions that are different
to what is being pursued by their industry peers. Safety surely lies in us all
going down the same path, leveraging the skills that develop along the way.
Well, turns out no, it doesn’t offer protection to simply follow the crowd.
Nonstop stands out because of the excellence of its architecture, the
robustness of the integration between hardware and software, the support for the
majority of modern development tools and much more.
As
a community, it we make light of the availability message, what value does
Nonstop bring to the market? All hardware vendors today promote their
modernity, their databases, their support of open source and yes, even their
scalability that, without highlighting its availability properties, means we
have reduced the value of Nonstop to where it becomes one of many alternatives
and not The Alternative. We often talk about the future-proofing of our IT
solutions and yet, nothing shouts louder about future proofing than Nonstop
with five decades of experience behind it. Likewise, we often talk about the
pool of experienced engineers and yet, as wider acceptance of the presence of
industry standard tools together with an API that makes fault tolerance transparency,
HPE with Nonstop Compute is demonstrating that today, Nonstop has become the
perfect fit for any enterprise looking to anchor their IT solutions on a system
that never fails.
When
it comes to availability and future-proofing, I will return to the post by
Peter Grendel where he writes, “How future-proof is your IT landscape? And just
out of curiosity – who else had one of these (slot) car tracks at home?” For
me, Peter, there is no longer a track at home but with young grandkids entering
their teenage years, who knows? I think as a community, we all who are familiar
with Nonstop can agree, availability is the cornerstone that assures Nonstop
continues, future-proofed!
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