Travel has been an integral part of my life. Always on a journey from the time began working in IT. This has been a topic I have regularly returned to in posts here and elsewhere. Exploring the world developed into a lifelong passion for me. What hasn’t changed has been my pursuit too of my other passion, technology. These passions have become intertwined through the years to where separation may I never happen. However, what this journey has allowed me to do is to look towards where it may take me.
In the preview of where this post might go that I posted back on August 11, 2025,
as One more preview of my upcoming Three
Wishes for Nonstop
– do you recall
reading it? – my three wishes looked as though they would center on Nonstop
technology, Nonstop vendors, and Nonstop business. Since that time, these
thoughts haven’t changed. Nothing deters me today from exploring these three
topics and to muse on where the Nonstop journey is headed.
Looking
too far ahead to Nonstop’s future is fraught with missteps and simply erroneous
predictions. This is not to say we should step back from doing so, but as my
timeline has always been three years, looking at what might take place between
now and the beginning of 2028 shouldn’t be too hard. Seriously? A three-year
window? Focused solely on technology, vendors and business; surely such a
canvass offers plenty of opportunity to get things horrible wrong, but based on
previous posts dating back to 2008 I have made multiple predictions that came
to pass.
Have
you checked the post label Wishes – if not, you may want to visit to
see how many predictions did come to fruition! Granted, safety often lies with
experience and as the IT industry has only been around, in a modern commercial
sense, for less than a decade before I have started working in IT – I count
this from the time IBM launched the System/360 (S/360) mainframe
on April 7, 1964. To think, just a tad over five years later that was the
very system where I served my apprenticeship.
My
wish for Nonstop technology. In my preview I wrote of how posting about Nonstop
centered on virtualization and a cloud presence wasn’t going to move the
prediction needle all that much. And yet, I was overlooking the impact likely
to occur thanks to AI. In particular Agentic AI, which seems a more appropriate
reference given the nature of Nonstop and its presence in support of mission
critical applications. The emergence of the term “adjacent server” raised the
hackles on the back of my neck when I first heard it – with IBM we had
associated processors, specialty processors, co-processors and more. Was
Nonstop going to go down a similar path?
Well,
what I feel safe to predict is that no, Nonstop is not going to follow a
similar path to that of IBM. Furthermore, Nonstop customers will prove to be
very conservative, proceeding with much caution. The big question being asked
of late is whether the presence of such adjacent servers will deliver value?
Will transactions in flight benefit from AI in any financially beneficial
manner? Perhaps some early inroads might occur thanks to tapping AI for
improved security but there are easier, cheaper ways to do that and current
Nonstop vendors have already begun exploiting.
When
it comes to Nonstop technology, my first and indeed biggest wish for Nonstop is
for it to become a standardized way in which all distributed systems – and
clouds, I am looking at you – can become more reliable than what they are
today. I see some early signs of this taking place but for Nonstop to expand
into a bigger technology universe it has to provide universal benefits and
nothing shouts Nonstop better than what we see with the glitches, outages, poor
oversight hat appears to be prevalent across cloud service providers today. If
we are going to turn to clouds as a resource, which we are increasingly likely
to do, then for the Nonstop customer there should be an expectation that such
resources match the availability levels of Nonstop itself.
This
is not too much to ask and should be a welcome challenge accepted by the
hard-core Nonstop development team in which I am placing considerable faith.
Not just the Nonstop development team but the many hard-core Nonstop developers
within the Nonstop vendor community. My second wish then for Nonstop is a
better, more integrated almost seamless interaction between all members of the
Nonstop vendor community. There should be no more us vs them when it comes to
the Nonstop development team and the vendor development teams at large.
Having
spent time at Tandem Computers in both the Product Marketing and Product
Management organizations, introducing a third party into any development
project was a tough call for Tandem management. But it did happen. We relied on
NDM for file transfer; ESQ for PNA, IR for network and system monitoring. Eventually
ICE for advanced SNA support. All the while, we had competing products within
the Tandem development teams, but over time, we found the value that came from
others spending their dimes on such endeavors. The value that came with freeing
up funding for more important projects. Which ones, you might ask? How about
something called TCP/IP? How about embracing LANs internally with WAN via Comms
Controllers? All important stuff for the times!
Back
then, Tandem didn’t have any of those capabilities but accepting the
development prowess of third parties quickly freed up the funds to do exactly
that – build the important stuff. So, my second wish would be fulfilled when
there is an across-the-board program that farms out development to those
parties that possess skillsets that have proved themselves in the marketplace.
Could happen? Let’s turn the Nonstop TBC conferences into a platform whereby
such cooperation can be properly addressed and yes, let’s forget all about who
is on the price book and who isn’t – each Nonstop vendor would have an equal
voice.
To
put an exclamation-point on this topic we must first acknowledge that the
volume of Nonstop vendors – excluding solution vendors – is woefully less than
it used to be. For those who recall ITUG events of past years, the exhibition
hall had multiple aisles and, in some instances, two-tier booths. Imaging that.
But today, we need everyone who is in development to be part of the bigger
Nonstop development community. And perhaps this represents an opportunity for
Connect to explore – three years should be ample time to sort it all out.
As
for predicting growth within the solutions vendor community, that is going to
need a lot more transparency being provided by all involved in Nonstop
development. Transparency in the sense of support of industry-standard
languages, frameworks, tools, etc. Support of Kernel Level Threading, albeit
seriously late to market even as it was a difficult nut to crack, is one step
forward. However, this isn’t a one-shot endeavor. Whenever an industry standard
is provided, Nonstop has to make sure that it support remains current and this
too is where the Nonstop vendor community might play a role – willing to
resource as they in turn have product dependent upon that standard.
As
for my third wish then it follows that it should be all about the business of
Nonstop. Whether predictions over technology come about or even those
predictions about the Nonstop vendor community are realized, they become a moot
point if HPE isn’t behind them. As I referenced in last year’s preview of my
upcoming three wishes for Nonstop, not seeing Nonstop as an active participant
in HPE’s go-to-market plans is both disappointing as it is short-sighted.
Clearly, there remains an element within the HPE hierarchy that views Nonstop
an outlier, possibly even a continuation of legacy. Well, they don’t know
Nonstop now, do they? It is up to us to ensure the global HPE comes to
understand what they truly have in Nonstop.
Celebrating
fifty years and only trailing IBM mainframes by a decade, Nonstop has proven
itself time and time again. HPE has the recognized leader in fault tolerant
computing and at a time when things are failing more often than in the past,
surely this is good news. Now I can make wishes all day long but this time,
this is a very serious item to cover. Let me just say, my wish for Nonstop is
continuing share of the HPE senior management’s mindset. In time, I want to see
Nonstop being introduced as the gold-standard for mission-critical computing –
every opportunity where a computer – human interaction is involved, it should
be driven by Nonstop. Human? Well, of
course, this covers a multitude of interactions increasingly, more machine-like
than human. But the argument still holds.
And
that brings to observe this time, my three wishes for Nonstop aren’t as big a
stretch as they may have been in the past. That is good news. It means that
Nonstop is still here, still meeting customer’s needs and is still anchoring
much of the mission-critical transactional world today. Realizing that I
started posting my three wishes back in 2008, that wasn’t always going to be a
given. So, let’s acknowledge that Nonstop remains relevant. Just now let us
address having Nonstop become a standard. An industry standard we can all be
very proud of as we progress even deeper into this decade. A standard that
becomes pervasive and can be found everywhere!
Epilogue: This is the last post I will be
making to this blog. With the presence of my Real Time View column in The
Connection together with my column of the same name in Nonstop Insider as well
as my commitment to support a client’s quarterly newsletter, keeping content
fresh and indeed relevant, means this blog has served its purpose. I am no
longer looking to promote Pyalla Technologies, LLC., but rather, I am fully
committed to supporting my clients.
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