Real Time View

It’s time for your weekend read. And so much is happening for the Nonstop community that it’s worth considering how well Nonstop Compute offerings remain active participants in a technology world that is adapting to dramatic changes happening all around it – change never lets up but this year, we bear witness to much more than we have seen previously. Last year, Margo and I moved home. Not once but twice. A quick sale of our home in Windsor, Colorado, a small satellite suburb just outside of Ft Collins, Colorado. Fort Collins being a place where HP once dominated the local employment scene. We moved our goods and yes, cars into storage. We then acquired a condo down in Longmont from a member of our daughter’s family. Longmont is another small satellite suburb bordering Boulder, Colorado, a place where Insession gained its foothold in the US. We moved some items out of storage into the condo even as we provided items for our daughters newly renovated basement. Addressing family needs, w...

No sun on the Rockies, not even the light of day I feel that old cabin fever coming on It won't be long before my ship comes in Gonna sail right out of Colorado Songwriters: Clint Patrick Black / James Hayden Nicholas I am a storyteller. As a storyteller, I am also an observer and as an observer I am yet to say that I have seen it all. Quite to the contrary, I am convinced that there is still much more to see and when it comes to IT, each and every time I speculate that a new dawn has come it seems that such an observation is only ever short term as with one dawn appearing over the horizon there is always another, and another, about to appear. Such is technology that nothing lasts forever to quote a popular song. I chose the photo above for its symbolism. Hard to escape? It’s a lighthouse. It may be decorative but they illuminate the location just as effectively. Dropping our gaze to the dock we see that there’s a warning: Snakes and Alligators. Who remembers that popular ...

  Anyone who was in IT in the late ‘70s knows all too well how IT managers wore pocket protectors and flashed their gold Cross Pen and Pencil sets. Long before Walmart and Costco there were several club-like discount stores where you could shop for deeply discounted Cross Pens. At one time Margo and I even bought deeply discounted Montblanc Meisterstück fountain and ball-point pens. Margo still cherishes hers but somehow in my travels of the ‘90s I managed to misplace my set. The significance of the presence of gold Cross Pen and Pencil sets weren’t so much about status or even leadership as much as it was about culture. They signified a sense of belonging to a profession where it wasn’t about slide rules and scopes as much as it was about drawing flowcharts and transcribing intent onto coding pads. You just had to have a good pencil and then the pen played a role in documenting a cover sheet. Perhaps it is simply too much time spent on Zoom calls or maybe the gaps in betw...

Attending virtual events with more to come, the signs suggest that this is now normal; have you composed yourself ahead of what’s to come? I have to admit, when this image came to me in a tweet, it brought a smile to my face. Who else but the local authorities in San Jose would have come up with this, based on the expectation that travelers in their city would understand the reference. Given all that is happening around us in these times, it’s pleasing to see that at least one authority retains a sense of humor. On the other hand, I am sure it had the desired effect. Silicon Valley will always have its detractors but it is with signs like this that the human side of technology comes through, resonating with us all. We didn’t make it up to Silicon Valley on our last trip to California; Monterey was as far north as our time allowed. It’s unusual for us to skip an opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues but I wanted to make sure I was back in time to wrap up assignments before...

Driving through a scorched landscape with little left to remind us of its former beauty, it begged the question: Are we torching (our plans) to retain on-prem IT and do we have a path back? In the last post to this NonStop community blog I wrote of how we had few plans to drive the Sierras any time soon. A reference in passing to the times we have driven to Burlingame, California, for the annual NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) event. The reference was followed by remarks about taking away any opportunity to drive somewhere as being a real downer for Margo and me. Well, that all changed over the course of just a week although we really didn’t cross the Sierra divide to head into the Bay but rather, we drove a southern route that took us into the greater Los Angeles area. Call it being optimistic about our chances of escaping the global pandemic but the opportunity presented itself as almost a last minute development. We had been on the phone with a number of clients of late after wh...

Hybrid IT, Clouds and transition from CapEx to OpEx – what’s it all mean for the new NonStop? There is always a degree of uncertainty whenever we head out onto America’s highways at this time of year. Will we be troubled by bad weather and road closures? Will road maintenance disrupt our plans in any way? Could there be mechanical failures of one kind or another? Driving to California means we had to traverse both the Rockies and the Sierras and with the uncertainty of fall conditions, this means we had to take the all-wheel-drive SUV. In the past, even in such a vehicle we have been tested by heavy snowfalls west of Truckee. There was a time when even our Jeep SRT8 struggled to stay the course when the snow on the highway turned to ice. But not this time! Apart from dealing with blowing snow in Wyoming – when doesn’t it blow in Wyoming? – our crossing of Interstate 80 was uneventful and “pumpkin” (our nickname for our Range Rover) never put a foot wrong. Oftentimes,...

Sailing a modern racing yacht can be complicated and yet, for many years this too it’s been the same for IT. However, CIOs all want to see IT simplified and HPE has now stepped up to address this … When I first started sailing I had to learn the ropes. Actually, and figuratively! In terms of actually I had to be able to translate what I had to do into tying an appropriate knot and as for figuratively, just a few outings before I really did have to know how to tie a bowline knot. No excuses! Yes, and pretty much blindfolded. So much for learning, “the rabbit comes out of the hole” and yes, “around the tree and back down the hole!” Never did visualize that but one seasoned sailor taught me a short-hand way of achieving exactly the same goal. Simple, right? Well not exactly; seems like everyone with whom I sailed had a different way of tying a bowline knot. No matter; the ends justify the means, right? On the other hand a yacht is a vessel where everything can go horribly wrong ...

Recent travels created memories; for HPE NonStop, the coming of dawn bodes well for a spectacular and bright future for the new NonStop! Memories of travelling the rivers and canals of Europe remain fresh. It wasn’t all that long ago and every time I reach for the phone there is a picture being displayed that does a very good job of opening the floodgates to these memories and they just come flooding in. I guess it would be unrealistic to expect that they will last forever, but all the same, one of the reasons any of us ventures far from home is to create new and lasting memories. On the occasion when this photo was taken, I had just strolled to the top of the boat and onto its “sun deck” to check on how far we had travelled overnight when I was greeted with this spectacular sight. I hadn’t expected to see this red a sky emerging with the dawn but it was hard to ignore! While the passage of time seems to accelerate through the years, as I looked to the horizon from the boat...