Real Time View

The NonStop community is fully aware of the danger that comes with making assumptions about NonStop; it’s time IT professionals draw similar conclusions. For the past couple of weeks I have been the primary care giver to Margo. As reported to various sites, the Friday before Christmas Day Margo broke her leg. Badly! She has been convalescing at home following surgery and while she is making great progress, she still looks to me for assistance with almost everything she wants to do. It’s been a tough job keeping her out of her office but she has been keeping visits to her place of work to a minimum. Having said this, I have paid a price albeit minor in comparison. Thinking I know the layout of our home, I have managed to hit almost everything I pass from my feet to my elbows to my hands. Turns out, apparently, I am making assumptions about the placement of items and the image I have in my mind is not accurate. Ouch! Over the course of my career I have made a couple of choices that i...

Looking for a fun ride into the next decade? You can’t do better than jumping onto NonStop – still the best platform for mission critical applications … Our time down under is now well and truly over. We have returned to Windsor, Colorado, where the weather is taking some getting used to – after a lengthy stay in what can only be described as tropical conditions, it has been snowing here in Colorado and temperatures dropped overnight to 8F degrees (about -13C). Looking back through the photos taken during the time spent in and around Sydney, I came across the photo I took as the family walked towards “The Dish” – one of the largest movable dish radio telescopes ever built. The Dish was also the title of a movie made a while back that highlighted how it was this radio telescope that relayed the signals coming from the moon when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto its surface back in 1969. Yes, it’s huge. But until you get close enough to give it a good look, its size is deceptiv...

Seated at a bar made up of repurposed shipping containers prompted me to think of NonStop. Just as shipping containers can be repurposed, with the arrival of Virtualized NonStop can we see NonStop being repurposed as well?     It was way, way back in 2009 when I wrote a post to this blog site about how HPE was packaging up shipping containers loaded with blades and peripherals and marketing them as a specialty POD – actually, as a “Performance-Optimized Datacenter” and to read more about this, check out the post of July 2, 2009, Common standards, uncommon advantages! I have no real idea of how successful this market campaign proved to be but I only heard that the program was discontinued sometime last year.  And the reason? HPE was moving beyond blades, where today it was all about hyperconverged infrastructure, hybrid IT and yes, Synergy. Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss Synergy as just software as the more I have dug into HPE Synergy, the first thing I notice...

With the first post of 2017, we can now look forward to what will likely transpire for the NonStop community – new products and features, all aimed to growing the market for NonStop, will further highlight just how much is changing for the better … For those of us living in the northern hemisphere the winter solstice is now behind us and the days are getting longer. Even if it’s just with the addition of a few seconds of daylight this will gradually extend to where we are having extra minutes of sunshine with each new day. With sunshine comes warmth and perhaps that’s the most important ingredient of all. Unless you live in the Florida Keys and don’t care all that much! Or you reside in the southern hemisphere were at this time of year it’s all about cricket and sailing and eating fresh lobster while imbibing on chilled chardonnay. Do I miss those lazy summer days of my youth when I lived in Sydney? Oh yes … Walking out from my home early one morning, just before Christmas, to s...

Could it be, after so many years, that NonStop systems are catching the venerable mainframe? Is it even conceivable that NonStop offers a better technology solution than its long time arch-rival? Possible? Well perhaps yes … the gap between the two is definitely being bridged! I was only recently writing to my clients about the work being done on our track Corvette. After nearly a two year hiatus we hope to have the C5 Z06 track ready by the end of the month, with perhaps an outing or two in the fall,  just as driving in winter is out of the question in Colorado so too is driving in the heat of summer. The ‘Vette looks terrific even after all these years – thirteen years old but only a little over 20,000 miles on the odometer even if almost a third of those were spent on the track as well as in and around the pits and paddocks you find at every race track. Yes, former head of NonStop development, Hal Massey, has a lot to answer for (as does Mike Plum, also formerly of NonStop ...

For a decade and a half, Martin Fink, EVP & CTO, HPE has been a recognized pioneer in bringing the world of open source into the commercial world. For the NonStop community this is well understood even as open source plays an important role in the growing popularity of NonStop systems today. Fair enough, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . There’s no sense of accusing me of waxing eloquent, but this week I was compelled to dig deep for just the right exclamation. By the way, this reminds me of my father who, when I was a child, called his cars “eloquent” and every Saturday afternoon he would pull them from the garage just so that he could wax eloquent ! Nothing original in this, as I am sure families everywhere in the English speaking world can retell something similar, but what strikes me is not so much the reference to cars, but the reference to waxing and waning as in phases of the moon. The reason waves lap the beach, moving up the sand just a few inches at ...

2015 HP Discover proved eventful for numerous reasons - less about The Machine and more about Composability ... for the NonStop community, the future is beginning to come into view! It’s been a hot, dusty and somewhat dirty week in Las Vegas and returning to the green landscape that is Boulder has brought into stark contrast the difference of just a few hundred miles. Living in the command center wasn’t without its challenges this year, as unfamiliarity brought unintended consequences. Who knew a push tab on the shower head would reduce the flow of water to barely a drip and who knew that the pilot light on the RV’s hot water system would go out … but in the end, we were able to keep our cool (and our hot) while showering with good water pressure! The world takes on a completely different image when all is well on the motor home front. Rested and looking forward to each day’s program, 2015 HP Discover was all about perceptions and presentation. Passing an exits sign on Interst...