Real Time View

This past weekend I seated myself close to the television through much of The Rolex24 at Daytona. Much like other races that span 24 hours, for as long as I can recall it was considered an endurance race, much the same as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and yet with the improved reliability of the participating vehicles, Daytona is now very much a 24 hour sprint race. Mixing prototypes with vehicles you could drive off the showroom floor sort of, these long races make for entertaining viewing. While we have a connection with one of the racers involved, the Indy Car phenom Colton Herta, the grandson of our good friends, the Kennys, who just happened to add yet another Rolex to his collection of Rolex Daytona watches after winning the Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) class and placed fifth overall (car pictured above), all the same I was surprised at how quickly those 24 hours passed. I remember conversations with my father after listening to Le Mans the time disk brakes first appeared (on a Jaguar...

The chance viewing of posts and tweets led me to an analyst report that suggested hardware vendors were going to shift their business model. What could this mean for the HPE and the NonStop community? Reading posts and commentaries on social media channels has become routine for Margo and me. For the better part of a decade, we have spent time checking out the popular sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. However, one post to LinkedIn we missed until we saw promotion of it elsewhere but after reading the post, it made us think more on where NonStop may be headed. The post was by T.C. Janes and it promoted a McKinsey & Company report, Hardware’s business-model shift: Finding a new path forward . Janes was Client Chief Technologist where, according to his LinkedIn profile he was “Responsible for understanding and quantifying my client's technology portfolio, strategizing across all HPE Centers of Excellence to address their business/technology challenges, aligning current/future HPE s...

Demolishing buildings may be happening all around you and for some enterprises, taking the wrecking ball to their IT data center may be in the cards. But the cloud experience is making sure hybrid IT prospers and with it, NonStop systems as well … During a trip back to Australia with a short stay on the state of Queensland’s famed Gold Coast, it was simply amazing to see the transformation of the skyline of Surfers Paradise. It was my longtime favorite holiday destination as a teenager and with memories of the many multi-story rentals that rarely rose to ten stories, to stay in a recent addition that towered 104 stories above that famous surfing beach was simply amazing! However, back down at street level it was almost as amazing to witness the continuous demolition activities underway as that skyline of my youth was being systematically reduced to rubble. Replaced with skyscrapers lauded for their modernistic approach to design – all glass and shiny chrome girders! However, it’s not...

We have now heard that the easy stuff has moved to the cloud but that leaves 70 percent of apps and data where they have always been. What does that mean for NonStop solutions? I was sitting inside the house for the past couple of days, avoiding breathing in the outside air, as the sky has been a source of constant smoky haze. Living in Colorado, we often refer to the end of summer as the beginning of the bushfire season and it hasn’t disappointed us this year. It’s awful and for anyone with allergy problems it is a time to hit the antihistamines hard. On the other hand, our friends in California are facing an even more problematic circumstance – should we stay or should we go. To think that the governor is calling for Aussie firefighters telling all and sundry that they are the best in the world! Put me in the category of agitators extolling the virtue of pulling out all the eucalyptus trees growing in California. Perhaps the Aussie firefighters are that good because they face horrifi...

Whenever a technology, product or solution appears to be the only answer then it’s time to look beyond it … At this time of year we can expect to be the victims of weather systems that Mother Nature cares to throw at us. Living alongside the Rocky Mountains simply means it can be cold and windy and the skies can be dark and cloudy. On the flip side, I don’t have to venture too far from my desk and given how I have just finished a major upgrade to my systems – a new HPE Pavilion laptop connected to multiple monitors, one of which is vertical and is the one I am using right now – it’s all still at the fun stage. Of course, the fun factor will diminish in time as patterns set in and I realize that it is still all work.  This week it’s been all about publishing. The December 2019 issue of NonStop Insider has been the priority and given how close we are to the holiday season Margo an I have been pleased with the responses we have had to date from the NonStop vendor community;...

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 ...

Pointnext; Greenlake; Intelligent Edge; OneSphere; OneView; Synergy; NonStop – yes, it was all covered at HPE Discover 2019 and cloudless has substance! There was time enough to think back on all that was covered at HPE Discover, 2019. One of the side benefits in driving to big-tent marketing events like this is that the trip back will be one that will have you thinking no matter the distances covered. In our case, it was a matter of traversing deserts and mountains, not forgetting the many rivers in full flood following a really snowy winter. A winter, mind you, that continued to dump snow on us poor Coloradans right up to the last week of May. There’s even the possibility that there will be ski runs open for the Fourth of July festivities. Following HPE Discover on this occasion there was little time to dwell on what was revealed as a trip to Grapevine, Texas, was required as the N2TUG Regional User Group (RUG) meeting took place a matter of just a couple of days later. No...