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The themes of meetings and events, as well as the commentaries and posts that followed, share a common theme – transactions and yes, our willingness to believe in transactions only when we have seen the contributions they make for us; HP NonStop systems are changing perceptions and remains at the forefront of processing the transactions that keep society functioning … All around us here, in Boulder, Colorado, the harvesting of the wheat crop has begun and there’s no missing the sightings of the harvesters going about their business – the numerous clouds of dust produced by the headers is unmistakable. While the wheat flows into waiting trucks the chaff flies freely in the air and it may be very modern looking, but it’s still rooted in traditions that are millennia old. The harvests now under way are of the winter varieties and if the weather holds, there will be an additional plantings shortly, although not being a farmer I’m not sure how all of that happens but I am only too ha...

With the introduction of brand new NonStop systems – the NonStop X family – distance is being put between the modern NonStop systems of today and any lingering thoughts CIOs may still have about former legacy systems from HP and Compaq. With the passage of time almost every important historical figure begins to muse on the legacy they will leave behind. In America, this involves a lot of discussion about philanthropy, even as it touches on the ramifications of endowing considerable fortunes on their heirs. As for Presidents, the talk is about future presidential libraries and having spent time in the Ronald Reagan library I can see why the creation of presidential library can cost a princely sum. With much work ahead of him still, I was curious to learn that President Obama is already talking about his own presidential library and the likely impact of his own legacy on the citizens of the U.S. as well as the city of Chicago. A colleague of mine from the time when I was on th...

We may be familiar with stories from the past including popular movies and publications but has securing private information become too scary? For the NonStop community there are lots of options …. This week another trailer was released for the upcoming end-of-year new Star Wars movie: The Force Awakens. Billed as Episode 7, it follows a pretty uninspiring Episodes 1 through 3 that focused on utilizing new film technologies, including a lot of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) that left many a follower of Star Wars wanting a lot more, and with the release of multiple trailers it looks like Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars franchise, is delivering!   Another image from the most recent trailer features the return of Hans Solo, aka Harrison Ford, and following some scary scenes ends simply with the acknowledgement from Hans Solo, “Chewie, we’re home!” and as a quick glimpse into the future, Star Wars fans are resting easy. However, for anyone in IT the future is l...

As for industry standards, it's been part of the game plan for NonStop to embrace industry standards fully and with NonStop X, HP delivers on this plan ... From the very first time a container ship passed through the heads of Sydney Harbor at the end of 1969 I have been fascinated by the container industry. Spending my formative years of IT working for a container shipping company cemented that fascination and I have been following the industry ever since. So much for the container ships that carried a measly 2000 standard size Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEU as today new-age behemoth ships transport almost ten times this number. What has really sparked my interest all these years later is what’s happening with containers today on dry land, as industries have grown up with novel ways to exploit essentially a standardized “building block”.  According to one news source, the Port of Seville, Spain, is among the more recent converts using seagoing containers in unconventiona...

Among IT professionals, when discussions turn to hybrids, it’s not just hybrid clouds being talked about but hybrid systems and for the NonStop community, this includes hybrids featuring the latest NonStop X systems … I recently passed a car with a bumper sticker: “Yes, it’s a hybrid, it burns both gas & rubber!” One’s perspective on the environment may differ from others’, and sometimes quite radically, but even so, there’s a sense that whatever interests us and wherever our pursuits take us, if we can leave the environment better off, then that is to the benefit of us all. Saying anything more on this matter however, as the majority of the U.S. shivers under the impact of a severe and lengthy winter deep freeze, may prove controversial (and it has nothing to do with the rest of this post), but even so, the cold has many of us wondering where global warming has gone. Living on Colorado I have become a big fan of natural gas – a sentiment I shared with others when I lived...

It takes very little encouragement from the HP NonStop team for me to provide my own commentary on what to expect to see in the coming year and for the first post of 2015, it just made perfect sense to blog about it! Few residents of North America would have missed hearing the news about just how cold New Year’s Eve turned out to be; here in Colorado, a centuries old record for the lowest minimum temperature was set. Recordings at the Denver airport dropped to -19 Fahrenheit by 9:00pm on December 30th, with the high reading of just 1 Fahrenheit being a new record lowest high temperature for December 30th. Nothing cheery or celebratory about this, and even though we had to step outside for a brief period on the afternoon of the 30th, it was very much a case of staying indoors and simply enjoying being rugged up around the fireplace. As for my ancestral roots, my family tells me that with 2015 being wrung-in, Sydney-siders were enjoying something completely different - temperatu...

Yes, it’s only one quarter away from being shipped to customers, and already the NonStop vendor community is very much  on-board  with this latest addition to the NonStop family of products … Kicking back and beginning to take it easy as preparations for the holidays continues unabated, even as our home embraces the festive seasons. The tree is up and decorated; the wine cellar restocked; and the food is in the pantry only needing to be cooked. Preliminary parties are behind us – only the big one to go and it will be over. However, this is also the season to simply take a deep breath and to be thankful we have made it through another year as we all begin planning for 2015. For the NonStop community, it’s going to be a very big year. Pictured above as a half-height blade, NonStop X, featuring a Xeon 4-core E7 processor - the latest product family in a long line of fault tolerant systems coming out of Silicon Valley, is tantalizingly close to reality. Just a couple of mon...

A chance posting to Facebook had me looking at the attributes of NonStop and whether you argue for availability or perhaps scalability, in the end, just having the discussion suggests NonStop is still very much in the game … Versatility! How many times have we heard a sales pitch that highlights the versatility of a product? In many ways, this is an approach to mitigating potential future obsolescence and it extends the product’s useful life.  Flipping through pages about NonStop on the web, I came upon a reminder of days past when NonStop was considered the Swiss Army knife of computing – versatile in its own right. This knife featured in a  First-Friday skit  by Jimmy Treybig that just came to my attention following a post on Facebook by long-time Tandem supporter, Maria Olivero. However, the original fault tolerant message has been replaced with new messages on availability, scalability, data integrity, security, networking, manageability and so on. So what rea...