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  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...

  I have been a story teller for a very long time. I continue to tell stories, it is something I like to do. When it comes to IT and the ever-changing IT landscape there really is no end to the stories that can be told. While I am not up to the standard of ancient Greeks who wove a moral into nearly all their stories, all the same, I have never been at a loss to highlight something positive about NonStop and in particular, the strong bonds that continue to bind together the many participants that make up today’s NonStop community. If as yet you haven’t read the September – October 2021 issue of The Connection you may have missed reading my article, Data; it lives and it grows – with NonStop SQL, data truly has found a home . In that case you have missed my opening observations on IT and data - In the Information Technology (IT) world where the majority of us within NonStop community work, our reliance on data cannot be underestimated. Whether it’s a simple request, “Show me the da...

Movement of people; movement of commerce; movement of data – there’s no stopping NonStop! Roadblocks? Get over it! When will this end? When will normalcy return? When will 2021 arrive? And so the questioning continues. For a year that started without any clues as to what would follow, we have been left to wonder about our own situation with family, friends and neighbors. As news headlines continue to broadcast ominous warnings about what is still to come, we might be thinking that the time has come to lease that old missile silo, after all. Even with vaccines making their first appearance, it is going to take time and for most of us, this new life centered on being hunkered down in our own homes will continue. Living in Colorado where a massive uptick in construction is under way with new homes, new schools and yes, new roads being built. As we look around our own neighborhood, development has continued unabated such that even freshly built homes re-entering the marketplace have sold...

Despite the gravity of a situation, levity can be found in apparent chaos. Sometimes, at least! But for NonStop, data gravity is already being addressed … I am always looking out for interesting photos, doesn’t really matter the subject or what might be taking place that captures the photographer’s interest. When I came across this photo of a truck losing a load of literally thousands of bottles of beer, creating chaos on a local highway and led to its closure, I simply couldn’t let it pass by without a comment. It takes little to throw well-oiled plans into disarray. Inserting such variables into books and movies is what keeps us on the edge of our seats. For me, anything featuring a velociraptor has me cringing and for anyone who has ever sat in a darkened theater watching The Lion and The Darkness had probably experienced something similar. But as a car enthusiast, seeing so much debris on the road would have me turning away from the scene in a hurry. Obviously, the ...

Sounds like a prison sentence? Not quite; Pyalla is celebrating the start of its tenth year, but talking of prisons, has security become the sole focus of IT these days? With last minute packing about to begin for our extended stay in Sydney and Auckland, I just noticed I was receiving more messages than usual on LinkedIn. When I checked the site, turns out folks are congratulating Margo and me for the nine years Pyalla Technologies, LLC has been in business. Just like that, nine years have passed by and we are into our tenth year. Who would have guessed? While down under, Margo and I will be taking a quick side trip down to Hobart, Tasmania, and not just for the food. It’s one of those places where the food is outstanding and few people know much about Tasmania, other than the Warner Brothers’ cartoon character, Taz – the Tasmanian Devil and yet, just outside Hobart lies Port Arthur. For anyone who has managed to read Marcus Clarke tome, For the term of his natural life ,...

From products, hardware and software, for the NonStop community conversations turn to solutions and staffing as services! Looking out over this vista in Utah’s Capital Reef National Park I immediately thought of the saying “between a rock and a hard place.” Can’t imagine why this came to me, but then again, the barren landscape stretching to the horizon was certainly not a pleasant place in which to become lost – the river beds are mostly dry, with the vegetation providing little by way of shelter. No, best to take it all in from alongside the roadways that run across the ridges! If you have ever traversed Utah state highway 24 to the junction with Utah state highway 12 and then continued on to pick up US highway 89, you would see some amazing sights. And yet, as this picture captures so well, the desolation that you would face, should you leave the well-travelled highways that traverse the park, would definitely place you between a rock and a very hard place! These past few ...

Who knew? Computers will be watching and learning more about us in order to satisfy themselves that yes, it really is us initiating a transaction and for HPE and NonStop, this is heralding the age of analytics and AI! Back on land, after a short voyage back and forth between Long Beach and Hawaii, despite all the steps we took to mitigate interaction with fellow passengers, I managed to catch the dreadful flu that was going around and not only did I catch it, but passed it on to Margo. If you haven’t been keeping up with my Facebook, twitter and blog posts this may be news to you, but even as I am now close to good again, Margo still has a few days to go. Of course, we avoided the buffet lines, rarely ventured into the public eat-anytime dining rooms and essentially, ate at the specialty restaurants even as we stuck to one café and one bar. All good, but no matter what steps we took clearly they weren’t enough! On the other hand, none of this proved to be a distraction to s...

In 48 hours’ time we will be back out on the highways mixing it up with all the big rigs, trucks and SUVs and even though it takes us three days, there is no way we would miss the NonStop Technical Boot Camp, 2017, in San Francisco. Will we be seeing you there? If by now you haven’t heard about the biggest event of the year for the NonStop community, then listen up! This is a big occasion and already the number of attendees is crossing the line and approaching a really good figure – not sure exactly what the final count will look like but I do know there are a lot of people really looking forward to this event kicking off in just a few days’ time. The move to San Francisco may be one factor, or simply because it’s a chance to head to sunny California where the real appeal lies. No matter, the chance to hear the NonStop team outline the next milestones for NonStop and to hear firsthand about recent successes in the marketplace by HPE along with the vendors providing solutions on No...

Revisiting the topic of scalability reminds us about just how flexible NonStop systems continue to be and with enterprises preparing for ever increasing data volumes, having an out of the box system that readily scales will prove to be a big bonus ... After  two plus months on the road, meeting with many members of the NonStop community as we drove almost 6,000 miles in the company command center, it’s a good feeling to once again be able to say you have a permanent address. At least, as permanent as anything can be these days, given the nature of the business we are in – content generation can be done almost anywhere but even so, having a residence that best could only be considered temporary certainly came with many distractions. On the other hand, we did stop in at N2TUG as well as 2017 HPE Discover and we did get to meet with clients in southern California.  To directly answer questions I have received of late our new residence is just a little north of the N...