Real Time View

  Greeley, Windsor and Weld County under severe thunderstorm watch until 9 p.m. It was late at night last week when the house shook violently. After stepping out on to our patio deck, another round of lightning bolts crossed the sky and again, the shock waves reverberated for some time. Close calls? For those who like to time the interval between flash and thunder, it was almost instantaneous. We have entered fall, but still summer conditions prevail with daily temperatures climbing to 90F followed by an evening of unsettled weather bringing with it short-lived storm fronts. Photo above appeared in the nearby Greeley Times and was captured around the same time as I was standing on the patio deck. Unfortunately, I still haven’t mastered the settings on my iPhone that will enable me to snap a photo quite like that, although I tried several times. Entering fall after a period best defined as tempestuous and unlike any summer previously experienced, can we expect conditions to conti...

Remember the words from that song long ago by the New Jersey band, The Young Rascals? One of their most popular releases of the late 1960s? For many of my readers it may well be the case of “perhaps not!”, but the song How Can I be Sure might be viewed as topical when addressing the HPE NonStop Community. In particular, the opening verse: How can I be sure In a world that's constantly changing? How can I be sure Where I stand with you? For the NonStop vendor community, the talk of the day is about ecosystems. It’s about the creation of software partnerships that are themselves ecosystems. Viable alternatives to other ecosystems that perhaps have come about a bit like topsy – “growing quickly without being noticed.” It has become less of a secret of late that, following the unveiling of partnerships by the NonStop team as a direct result of its Showcase initiative, those NonStop vendors not participating in Showcase are coming to terms with a landscape that is very much chan...

Many road warriors we know all too well expect that when they head to the airport to board their flight and attend to business they will then return home safely. It happens all the time. For anyone that has walked through an airport of late there is no doubting that the desire to get back out into the world has returned. Gates are packed with check in and security lines back to their former slow crawl patterns. What is not expected is to see planes parked at the gates, along taxi runways and worse. Who knew that a simple computer glitch could take down the air traffic control network across the United States? When news of a glitch spreads it almost never turns out to be a minor irritation. Of late we have read about such glitches affecting  banks, trading houses and more – so much so that for the community at large, it’s become almost a case of well, here we go again. But bringing air travel to a halt, that’s a glitch on a completely different plain! Everyone it seems is left hur...

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 ...

It is becoming all too clear. For the NonStop user the world is changing rapidly as we move to hybrid IT and look to a virtualized NonStop. Where will find the help we will more than likely need? Only this week I was visiting our new off-premise storage facility where we are now storing vehicles we can no longer accommodate on-premise, at our home. The company command center – yes, our faithful RV that many of you have seen at recent RUG events, our motorcycle, our trailer and even our fifteen year old Corvette “track toy!” It is not a cavernous storage facility by any means but it does come heated and with a number of different power outlets including one 30amp circuit which should be enough to keep the command center’s refrigerator working and the drinks chilled. Now, all we need is a couple of chairs and we have a new weekend retreat! Well, perhaps not … Fortunately it is all rather simple and we don’t need to have someone present looking after the facility. There is a mana...

As often as we hear, “open to the elements” and we cringe, for NonStop users, open is a good thing – but it’s even better with help from service providers … Well, the weather isn’t doing us any favors even if it is nowhere as bad as what we are looking at for the US Mid-West and East Coast It’s SuperBowl Sunday and with the venue being Minneapolis it’s safe to say it’s really, really, cold. Thank goodness the venue will be inside a dome, but just making the trek from car to stadium will be a challenge for many. Forecasters are telling their audiences that frostbite will set in within 30 minutes so spectators will need to be careful. And yet, it is football after all and many a time we have seen games played in atrocious conditions inside of stadiums open to the elements. We want to be close to the action sometimes and feel as though we are truly involved in the game, but there are limits after all. On the other hand, more clubs are spending the billion dollars it takes to b...

A week spent interacting with folks far-removed from NonStop and yet well-informed on all things IT; as time wound down, there was little to argue about – NonStop continues to reward those who step back to look at the big picture! If you have been following Margo and me on Facebook you will know that we have spent the past ten days on the road. This time, the plans we put in place earlier this year didn’t take into account the dates for NonStop regional user group events so no, our travels didn’t include participating in events back on the east coast. Instead, we were off to the southwest where our destination was Albuquerque, New Mexico. We had wanted to catch up with some ex-Tandem folks we knew as well as find time for talks with other professionals and with prospective new clients. Always a fun thing to do for Margo and me! While I am focused very much on all things NonStop, from time to time it is good to get the perspective of others not quite as close to HPE and NonStop...

Our desks may be cluttered with phones, laptops, tablets and PCs and there is still a need for cables but we have come a long way with comms and for the NonStop community, we have so much choice when it comes to media focused on NonStop! Where do we go for news today and how do we keep in touch with colleagues and business partners worldwide? Once, these two matters were very separate topics – we had phones, email, faxes and newspapers.  When the fax machine arrived near my office at Nixdorf Computers, back in the early 1980s, I could see my skills as a telex machine operator go out the window (and after all the time I put into becoming a skilled operator) but on the other hand, I started faxing everyone I knew! When it came time to consider working for Tandem Computers I heard about its Tandem-based email system and I was hooked. So much so that on my first day in the Tandem offices at North Sydney, I accidentally sent an email to everyone in the company only to recoil in s...