Real Time View

It’s all positive news with the availability of the NonStop BladeSystem NB56000c and when you look closer, you can see that the ongoing investment in NonStop remains strong and that the roadmaps presented by HP NonStop continue to be pursued aggressively and passionately.   Greetings from within the world’s tallest residential tower, the Q1, on Australia’s famous Gold Coast, Queensland. While we are not residing on the highest floor, the “hotel” does include floors much higher than the surrounding buildings, so the views are spectacular to say the least. I have been a visitor to the Gold Coast since 1962 as it became a popular vacation option for my family, but nothing quite prepared me for how other-worldly the experience is proving to be. The picture above was taken on the first night of our stay by a highly skilled photographer – no trickery involved – and almost 40 floors above the street! With business in Sydney behind us and just a couple of more “catch-ups” and site v...

Greetings from Sydney, Australia! However, it was the trip to Canada, to participate in CTUG, that influenced this post – Tandem was good but NonStop today is so much better! Given the opportunity would we still invest in good when better is available? I don’t think so … There have been a number of posts since I referenced boats, cars or travel – but it seems appropriate to, once again, dip into this pool to pull  out some well-meaning metaphors and this time, the connections or associations will not be hard to miss. It’s been some time, but we finally replaced the ten plus years old Cadillac Escalade. With more than 175,000 miles on the odometer there was sense of imminent doom with every outing we took, and later this year we will be driving to Orlando for a major event that Margo will be overseeing. The Escalade was good, and served us well, but was there something better? After testing a number of SUVs, including the new Escalade, the Mercedes Benz ML550 and ever so br...

It was many years ago, shortly after arriving in the U.S., that I moved to Boston and began my career in IT. If it wasn’t for the generosity of those prepared to give me a chance, I probably wouldn’t have had any opportunity to get a toehold on what was then considered an industry in its infancy. Keydata Corporation, the first commercial time-sharing computer firm, was my very first employer in the US. Most of the processing was done in batch, with reports generated nightly. The businesses sent Keydata their daily transactions logs which we processed for them. There was nothing real time about it, as I recall. Perhaps the concept of time-sharing and cloud computing differs by just that one fine point – cloud computing assumes real time processing, otherwise, conceptually, these are the same approaches to data processing! When you look back at early service bureau companies supporting time-sharing, they were just providing a big resource (for computing) with an archaic interfac...

Once again, it’s all about user groups and the benefits they provide. I continue to support them as I see few alternatives when it comes to better understanding their passion for all things NonStop! It is a common observation of mine, and coming as it does so soon into my eight year of blogging, it should not come as a surprise to anyone. I like participating in NonStop regional user group meetings, and this week I have the privilege of participating in the CTUG fall event. The turnout was encouraging and the engagement amongst the user group’s stakeholders was hard to miss. As Randy Meyer, HP VP and GM of Integrity Servers observed in his opening remarks, “If you want to see an example of how to run user group events, then you only need to visit CTUG!” HP Canada Sales VP, Roger Walker, who was clearly excited by the prospects of NonStop, rattled off numbers that surprised many in the audience. It’s not only hard to ignore how engaged the user group’s stakeholders were, but ig...

At first, it just seemed like a good idea. On second thought, how would I find enough to write about? Seven years on, and some 500 plus posts to multiple blogs, when it comes to NonStop there’s still so much more to write about …      It actually crept up on me but in the end, it came as a surprise. Readers who check out older posts to this blog may have noticed as well, and I believe I gave out a few clues over the past months. Yes, with my first blogs appearing in August, 2007, six years have passed and I am now starting my seventh year of blogging to Real Time View - continuing to generate what I like to think is further “Ink on NonStop”! To be fair, I am not sure how many posts I have written for industry, vendor and community blogs I support, but a back of the envelope calculation suggests somewhere north of 500 posts, not including the features and updates I provide to both, The Connection and Tandemworld. Along the way, I have been well supported by the vend...

The title may be unexpected and indeed, a little off-putting but perceptions about NonStop are transforming. And IT professionals are learning not to ignore NonStop – after all it’s still all about transactions! Even as I was thinking about the subject for this blog post, Margo was busy posting to our social blog, Tails of Dragons, Plates of Gumbo and Streets of Bourbon . Among the pictures she included was one I took of her on the corner of Orleans and Bourbon Streets, New Orleans. This was just a few short weeks ago and without giving away the storyline in Margo’s post; we were completing a circuitous road trip to Atlanta and back to Boulder. However, the evening that I took this picture was also memorable for another reason – for the first time in a very long time, I was surprised by the antics of a street performer. I sensed something was about to happen, but what happened right in front of me was remarkable all the same. Perhaps it was the stare the street actor gave me or si...

We all understand Big Data but what about Big Transactions as in lots and lots of transactions – so many that today’s showcase Big Data Centers will only get bigger and bigger … and when discussions turn to transactions, it’s hard to overlook Nonstop! Big things have always fascinated me. My very first job was at the Steelworks, south of Sydney, where air conditioning of the computer facility was its only redeeming feature. Otherwise, the heat and noise, and often the sheer terror it espoused, gave it a sense of being otherworldly when first encountered. Nothing about a steelworks is minute or delicate and finesse has no place in the presence of such massive structures visible everywhere you turn. For more on my days at the steelworks, check back to the post of March 26, 2008, A question of balance! I came across this reference when I was scrolling through earlier posts looking for a particular post, written while attending an earlier user event in Las Vegas, before HP Discove...