Real Time View

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...

A trip to Las Vegas is a reminder than not all big projects succeed and the story of failed big projects isn’t limited to construction as experienced IT professionals will quickly point out – but the issue today is whether small has become the new big! This week has me back in Las Vegas for another event, the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) US Conference, 2015. Under the overall banner of enhancing the consumer’s self-service experience, it has attracted the usual crowd of ATM vendors, payments solutions providers as well as all the service providers on the periphery of the ATM ecosystem. Among the sponsors are some familiar names, and it’s good to see a healthy representation from the NonStop community, and conversations started as soon as I left the registration desk. However, it was the familiar sites of the Las Vegas skyline that really caught my attention this week. If you recall the last post to this blog, that of February 6, 2015 , Of hubs and spokes; of niches, clouds...

The topic of NonStop being deployed as a hub has been a consideration for decades with several initiatives kicked off during that time. But with the arrival of NonStop, will an intelligent price-competitive hub featuring NonStop X make a difference and prove valuable to users? In the post of February 3, 2015, to Buckle-Up-Travel (my social blog), In truth, we are but travelers … , I comment on how I have become a traveler in the sense that what’s immediately beyond the horizon is important to me. Not the destination, nor the road itself, but rather the act of moving, of travelling, as I said, that really motivates me and keeps me well-grounded in what’s happening in the world outside my office. I don’t always make the right decisions about the form of transportation I use, but so long as it gets me pointed in the general direction I want to go, it’s all good! This reminds me of the quote from 1951 Alice in Wonderland animated movie when Alice said: “I give myself very good advic...

Cloud computing continues to dominate much of the popular discussions of late, but when it comes to putting real systems to work in support of real applications, there’s much to be said about the inherent value that comes with hybrid computing deployments and this is becoming netter known within the NonStop community … During the holiday we watched the Clooney / Bullock movie, Gravity. It was a very well made, not-so-quite SciFi drama, set in space but believable in that it was about the International Space Station and a fictional journey of recovery in an old-fashioned space shuttle. The imagery was beautiful and portraying work in space entirely believable. So much so that I gradually inched forward on my seat, anxieties building and really appreciative of the tethering they enjoyed to the shuttle and to the telescope that they were repairing. Obviously, Clooney ever the adrenaline junkie was enjoying himself untethered as he drifted around doing a “spacewalk” and checking out...

Architects and intellects worry about what to do with former pristine examples of technology in their day and yet, left to creative individuals, there’s no limits to what can be done to breathe new life into what otherwise might be trashed. For the NonStop community some examples raise interesting questions including the database … One of the more interesting developments I have witnessed these past decades is the repurposing of buildings – historical buildings catering to entirely new, and often unexpected, patrons. Think Starbucks opening in the foyer of an old Sydney bank branch, near the famous Circular Quay. Think too of the former Roman Catholic Church of St. Joseph in Arnhem, Netherlands, one of hundreds of decommissioned churches, that was turned into a skate park – a situation that the former elders could never have contemplated as a likely eventuality. The photo above? It’s of a former Lutheran church in Edinburgh, Scotland, that has become of all things, a Frankenstein...

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...

Along the drifting cloud the eagle searching down on the land; Catching the swirling wind … Go closer, hold the land feel partly no more than grains of sand; We stand to lose all time a thousand answers by in our hand …” so go the lyrics from a YES song written decades ago and yet, it foresaw we stood to lose a thousand answers … In a play on a title I used for the final post of 2012, Yes, I get it! closing out 2014 brings with it a lot of anticipation. There will be NonStop community members – users and vendors alike – that have placed orders for NonStop X and more than likely have been testing their applications on NonStop X for some time. The prospect of installing your own NonStop X system is bound to arouse excitement typical for this time of year. For all of us living in the northern hemisphere, the prospect of spring seems a long way off, as winter has us fully in its grip, but spring will come, no matter what, and that’s how I sum up NonStop X. It’s coming, no matter wha...