DRNet – THE fabric for hybrid IT

Where HPE is taking NonStop today isn’t proving too surprising for the NonStop community. In fact, where NonStop is headed is a direction sorely needed by NonStop customers, big and small. The first step in the journey for NonStop came with the port of NonStop to x86, the migration of the interconnect from proprietary ServerNet to InfiniBand (IB) and more recently, to RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and then a second step that saw an even bigger shift for NonStop as HPE complemented current support for physical machines with support for NonStop of virtual machines. Yes, NonStop is on a journey and that journey is going to better align NonStop with the major initiatives within HPE to simplify a data center’s transformation to hybrid IT. Under newly-elevated HPE CEO, Antonio Neri’s, direction HPE has divided itself into three core businesses. The major business (and the most relevant for the NonStop community) is called Hybrid IT and it is comprised of the compute, storage, and d

In last month’s article, we opened with the observation, “Data; it’s about data!” and that, according to Gartner, “Today, disciplines are merging and  approaches to data and analytics are becoming more holistic  and encompassing the entire business. Forward-thinking organizations are already on this path.” In the weeks that have passed, nothing from HPE or the NonStop vendor community dissuades us from the importance of data – there is a reason, after all, why we call our operations the data center and why we refer often to our data processing. When you think about it, even Information Technology (IT), and the way we label our industry and our professions, is a continuation of this theme of data. It is turned into information and without data enterprises would be hard pressed to make informed decisions. In that article we also noted how CIOs everywhere are looking at the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and are giving a lot of thought to how best to capitalize on augmented re

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise to see vendors swinging their development muscle behind support for open platforms. Linux®, Windows® and yes, even Unix® are now starting to become available from vendors formerly associated just with the NonStop platform. We see this expansion in product offerings from well-known members of the NonStop vendor community as, more and more often, NonStop users are adjusting to the realities of the hybrid world taking up residence within their data centers. As data center managers absorb the benefits and impact from gathering clouds, there is a growing requirement for NonStop to become a better corporate citizen, to adjust and to yes, “play better with others,” sharing products that have helped sustain NonStop as the premier mission critical transaction processing platform that it is today. HPE has just released its financial results for Q1 and the company has been treated fairly well by financial analysts. As analysts pore over the repor

“Data; it’s about data!” Furthermore, when it comes to data today it’s also about data analytics where data is all important and more data, well, even more important. According to Gartner, “Today, disciplines are merging and  approaches to data and analytics are becoming more holistic  and encompassing the entire business. Forward-thinking organizations are already on this path.” Around the corner, CIOs everywhere are looking at the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with thoughts of capitalizing on augmented reality and deep learning which are coming closer to reality than many in the industry are prepared to acknowledge. However, no matter which way you cut it, it’s still all about the data and having data in the right place, at the right time, uncompromised and complete. For the NonStop community, much of this isn’t coming as a surprise as for many years solutions that demand 24 x 7 operations with total data integrity have been running on NonStop! In its definitive paper on