There is no question that HPE has made a sizable investment in NonStop and no community is more surprised to read this than the NonStop community. After a decade of perceived indecision on the part of those close to NonStop it now appears that much was happening in the background. Final numbers can only be guessed, but when you see the results and know that work has been going on for more than five years and perhaps as much as ten, then coming to a place where we have these options to consume NonStop than the investment must be close to passing the half billion dollar mark. So, what is NonStop as a Service and how best to understand the market it will likely serve?
When you poll HPE NonStop executives and managers the
results are mixed, to say the least. There are those who wish to remain quiet
on the topic, preferring instead to see which market bites first, whereas there
are others who are really excited by the future prospects of NonStop and
believe it will serve every market. However, it was back in the Spring, 2016,
issue of NonStop Insider that we first read about “a future where a virtualized
HPE NonStop server could be deployed as a traditional hardware appliance or as
cloud-based NSaaS and DBaaS.” More recently, in the LinkedIn promotional post
for the June, 2018, issue of NonStop Insider, something a little more pragmatic
appeared, “While it’s still all to be sorted out, just the mention of the
possibility of having HPE deliver a working NSaaS has many members of the
NonStop vendor community hitting the books. How’s this going to all work,
indeed! And yes, can we make any money from such a model, ouch!”
To put the words appearing in HPE NonStop PowerPoint slides
as well as the commentaries that are beginning to appear into context, it may
be wise to take a good long look at what NSaaS really is. According to those
members of the NonStop team using these PowerPoint slides, it really is a case
of NSaaS being more a Platform as a Service (PaaS) than it is Infrastructure as
a Service simply because NSaaS provides so much more in terms of functionality
and indeed usability. “A pure IaaS, in classical terms, does not make sense for
NonStop,” one NonStop team member told me recently. “So it definitely is more
on the PaaS side, but I’d call it PaaS++ due to its potential flexibility,
which even allows easy adoption of newer hyped topics such as Serverless!”
For now we will leave the Serverless topic and return to
NonStop and NSaaS being a PaaS. And why is this important to know? It all comes
back to messaging and how we present the option to turn to NSaaS to our fellow
IT professionals including our CTOs / CIOs. For instance, set the expectation
wrong and our one shot at expanding the presence of NonStop within our
enterprise may end sooner than it began. Again, NSaaS is just another way to
consume NonStop and if you already have a massive NonStop system powering a
financial network or a manufacturing plant, NSaaS isn’t going to prove to be an
option.
“The real potential is in the new way to consume NonStop, i.e. removing entry barriers for customers (e.g. provision in minutes, quick time to market / time to value (TTM / TTV), no need to install/manage, pay per use, etc),” was one response I was given by the NonStop team. And this makes sense – after all, we are learning so much about the benefits of cloud computing with its elasticity of provisioning that it is influencing other deployment models. “Enabling new business models, opening new channels to the market for partners through the app-store, leverage business- and infrastructure services, such as Mission Critical Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as a Service, even the potential well-understood by this community, to support DR as a Service, along with some of the more classical PaaS elements, including middleware services, such API gateway, Java / Python / etc.”
And yes, with the caveat, all in due time of course. “The focus of NSaaS should be new opportunities rather than existing customers,” is the common theme coming from the NonStop team. “New customers often have very different needs and so running NSaaS in production up to some level is something I’d not preclude at this point.” Fortunately, for the NonStop community, the availability of NSaaS will likely develop traction for a couple of reasons that have to do with leveraging all the work that has gone into making NonStop a software platform (the best software platform on the planet), embracing commoditization, openness and standards. One publication recently admitted that PaaS as it stood right now suffered from two major weaknesses, according to CIOs they polled.
“Service availability or resilience, however, can be a concern with PaaS. If a provider experiences a service outage or other infrastructure disruption, this can adversely affect customers and result in costly lapses of productivity. Provider lock-in is another common concern, since users cannot easily migrate many of the services and much of the data produced through one PaaS product to another competing product. Users must evaluate the business risks of service downtime and lock-in before they commit to a PaaS provider.” We have already seen how easy it is today to move applications and supporting middleware to NonStop and indeed, should it warrant it, onto another platform and for the NonStop community this is not as much an issue as it once was. When it comes to that all important topic of service availability then there is nothing else on the planet that can match the service uptime of NonStop!
However, this isn’t the only note of concern being expressed about PaaS. From another publication, “With PaaS, proprietary platform features may leave a client with little recourse should new requirements arise that the platform cannot address. Brain drain or loss of key personnel and skillsets may leave future updates and adaptations delayed or deferred, increasing technical debt. And wringing the most performance out of a PaaS solution may require specific (and expensive) expertise that cannot be easily scaled. When taking on PaaS, clients must enter with eyes wide open to the stickiness that closed or proprietary PaaS services incur.” And yet, the NonStop community is well served with expertise on this front and more than one managed service provider is already stepping up their investment in NSaaS to better serve the NonStop community.
Eventually, the question will arise, “Where will we turn for NSaaS and who will deliver NSaaS along the lines of traditional PaaS offerings?” Right now, this is being pursued by HPE on a couple of fronts. There is work being done at the ATC to explore options and to answer that all important question: “Can we make any money from such a model?”HPE is also exploring options with the vendors that already have shown interest in providing NSaaS including solutions, middleware, utilities and tools vendors. Clearly, it is early days but it is encouraging to hear from the NonStop vendor community as they look to leverage NSaaS even at this early stage of the program.
“The real potential is in the new way to consume NonStop, i.e. removing entry barriers for customers (e.g. provision in minutes, quick time to market / time to value (TTM / TTV), no need to install/manage, pay per use, etc),” was one response I was given by the NonStop team. And this makes sense – after all, we are learning so much about the benefits of cloud computing with its elasticity of provisioning that it is influencing other deployment models. “Enabling new business models, opening new channels to the market for partners through the app-store, leverage business- and infrastructure services, such as Mission Critical Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as a Service, even the potential well-understood by this community, to support DR as a Service, along with some of the more classical PaaS elements, including middleware services, such API gateway, Java / Python / etc.”
And yes, with the caveat, all in due time of course. “The focus of NSaaS should be new opportunities rather than existing customers,” is the common theme coming from the NonStop team. “New customers often have very different needs and so running NSaaS in production up to some level is something I’d not preclude at this point.” Fortunately, for the NonStop community, the availability of NSaaS will likely develop traction for a couple of reasons that have to do with leveraging all the work that has gone into making NonStop a software platform (the best software platform on the planet), embracing commoditization, openness and standards. One publication recently admitted that PaaS as it stood right now suffered from two major weaknesses, according to CIOs they polled.
“Service availability or resilience, however, can be a concern with PaaS. If a provider experiences a service outage or other infrastructure disruption, this can adversely affect customers and result in costly lapses of productivity. Provider lock-in is another common concern, since users cannot easily migrate many of the services and much of the data produced through one PaaS product to another competing product. Users must evaluate the business risks of service downtime and lock-in before they commit to a PaaS provider.” We have already seen how easy it is today to move applications and supporting middleware to NonStop and indeed, should it warrant it, onto another platform and for the NonStop community this is not as much an issue as it once was. When it comes to that all important topic of service availability then there is nothing else on the planet that can match the service uptime of NonStop!
However, this isn’t the only note of concern being expressed about PaaS. From another publication, “With PaaS, proprietary platform features may leave a client with little recourse should new requirements arise that the platform cannot address. Brain drain or loss of key personnel and skillsets may leave future updates and adaptations delayed or deferred, increasing technical debt. And wringing the most performance out of a PaaS solution may require specific (and expensive) expertise that cannot be easily scaled. When taking on PaaS, clients must enter with eyes wide open to the stickiness that closed or proprietary PaaS services incur.” And yet, the NonStop community is well served with expertise on this front and more than one managed service provider is already stepping up their investment in NSaaS to better serve the NonStop community.
Eventually, the question will arise, “Where will we turn for NSaaS and who will deliver NSaaS along the lines of traditional PaaS offerings?” Right now, this is being pursued by HPE on a couple of fronts. There is work being done at the ATC to explore options and to answer that all important question: “Can we make any money from such a model?”HPE is also exploring options with the vendors that already have shown interest in providing NSaaS including solutions, middleware, utilities and tools vendors. Clearly, it is early days but it is encouraging to hear from the NonStop vendor community as they look to leverage NSaaS even at this early stage of the program.
However, this is a rapidly evolving topic and to hear more
of what is taking place and how the HPE NonStop team is addressing the topic of
NSaaS from both the user and vendor perspective, perhaps you need to pack your
bags and head to this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp, as I have to believe
this is one topic where the NonStop team will be only too happy to explore the many options that come with NSaaS with you!
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