DRNet – THE fabric for hybrid IT

  If you work in Computer Science, you are doubtless familiar with Murphy's Law, which states that whatever can go wrong, will eventually go wrong. Faith and prayer rarely help.  And this talk is not just theoretical, stories of tech disasters in the NonStop Community prove this point again and again. Over the many years since Tandem was born in the 1970s the community has learned that data is really your most important asset, and without it we have no business at all.  The story I really love is of the Tandem disk packs when disks were configured liked top-loading washing machines.  An earthquake shook these disk-packs, so much so that one of them fell on its side.  The client called Support in a panic, but fortunately the system carried on running as normal. A couple of engineers had to come round to set the unit back upright, but everything just kept on running!  It could have been a much worse situation, but even with the best laid plans something unusu...

Our attention of late has been directed at major vendor events. Just this week there were major events held by HPE and Apple and last week it was Cisco Live. There have been regional events for the NonStop community as well. What has differentiated these events from anything experienced in the past is that they were virtual events – programs developed by vendors that allowed us to sit at our desks to watch the events unfold. Different? Of course; and for some sessions, a little difficult to take! However, their success cannot diminish the fact that in today’s new normal world, there are few alternatives to such approaches. At HPE Discover 2020 there were even hands-on developer labs (you needed to sign up for these in advance) where HPE committed considerable compute resources and where the responses coming from those who participated were very positive. It is against this backdrop that one phrase kept coming up – Business Continuity. For most attendees it took a while to s...

No matter how much we invest today in our home office, working from home is still that; we are at home, working. For many vendors within the NonStop community there has always been some of their employees who qualified as remote workers, but with today’s global pandemic still holding sway over much of the planet, it’s as if our home office has become the new “work central.” Almost nothing we do in support of NonStop customers sees us moving all that far away from our desks, whether set up in the living room, on the deck, in the basement or in the garage. What NTI would like to emphasize is that from its earliest days, NTI has been about supporting our employees who prefer to work remotely. Development and support have worked remotely for many years – it’s just the nature of our business, working with the NonStop community, but today, you will find all of NTI working from home in accordance with directives and mandates imposed globally. It has always been about our people and we h...