DRNet – THE fabric for hybrid IT

”Maintaining the status quo is a recipe for stagnation,” so one source tapped recently. More to my way of thinking, when it comes to accepting the status quo, was the observation by Henry Ford; “If I would’ve asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Among the NonStop community there has never been support for just doing the same time and time again, rather, there was always a willingness to pursue new opportunities so long as the risk to NonStop itself could be managed. No NonStop user wanted to ever compromise the availability attribute of NonStop!   There continues to be a lot of emphasis placed on Digital Transformation (DX). New IDC Spending Guide Shows Continued Growth for Digital Transformation in 2020, Despite the Challenges Presented by the COVID-19 Pandemic , an IDC update of May 20, 2020, made it very clear that for the foreseeable future, DX would involve considerable effort being devoted to ensuring the right product mix is deployed across t...

NTI has been describing its vision and strategy for some time and in 2020 there is a full rollout of new products and features centered on DR Net ® . While it is relatively easy to whiteboard marketing plans covering vision and strategy, they still need to be implemented in products for the real world. And NTI is delivering today! The NonStop community is familiar with “slideware” and as interesting as many presentations on data may be, there still is no substitute for usable products in the real world. Throughout 2019 if there was a RUG or GEO event anywhere in the world, you would have heard all about the PRO Visioning : Excellence in Data . The catalyst for making the move into a more data centric view of the world has been a direct result of the changes happening with NonStop. Data has taken center stage! Data is the new currency of business! Mining data reveals true nuggets that are pure gold! It’s only a short time ago that NonStop transformed into a software solution – a...

The NonStop community is a very strong community that has taken considerable pride in organizing meetings on a regular basis. Community members have been associated with NonStop systems for three or more decades, perhaps longer. The history of NonStop is rich with anecdotes about who deployed what and when, even as the NonStop vendor community has thrived on solving business problems. As one NonStop vendor put it recently in a presentation to the NonStop community, “We come together to better educate ourselves about the best ways to improve business outcomes; compelling value propositions built for NonStop need to be reinforced at every opportunity.” If you want to get the inside scoop on all that is planned for NonStop in 2020, whether this comes from the NonStop team or the NonStop vendor community, make plans to attend RUG events as they are held near your location. NonStop systems always made a strong case for supporting mission critical solutions. As the pioneer of faul...

Today there is visibly more enthusiasm over the future of NonStop within HPE and it comes from the top, with executives talking openly of how they see the role being played by NonStop growing in importance. After all, as we heard said frequently in 2019, when it comes to NonStop then yes, we create the data! In today’s highly connected world, where access to data is instantaneous, having the right data in the right place is of paramount importance where data created on NonStop continues to be the freshest and highly valued and in an environment where HPE is telling CIOs that data is the new currency of business it’s pleasing to all NonStop stakeholders to hear of NonStop being talked about in this manner. Igniting the level of enthusiasm now in evidence among the NonStop team has secondary effects on the NonStop community that too are quite noticeable – a renewed enthusiasm for NonStop. As contagious as such enthusiasm has become it’s just the start, as the major role data repli...

Half a decade ago IBM illustrated a post to the IBM blog with this schematic. IBM pulled data from 800 plus enterprises and published a report, “Under cloud cover: How leaders are accelerating competitive differentiation.” While we may raise concerns about the age of this report, it does hit the mark in some areas that the NonStop community seek to address – when to use cloud computing and how best to leverage virtualized NonStop and not forgetting just how important analytics have become.  In the coming years, it is HPE’s expectation that the number of enterprises running traditional NonStop versus those running virtualized NonStop (vNS) will likely be about the same. There is every potential that some vNS will find their way into the cloud, but perhaps most important of all, whether in the cloud or not, analytics platform will be close by and looking to access NonStop created data. Are you ready? Are you preparing for such a NonStop world? One observation by IBM, publ...

When Jeff Kyle, HPE VP & GM Mission Critical Solutions, stood before the audience gathered recently in Atlanta for the ATUG Regional User Group (RUG) meeting, two of his comments resonated with the community. The first was a reference to “we, at NonStop, create data” whereas the second was more of a challenge thrown out to all NonStop competitors, “NonStop – won’t Stop!” In one short presentation, Kyle touched on NonStop’s role as a vital source of data created while running mission critical applications whereas the challenge reiterated what makes NonStop viable today; it’s fault tolerance is as relevant an attribute as it ever was even as it attracts dissension from those who think good enough is well, good enough! These observations and comments coming from Kyle reinforce the critical message you will hear coming from NTI today – it’s all about the data. Move the data, replicate the data, distribute the data, integrate the data and yes, transform the data. It’s a data world...

There isn’t a day that passes where there isn’t a reference to clouds in industry publications – whether public or private clouds, managed or otherwise. These almost constant references to clouds are driving the conversation within the IT industry to the point where almost any other model for data processing, as we have known IT for a number of decades, is considered legacy. And yet, for the NonStop community, with its affinity for fault tolerant platforms in support of mission critical applications, the move to support clouds will be at best gradual, with a degree of caution, with many baby steps as the NonStop users come to terms with applications and data moving to a platform that in and of itself is fragile in comparison to NonStop.  Following on from the introduction of NTI’s key message of PRO Visioning : Excellence in Data – ready to deliver data from NonStop to almost any imaginable target – products are now being unveiled. And the conversations concerning clouds ar...