While we now know most of what was covered at last month’s 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp and have read many of the blog posts that followed there still remain many questions needing to be addressed. One of the good things about social media and even electronic publications such as this is that few people will miss out on what topics were covered at Boot Camp, but then again, from a vendor’s perspective, considerable due diligence needs to be undertaken to better determine the impact and indeed anticipated timetable it will have on our customers. DataExpress isn’t immune to the challenges that will arise in the New Year and like many within the NonStop community, we will approach any changes to product plans with a measured degree of caution.

Returning to what was covered at Boot Camp and rolling back to the very first keynote presentation featuring Martin Fink, EVP and CTO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the emphasis was on strategy and vision and perhaps the most important item Fink raised was about the strategy itself. “Do we need a new strategy?” Fink asked before answering his own question succinctly by saying, “Not for the next ten years.” And this more or less sums up our initial impression from the event – it looks like the course for NonStop is set and the new HPE doesn’t appear to be wavering from its mission to make NonStop as contemporary a system as possible.

Like all vendors, we prize a degree of stability together with consistency extremely highly. We have few choices in this respect – should we lose faith in a technology, architecture or even a product because the message keeps changing then we will soon opt to pursue something else. One of the strengths of NonStop is that it has stuck to its value proposition, what everyone in the NonStop community refers to as the NonStop attributes. Data integrity, scalability and availability although we heard that Fink spun a good story as to data integrity no longer being quite the item it once was – with failure rates approaching 1 in 6 billion years  – even as he talked more about fault tolerance than using the word availability. However, when it comes to scale-up and even scale out together with still unmatched levels of availability, with NonStop X now shipping the NonStop community has “the best software platform on the planet!”

Among ourselves here at DataExpress we have to admit that we weren’t quite prepared for an executive of Fink’s standing to talk so openly about NonStop as “the best software on the planet” but it hasn’t escaped our attention either. Stepping back and looking hard at the NonStop X system, there’s nothing unique or proprietary anywhere in the cabinet. Perhaps the capability to connect to two InfiniBand (IB) fabrics with software on NonStop supporting the X and Y IB fabrics is unique to NonStop. Then again, other operating systems supported by the Intel x86 architecture, including Linux and Windows, now have the potential for applications taking advantage of this capability included in the blade package should they run on the X blades. Again, our initial observations are leading us to think there will be smart vendors and perhaps even users that will develop infrastructure that accounts for such a redundant capability to give hybrid computers based on NonStop new levels of availability.

Here in Dallas, Texas, we are prone to heavy rains and this year hasn’t been an exception. According to weather tracking institutions at nearby Dallas / Fort Worth Airport, 2015 was the wettest year on record with November the wettest ever November. Just for good measure Friday, November 27, 2015, was the wettest Friday ever. Attempting to forecast the weather across the Dallas / Fort Worth metropolis proves challenging even for the most astute weathermen, and they aren’t immune to making some very big mistakes. Somehow, predicting in absolute terms what HPE has planned for NonStop over the next ten years, even with the strategy well outlined as Fink has done at Boot Camp, isn’t for the faint hearted. At companies the size of HPE, there’s no telling the changes that may take place over a decade so some aspects of the strategy may just stay that way. That is, they will be strategic but nothing more.

As far as intentions go it looks as though the product plans as outlined by those at Boot Camp with ownership of the plans, we feel confident that with two models already announced for the NonStop X family of systems, NonStop X will prove highly successful and gain considerable popularity within the NonStop community. However, it’s still going to be very much a waiting game to see what starts trending upwards when it comes to hybrids. Will we, as is typical in Texas, be flooded with customer requests to support or will it be more a case of watching the occasional splatter of rain drops with just a few dedicated users beginning to adapt solutions in support of hybrids? Certainly we are intrigued by the prospects given all we have heard about project Yuma but will that be all that comes out of NonStop development or will there be more?

At DataExpress we have two distinct products; one for the NonStop platform (DXNS) and another for open platforms (DXOP).  At the time we invested in the open platform we thought little about there being a future one day when NonStop would join the ranks of open platforms but this may definitely prove to be the case either in part, thanks to hybrid, or in full thanks to the continuing improvements being made to the OSS personality. And yet, will consideration be given to the possibility of breaking out components at some point to have some run on NonStop while other components run on Linux, for instance – well we will need more than just a weatherman before amending our product plans. We may not have plans that run for another decade but certainly, we will be watching very carefully the response from our customers, not just their adoption of NonStop X and even hybrid but where NonStop, as a software platform, creates new opportunities and penetrates new markets.

While we aren’t immune to making mistakes we feel today we are better informed about where NonStop is headed and we are onboard with what it has embraced. There’s still more to come we believe, particularly when it comes to running in a virtual world, supporting clouds not to mention potential infiltration of open source projects, but the story so far looks appealing. Much like the anticipation we all experience with the coming of a New Year, DataExpress is anticipating even more files needing to be moved as there is no letup in the demand for information to be analyzed and stored, so with that, we wish you all the very best of holiday seasons and trust that the new year is a time of happiness for all!   
 

The year is winding down and it’s time to start thinking about 2016. While a new year means new opportunities to pursue, it is also important to reflect back what we learned in 2015.

In 2015, the NonStop community continued to depend on Prognosis to provide measurable and meaningful data - visualized for ease of consumption, as a critical component of their IT infrastructure. In my post to the IR blog of November 18, 2015, Delivering Value for NonStop X Users I observed how, “Many people view IR’s system and application performance management solution, Prognosis, as the solution of choice for NonStop environments.”

Perhaps more importantly, and definitely influenced by the success enjoyed by the new NonStop X platform, I also observed that, “…actual measurements are harder to truly achieve as a result of the ever-increasing interconnectivity of systems and applications.” However, with Prognosis more NonStop users are leveraging IR’s capability to run and manage performance of adjacent systems. This includes utilizing Prognosis for open systems like Unix, Windows or Linux (including its application stack), or to get visibility into contact centers supporting all types of payment processing operations, including credit and debit cards, mobile payments and other emerging technologies.

In turning to industry-standard hardware, HPE designed its NonStop X family not just on the Intel x86 architecture but also incorporated InfiniBand as its interconnect fabric. With new access features, interconnectivity between NonStop X and adjacent systems has been significantly enhanced and at the same time has reduced the total cost of ownership.

At the 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp we heard of other vendor’s early experiences using the interconnect fabric via a new API under development in the NonStop labs, aka Project Yuma. IR is committed to testing Prognosis with Yuma as NonStop engineering provides a Yuma lab for vendors. 

In summary we see two distinct opportunities to leverage Prognosis:

1.      Heterogeneous environments that are connected with InfiniBand provide new alternatives to choose the appropriate platform to support distinct business processes. The downside is that the resulting increased complexity poses challenges for IT Operations. However, Prognosis multiplatform capabilities allow an end-to-end view of interconnected systems. This reduces MTTR and finger-pointing between IT silos.

2.      With Prognosis performance management capabilities customers can measure how distributed workloads affect individual and overall performance.

As mentioned in earlier posts, IR remains firmly committed to the NonStop platform. This is a message I really want to reinforce for everyone in the NonStop community. While HPE often talks about “convergence,” they present a case for converged infrastructure featuring HPE hardware and middleware.  At IR we also see a convergence, but for us this is taking place at the application level.

The history of Prognosis is directly tied to the success the IR team has had in addressing real issues and solving real problems for our customers. So, we see application level convergence as another opportunity for IR and Prognosis to deliver additional value and true business benefit to our NonStop clients. IR will continue make the investments necessary to support the platform and the NonStop user community.

As I look forward to 2016, I see the beginning of many new opportunities driven by the complexity of hybrid systems. Simplify complexity has always been at the heart of what we do with Prognosis.  

Andre Cuenin

andre.cuenin@ir.com

XYGATE SecurityOne^TM , the newest member of the XYGATE suite of products, proactively provides real-time Security Intelligence and Analytics for HPE NonStop servers.  Using patent pending technology, SecurityOne enables a new form of risk management on the NonStop allowing users to cut through the noise and identify critical, “low and slow” indicators of compromise. It provides a 360-degree view of your NonStop security posture providing visibility into the unknown unknowns.
As one customer said it best, “SecurityOne isn’t solving a technology problem, it’s solving a risk management and security strategy problem”. For more information on XYGATE SecurityOne, please seehttps://www.xypro.com/product/securityone/

XYPRO Technology Corporation

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For those who could not make the event we plan to have a BIG SIG in MAY 2016, tentative arrangement are currently being made for 12^th May in central London, so please pencil into diaries and watch this space and/or check www.bitug.com website for updates.

Since 2004, XML Thunder has been generating COBOL and C programs to read and write XML documents based on XML Schema Definitions. To learn how XML Thunder addresses elements and attributes with empty content visit out online Wiki article – Suppressing Optional Elements and Attributes  (http://goo.gl/zJRMGO)

“Hear ye, hear ye!” The leading cause of data center outages is UPS battery failures following a power outage. 24% of data center downtime can be blamed on the failure of the battery backup. Another 7% of data center outages occur because generators fail. How can the simplest of technologies cause such crisis-oriented consequences?

“Applying Predictive Analytics to Power Backup” discusses how this field of mathematics now is being put to good use to detect the pending failures of UPS batteries and generators. Both backup methods typically are scrutinized by extensive monitoring systems. Unfortunately, much of the data generated is not used for actionable purposes. Predictive analytics exploits patterns found in that historical data to foresee failure probabilities and to recommend corrective actions. The result is the much-improved availabilities of data centers, and that is why increasing numbers of organizations are adopting predictive analytics as part of their decision-making processes.

In addition to “Applying Predictive Analytics to Power Backup,” read the following articles in the Availability Digest’s December issue:

Crimea Loses Power for Two Weeks – Talk about a massive outage! The citizens of Crimea lost their access to electricity from November 21st through December 8th due to sabotage by Ukrainian activists unhappy with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. All four power feeds providing electrical energy to Crimea were destroyed. The saboteurs next prevented repair teams from restoring power. Russia, however, had a failover option. It just took a few weeks to make happen.

The Cost of Data Center Outages – The Ponemon Institute recently released its 2013 Cost of Data Center Outages report. The survey of 67 data centers includes the following findings: the average cost of a data center outage is $690,000 USD, and the average outage duration is 86 minutes. Read the article for additional survey results.

Fault Tolerance with everRun from Stratus – We know, we know. Stratus isn’t NonStop. Stratus’ fault-tolerant solutions have been around since 1980 but never played in the same competitive space as Tandem. In fact, someone once said that if a Stratus salesman and a Tandem salesman were making a pitch for the same business opportunity, one of them was in the wrong place. It’s still nice to read about a technology that like NonStop has succeeded far longer than the vast majority of IT innovations.

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - Our article highlights some of the numerous @availabilitydig tweets that were favorited and retweeted in recent days.

The Availability Digest offers one-day and multi-day seminars on High Availability: Concepts and Practices. Seminars are given both onsite and online and are tailored to an organization’s specific needs. We also offer technical and marketing writing services as well as consulting services.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 728 members and counting. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.
 

Find out more about us at www.tandemworld.net