Most companies fail to recognize their operational data is their most valued asset simply because it doesn’t appear directly on any financial statements. Data holds valuable insight into organizational productivity, customer habits, and proactive decision making. Unfortunately, most businesses fall short of utilizing their data to its fullest potential.
In early December 2020, I had an opportunity to sit in on a virtual fireside chat with Scott Dorsey, former Founder and CEO of ExactTarget at the 2020 Instill Culture Conference. ExactTarget is a provider of digital marketing automation and analytics software that was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2013. As mentioned in a previous LinkedIn article, this conference brought together a community of forward-thinkers from sports, the military, business, academia, and the venture capital worlds to brainstorm how to build positive organizational cultures.
Deon Ballard, Principal product marketing manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is quoted saying: “Sometimes you want boring. Sometimes you want reliable and predictable and all the things that you generally don’t want your first date to describe you as you really want your operating system customers to describe you like that.” I like that quote. If RHEL is boring, NonStop must indeed be comatose. Of course, Mr. Ballard is correct you do want boring in an Operating System, one that allows you to sleep well and with confidence.
After the successful upgrade I got the idea to use these servers and learn how to setup vNS on VMware. I managed to get two of these eight servers for my home LAB with the CPUs, RAMs, HDDs and the NICs. The server components were not enough to build a vNS , according to the Hardware architecture guide for HPE Virtualized NonStop on VMware. I had to spend few thousand dollars to buy the missing components like Mellanox ConnectX-4 cards, upgrade RAMs, etc…
The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is a major piece of legislation adopted in 2018. It is designed to address the protection and responsible use of every European Union citizen’s personal data. However, GDPR is not an EU-only regulation. It affects ANY business or individual handling the data of EU citizens, regardless of where that business or individual is based.
There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about Kafka, but what is it, and how might it impact NonStop applications and data? According to the Kafka Apache project, Kafka is “the most popular open-source stream-processing software for collecting, processing, storing and analyzing data at scale.” Kafka is used by thousands of companies, including 60% of the Fortune 100. Well known users in the finance space include Goldman Sachs, Rabobank, Barclays, Jack Henry and PayPal, and household names that use Kafka include Netflix, Oracle, LinkedIn and AirBnB.
Perhaps the most enduring character from the fictional Star Trek franchise just happens to be Data. With his positronic brain he could out-compute the likes of Vulcans and in so doing, endeared himself to viewers worldwide, given his total lack of emotion. Before Data, there had been Spock, but in Data we saw a significant upgrade albeit one with absolutely no understanding of humanity. In many ways, the mere thought of having someone like Data onboard the spaceship USS Enterprise, gave the scriptwriters that all-important way out whenever situations escalated beyond belief. With Data, there was always an option.
In an enterprise, there are many different data sources that are produced and consumed in many different departments. Instead of being tied to the proprietary access of each database, the use of a web service API will make integration with these myriad of data sources much easier. RESTful web services will provide a data access layer that’s more flexible and compatible with different applications, including mobile, web or cloud services. Many database vendors now provide access to their databases using RESTful APIs. They include Oracle, and MS SQL Server, the two leading databases in the marketplace.
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