News from HPE’s NonStop Division

According to a Harris Interactive poll, many people consider 50 years old to be the “best age” if they could live forever in good health at a particular age. So, are the best NonStop years ahead of us?  I found that celebrating 50 years of NonStop has brought 2 perspectives in conversations with our long-time customers and partners. One that assumes that if software is 50 years old, then it can only be labeled legacy, and surely there is so much innovation over 50 years that something that old maybe heading towards a museum? The view may go on to qualify NonStop as a mainframe, also considered something of the past, with the image of big capital expenses and not compatible at the communication and API layers. Complete the picture with the recognition that the NonStop community includes many individuals with 30 or 40 plus years on the platform, and you may wonder what the future of the platform is for the next 50 years.

Another view however is that if this platform is still playing such an important role for mission critical applications where they have been deployed, from banks to payment processors, from travel to manufacturing, or from retail to transportation industries, then there must be some explanation as to why that is. Why is it not following the same path as many others that are not surviving against the industry innovation? Why is a platform that some competitors would conveniently label with negative connotation words such as proprietary, legacy, mainframe, maybe because they are themselves new entrants without a similar customer recognition, still have such a strong customer loyalty and continuously renewed commitment? Maybe as Tim Dunne from NTI eloquently puts it in his article in this edition of the Connection magazine, “It must be doing something right! “.

Something else we all know is that no matter how much you wish otherwise, we all age. The question is, is it aging like wine or whiskey, getting better as it goes?  I recently was reading an article highlighting that some languages, such as C, are not memory safe and thus the source for a good number of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). With that in mind a conversation started in the Linux community asking if the Linux kernel should be re-written in the RUST language. Beyond the fact that not everyone agrees on what to do, one of the obstacles highlighted was that Linus Torvald and other Linux kernel SMEs in the governance who are required to validate such an important migration project are all close to retirement, therefore raising the question:  Is a completely new OS required to solve this problem? Is Linux aging well?

Perhaps the age of a technology is not what really matters. TCP/IP and SQL are both 50+ years old and doing well, thank you! Instead, there are a number of attributes that will define the value and quality of a given product which in turn maybe validated by customers and if structurally the software governance is stable enough then the conditions are met for such product to simply continue to thrive. As written in previous articles here, NonStop uses a horizontal scaling architecture, considered today as very modern because of its use as basis for cloud scalability. NonStop had the concept of containers for a long time and still very much competitive as highlighted in a recent post on Tango elasticity on NonStop by our partner Lusis. NonStop availability is still unmatched. NonStop clustering is the most advanced in the industry. NonStop provides an all-integrated stack. Combining the integrated stack and built-in clustering means NonStop has a much lower TCO than many other platforms with supposedly free software. NonStop benefits from the most demanding customers who are always pushing us to evolve the platform where true availability, scalability, security and data integrity fundamentals continue to be implemented without compromise, but with more consumption choices such as provided by GreenLake. Good technology is timeless.

To wrap this up, I’ll let you with another great Connect magazine edition telling the story of how NonStop 50 years have been celebrated at NonStop TBC 2024 with great anecdotes, fun and goodies along the way.

Enjoy the holiday season!