- Insider Technologies celebrates its 30th yearInsider Technologies is a leading software development company developing mission-critical applications for the world’s most demanding customers. The firm’s DNA is in NonStop, with products like MultiBatch and Reflex firmly cemented in its client infrastructure. Now celebrating its 30th year of operations, Richard Buckle stopped by to chat with new and veteran members of the team to hear their reflections on the past and what they anticipate for the future of NonStop. Karl Gilbank (MD), Karl Todd (Product Owner), Dave Shields (Principle Consultant) joined in the discussion.
- A Note From Connect Leadership
- Expanding NonStop Opportunities
- Don’t Look Now! Your Data is Moving – Again!The past several years have seen another explosion of data creation. As predicted, the amount of data captured today is at least an order of magnitude more than what was captured just 5-10 years ago. This trend is expected to continue for at least another decade. But capturing lots of bits in a bucket is a relatively easy job for most of IT. Log files and data capture mechanisms have improved to the point where facial, spatial, and other data are passively flowing into collective storage.
- Discover Meaningful Patterns Using Data IntegrationData is valuable. And the more current the data is, the more valuable it is. However, if this data is trapped or “siloed” in a single system, and not available to enable other real-time business intelligence processes, then its value is limited, and competitive opportunities are missed. To avoid these missed opportunities, companies need to liberate their trapped data in real-time, and make it immediately available to other applications. For these reasons, some of the most valuable data is the data flowing through online transaction processing systems.
- Microservices and NonStopIn a blog on the NuWave Technologies website last year, titled NonStop Applications and API Gateways -What’s the Big Deal? we looked at API Gateways, and how NonStop applications can benefit from working with them. Microservices are an important aspect of working with API Gateways, and while that article touched on microservices, it didn’t get into details.
- Solving the need for SNA and X.25 Support on NonStop XAs the support timeline winds down for NonStop Itanium platforms, more and more customers are looking forward to their next step in their NonStop evolution. The NonStop X platform running L-series is the new home where customers are moving. For some customers there is a serious issue in moving to NonStop X. They still heavily use SNA, SNAX and/or X.25 to communicate with other companies. For some banking customers this was a particular roadblock that seemed to require rework of their application and a change in how transaction information and messages will be sent to their partners. Because HPE did not port their own SNAX and X.25 products from Itanium onto the NonStop X platform, some customers felt stuck and overwhelmed by what it might involve to migrate.
- Simplification: avoiding complexity and ensuring NonStop data “plays well with others!”Let’s talk about simplification. If you have as yet not had a chance to attend major HPE events and have missed the opportunity to hear HPE executives talking about strategy, you may have missed the emphasis HPE is placing on Hybrid IT. More importantly perhaps, you may have missed the further focusing of that emphasis to where HPE today talks about the need for IT to simplify the transformation to Hybrid IT. Almost by definition, hybrids represent more than one platform and equally by definition, complexity increases.
- Strategies for Capturing and Creating Value from your Security DataEvery business wants more data. Data on their customers, competition, operations, processes, employees, inventory and more. Data can be used to make better-informed business decisions and provide strategic insights that give your company a competitive advantage in terms of efficiencies, enhancing the customer experience, or refining market strategy. Its uses are limitless. Over the last decade, computing power has advanced to the point where generating and storing massive amounts of data has become highly cost-efficient.
- Challenging One-Size Fits All Computing How have things changed?
- Using NSDA to understand query workloadsWe are all aware of the inherent value of customer data within the databases that support our applications. This data identifies customers, accounts, transactional interactions and other patterns that are important for understanding customer behaviors and habits – all of which are useful for improving business processes and customer satisfaction. But what about the value of data about the data processing workloads? Is there value in understanding the processing workloads of our customers? What could we do with workload information if we had the ability to easily organize workload data into meaningful categories and groups, and view the dynamics of the processing patterns over time?
- Back For More (Sept-Oct 2019)It has been quite a while since I was given the opportunity to spend as much time as I have of late in my office. There is a nice feeling about having an opportunity to follow routines. We all live busy lives and there’s no doubt that having time to kick-around ideas with colleagues represents time well spent, but even so, there really isn’t any substitute for networking with those working with the products you cover in presentations and in articles, commentaries and blog posts. Shortly, the pace picks up considerably as with the arrival of the fall late in September, the number of gatherings of NonStop user groups kicks into high gear.
- NonStop Trends & WinsThere has been a lot more interest in virtual NonStop since the support of the VMware Hypervisor. I am aware of many proof of concepts testing virtual NonStop. There still seems to be some confusion around what virtual NonStop means exactly. Many jump to the conclusion that NonStop can now be run in a public cloud such as AWS or Azure. This is not currently possible since, to make virtual NonStop, actually ‘NonStop’ requires some fairly stringent configurations. These things are not readily available to configure in a public cloud. That depends on your definition of cloud; but in general, yes, if you mean a private cloud…
- News From HPE’s NonStop Enterprise Division