NonStop has always been driven by business solutions and therefore when the new Data Solutions organisation was formed this was a natural fit for NonStop.
HPE’s Data Solutions business under Jeff Kyle is accountable for creating and delivering differentiated transaction processing and in-memory data analytics solutions for HPC, AI, structured data, and unstructured data for financial services, manufacturing, transportation, and retail segments via PaaS & SaaS.
NonStop remains at the forefront of continuous processing deployments around the world. At the heart of the NonStop design philosophy is ensuring a customer’s application and their business never goes off the air. We are tremendously proud to be supporting the world’s most critical and high-profile business workloads.
Iain Liston-Brown: Why is HPE NonStop relevant today?
Neil Davis: For NonStop the world has always been 24×7 but the number of business applications that fit this requirement has grown exponentially.
Over the last eighteen months since the COVID epidemic, everybody has had to experience undertaking all those day-to-day activities we took for granted as physical transactions through a new virtual world. Today we expect to be able to access all these services wherever and whenever we want, not bounded by the old norms of a traditional business day.
NonStop has always lived in this world, and our customers exploit NonStop systems to deliver their services day-in-day-out without them losing sleep since their NonStop systems are proven to offer the scalability and availability needed to support the new norm.
Whilst headlines suggest the world is all moving towards a Cloud-based deployment, failures in the Public Cloud have also been highly visible. Failures have not only disrupted their business models but directly affected their customers and made headline news.
NonStop as part of HPE’s Hybrid Cloud world has, in contrast, been quietly getting on with the job delivering for our customers. The adage of “keep it simple” rings true; complexity remains the biggest cause of downtime.
Iain: What are the new products and initiatives that get customers excited?
Neil: In the last twelve months NonStop has been busy, we have seen the release of the 4th generation of x86-based NonStop systems. The NS8X4 and NS4X4 have seen record adoption rates from our traditionally conservative customer base, already reaching over 85% of new systems shipped in EMEA during 2021.
We have also seen great interest in how Virtualized NonStop running on Private Cloud and the SQL/MX Cloud Edition database can be used as a highly secure, multi-tenant data platform for cloud-native applications.
As ever with our customers being in heavily regulated industries. maintaining compliance and data security is a common key topic. Expansion of our software portfolio with the inclusion of new security, business continuity, data management, DevOps, and manageability tools are enabling a richer solution directly from HPE and facilitating further integration of NonStop into a customer’s enterprise-wide toolsets such as CyberArk, SailPoint, and Git.
Iain: Where does HPE GreenLake fit with NonStop?
Neil: Antonio Neri, the CEO of HPE, has publicly stated that by 2022 everything from HPE will be available as a consumption-based service, under HPE’s GreenLake banner. The IT industry has seen a wide move from large capital investments to more flexible methods of consumption. This started with the Public Cloud providers and the creation of Shadow IT, but moving forward a range of deployment and procurement options are highly desirable focused on how the business uses its IT.
NonStop is no different and for the last couple of years, we have engaged with many customers who would like a more flexible option than traditional capital procurement. Indeed, in EMEA, 25% of the NonStop business is now transacted each year under a multi-year GreenLake consumption-based contract.
As we move forward, we are continuing to develop a wider range of GreenLake based consumption models for NonStop, including metered capacity integrated into HPE’s GreenLake Central console for billing, along with HPE’s other GreenLake offerings.
What is key for our customers is enabling a different cloud-like way of consuming NonStop, in line with other environments from HPE, to accelerate further deployment, whether it be on-premise or hosted. This includes the option of HPE taking on the full management of either converged or virtualized NonStop environments, turning NonStop into Continuous Processing as a Service (CPaaS).
Iain: Everybody talks about Workload Optimisation and economics, so where does HPE NonStop fit it?
Neil: The next evolution of GreenLake is to offer a full business workload as a service. NonStop, again, is at the heart of this initiative underpinning HPE GreenLake Payments as a Service (PAYaaS). Here, rather than offering only Infrastructure as a Service, HPE is now offering a complete Payments solution including the infrastructure, payments application, implementation, and ongoing management either on-premise or hosted. With the customer now consuming this PAYaaS by the number of business transactions used as measured by the business application.
So why NonStop for PAYaaS? NonStop is recognised to deliver industry-leading service availability combined with a class-leading TCO, so it was a natural fit to underpin PAYaaS to deliver both the reliability and the flexibility required to support future transaction growth in the Payments market, whether it be for the Financial Services, Retail or Transportation markets.
Vanessa Kaupp and Vlastimir Stankovic from NonStop EMEA, presenting at Digitech Algeria, October 2021
The HPE PAYaaS for the first time will offer a Software as a Service (Saas) like offering but with all the benefits of a traditional tailored solution to a customer’s exact business needs, which addresses regulatory issues of compliance and data residency, all managed by HPE and consumed by business use. We like to think of this as better as a than cloud solution.
Praveen Gupta and Clive Abrahams from NonStop EMEA, GITEX Dubai, October 2021
We are already looking at how we can bring other business workloads online using a similar consumption model to address other markets and industries.
EMEA NonStop Executive Customer Council, Edinburgh 2019
In summary, after 27 years in the industry I am immensely proud to be running the NonStop business in EMEA. What gets me up each day is the team of specialists I work with and the close customer and partner engagement. We remain an immensely close community working together.
Whilst at the same time driving transformation with a whole new area of opportunity, widening the applicability of NonStop into the Hybrid Cloud market with a proposition and consumption model that resonates strongly with new customers and market requirements.
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