Articles by Justin Simonds

The 2022 NonStop Technical Boot Camp was held “live” at the Hyatt Regency SFO in Burlingame, California. It was very nice to see people face to face and shake hands after the past two years. Even though I caught a cold, it was well worth it.

I’ve been doing a lot of research recently based on an article I read online. It was discussing human trafficking and that there were patterns in the transaction flow that could identify this activity. I was intrigued. I was quite surprised to learn that, depending on the poll, human trafficking was either the second or third largest revenue source for criminals.

As most of you know, NonStop generally is not a big participant of Discover and we showcase NonStop at our annual Bootcamp. This year will be a bit different. NonStop will be discussed at Discover. NonStop will be showcased as the platform for the new HPE Greenlake “Payments as a Service” being announced at Discover.

HPE Virtualized NonStop started as just a concept and challenge to the NonStop development team. Andy Bergholz, if you remember him, had sent the team off for some virtualization training and just asked “Could NonStop be virtualized”? “No”, “Never” “Of course not” “Why”? But then, as Andy suspected, there started a lot of “Well, what if…” conversations and in just a little while they had booted NonStop under OpenStack. That’s the way great leaders get things done

Well, it was very nice to actually attend a User Group meeting in person. It seems like it’s been forever. SunTUG 22 seemed to be pretty well attended. Kevin Shabow, the North American Director of NonStop Sales, kicked off the conference and asked for direct feedback from the audience. This harkened back to the origins of ITUG when Jimmy and execs would have open forums about what was needed, what was working, and what wasn’t. Jimmy always mentioned how very valuable direct customer feedback was to him and the team.

Greenlake is a major HPE strategy. You may have seen the announcement “The cloud that comes to you”, which is essentially Greenlake. Imagine Amazon, Google or Microsoft coming into your data center and building you a mini cloud that they then manage for you. You spin up applications and databases, try new business strategies, run sprints and have all the advantages of the public cloud.

An important question that is and has been discussed – is there a fundamental limit to computing?

There is already an estimated $7B being spent on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning (AI,ML,DL) in banking this

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.

We have seen amazing progress in terms of digital transformation based on the pandemic. Indeed there was no choice. Those lucky enough to have jobs that lasted through the pandemic had to work from home.

Mission-critical edge processing The HPE strategy evolves around the idea that corporations will use a mix of on-prem private cloud

There is a Gartner concept called Bimodal IT which is the idea that most customer datacenters are run with two

Well, 2020 is behind us, although it hardly feels like it. Economies around the world, barring China, are under-performing. Various countries have flirted with reopening only to have a new wave of coronavirus spike causing them to fallback. Technology thrives and online has become just about the only line available.

HPE has been working on some exciting new use cases for HPE NonStop, and so has NuWave Technologies. These cases are either currently being applied, or could easily be applied in the near future, in the healthcare sector.

There’s likely to be a number of articles on TBC 2020 which, by all accounts, was a huge success and

Alan Turing OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) born 23 June 1912 and died 7 June 1954 was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist, or what we would call today an under-achiever.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) also known as the technology required for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) is getting even better.  I have a great interest in this and if you’ve seen some of my AI presentations I show a low-latency NSADI link between NonStop and the HPE Apollo HPC systems.

Well we at HPE continue to work from home.  I was doing that anyway so my only change was never going out.  When I do I’m complying with mask recommendations and washing my hands often.  My youngest son is worried about me, which is very endearing.  He always offers to do the shopping but every once in a while you just want to pick your own peaches.  I never appreciated a trip to the store so much.  I’m sure everyone has their own stories to share and hopefully, we may be able to share them at the Bootcamp but we are still waiting to hear if that will be live or virtual.

If you follow my column (and if you do, thank you), you know that I tend to favor the ‘Trends’. I confess the technology does hold more fascination for me but it is high time to discuss some NonStop success. Now, first off, NonStop is a unit inside Mission-critical systems which is a business unit inside High Performance Computing which all rolls up to Compute within HPE which is still just one of several major business divisions. I say this because I don’t want the percentages I am going to disclose to be interpreted as a recommendation to buy or to not buy HPE stock. That would be between you and your financial broker. Also the percentages I am discussing refer, this issue, to North America. So that being said and without disclosing any real numbers I am okay in relaying that so far this year NonStop is about 15% up revenue-wise over last year (Y/Y). This quarter NonStop is up over 30% (Q/Q). And for the year so far we are tracking over budget. So wins are definitely happening. Since I do not have customer permission to disclose any specific names let me just say that major banks, major retailers and major credit card companies continue to be pleased and are investing in their NonStop mission-critical systems. The x86 platform systems are the predominant platform that is selling, and the latest systems (HPE Gen 10 or for us X-3) takes full advantage of the HPE silicon root of trust, making it the most secure x86 architecture available. See this article on HPE cyber security or search the website for Cybersecurity or silicon root of trust. Pretty cool stuff. If you have an existing Gen 8 or 9 system (X-1 or X-2) you may consider a processor swap to the latest Gen 10 (X-3) processors. They are faster and have the added security built in (see link above). If you saw my last article on the old syndromic surveillance pilot, I am happy to say that there is renewed interest in that solution both in the United States and overseas. We are seeing the criticality of systems as Covid-19 is cresting in the United States and starts, hopefully, to begin to decline.

With the pandemic upon us I believe the value of NonStop is paramount.  As many are aware GE Healthcare, the NonStop healthcare solution partner, existed the enterprise side of the business, relinquishing that market to their competitors Cerner and Epic.  However NonStop has done more in healthcare and I wanted to tell an older story that becomes very applicable to today’s environment.

NonStop – Some Clarification In visiting customers over the past few months it’s clear that there is some misunderstanding of

At this year’s NonStop TBC we had the first ever NonStop Hackathon. Hackathons have become commonplace but not on NonStop. To me this shows a new commitment to keep NonStop current and viable. 3 teams competed to connect to the vNonStop system in Alpharetta and demonstrate connectivity. There were cash prizes. The competitors all received the inaugural T-shirt and to keep them going, a snack table, and, of course, beer.