NonStop Trends & Wins

A large Global Company and NonStop customer emerged from a restructuring initiative led by new investors to increase profitability and cash flow, along with streamlining assets. There was also new services and partnerships to be considered in their planning process.

Gartner has started talking about a new ‘stalking horse’ called the Digital Immune System (DIS). In fact they say “By 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase customer satisfaction by decreasing downtime by 80%.” As you might imagine when a NonStop person hears about ‘reducing downtime’ and ‘increasing customer satisfaction’ our ears perk up.

As you all may know, HPE is on a fiscal year which starts Nov 1 each year.  Traditionally NonStop usually has a great 4th quarter and the pattern is a soft First Quarter.  It’s not written in stone but falls into the general pattern for as long as I can remember. 

IceFire is standard-fare ransomware.  It is a kind known as ‘big-game hunting’ (BGH) ransomware.  What is BGH ransomware? It is a kind of ransomware that is characterized by a double extortion model that targets large enterprises, using numerous persistence mechanisms.  It is very hard to detect since it covers it tracks by deleting log files.

As mentioned in my last post, Cloud was the big topic for the 2022 NonStop Technical Boot Camp.

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.

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.

Everyone and every company seem to be designing for the cloud. Of course “the Cloud” means different things to different people but in general I think we can agree that when the term comes up it means something like Amazon or Azure. One has the capability of quickly bringing up compute resources including servers, storage and networking. One will only be charged for what one uses and for how long it is used. One can stop anytime. The presumption is that this is much better than owning resources and having them sit idle, or at least not fully utilized. As usual, people want something that is available whenever they want it for as inexpensively as possible. For that they are willing to accept some risks including availability, security and an eventual, not immediate, database consistency. It is good, perhaps not great, but solidly good. NonStop is looking for customers and businesses that require great. NonStop has a long history of interfacing to “the Cloud”. In the early days Keith Moore and I were discussing the ‘Silver-Lining Architecture’ to protect resources that were on the cloud. This developed later into GuardianAngel where NonStop’s Pathway monitors were running serverclasses off platform and in the public cloud while still being controlled by NonStop with the inherent advantages of Pathmon – scale up (more instances) if response time started to slack off. Recovery in some instances failed. Automatic shutdown of instances as load decreased. Now with virtual NonStop we have real integration with a cloud, not ‘The Cloud’ (public), but a cloud (private) by allowing NonStop instances to be spun up, with several configuration requirements, but spun up nonetheless.

The greater HPE strategy evolves around the idea that corporations will use a mix of hybrid architecture and hybrid cloud to achieve optimal results for a reasonable investment. Another tenet to the strategy is that everything will be understood through artificial intelligence and its components of machine and dep learning. Finally that a large portion of computing will be done at the edge. By the edge, HPE means near the creation of an event or transaction. It would be pre-cloud and would, most often, obviate the need to move the data back to the data center since it would have already been processed. Only aggregate data and outliers would make the long and somewhat expensive trip back to the data center. By way of example, I was reading of video ‘smart cities’ surveillance systems that were setup in China a few years ago.