The Connection

Every 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.

Introduction Having been in the industry for four decades allows you to see both trends and hype from the global

We 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?

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.

There 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…

As we go into the third decade of the 21st century, we see how much the predictions about data proliferation

There are several different factors to consider when thinking about protecting your data. The subject can be complex and usually involves multiple parties.

Let’s begin with a simple thought exercise. Think about how much personal information you share on a day-to-day basis, online or otherwise. Consider who and what you interact with; applications, devices, websites, humans, corporations, etc. How much time do you spend thinking who has access to your data and what they could do with it? What are some of the things that you do to ensure you are protecting your valuable information?

We are in the middle of 2019 already!! I guess a large part of the northern hemisphere is awaiting the onset of summer. Global warming and El Nino are posing twin challenges to our lives with rising temperatures and scarce or untimely rainfall. Here in Bangalore – India where I work, the summer has just gone past without much heat (sigh!!) but the rain is playing hide and seek.

Increasing business relevance and revenue on an ongoing basis is very challenging. For proof, look at the increasing number of companies dropping off the Fortune 500 list. And even for some established companies still on the list with shrinking valuations, it’s clear digital transformation to successfully address new opportunities and increasing business demands is difficult.

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 week the European NonStop Community came to Edinburgh BITUG was proud to host the first annual European Technical Boot

N2TUG held its 2019 meeting at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, Texas this year on June 27th. Our theme

In 1982, a band called THE CLASH sang, “Should I stay or should I go now? If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay it will be double . . .” and it’s possible some NonStop customers may think it is better to stay on the NonStop i boat rather than migrate but over time that decision will cause them to miss out on new features and enhancements coming to the NonStop X product line. HPE NonStop recently announced the end of sales for NonStop i, our Itanium product line and of course it’s natural that customers are starting to ask if it’s time to migrate and to contemplate what the effort to migrate might involve.

It can take months or even years before a data breach is detected. The latest statistics from Ponemon Institute’s 2018 Cost of Data Breach Report outlines that it takes an average of 197 days to identify a breach. That means someone is in your network, on your systems, in your applications for over six months before they’re detected, IF they’re detected. That’s six months! On the higher end of the same report, there are companies that have been breached for years before they realize it. For example, sources indicate the Marriott data breach occurred back in 2014, but it was not disclosed until 2018. The scale of that breach is still being evaluated and it seems to get bigger and more impactful as more information is discovered.

Andrew Price:  All longtime NonStop users have watched over the years as the NonStop platform has become more and more

After a winter with record level snowfalls here in some areas of Austria of up to 4.5 meters of fresh snow within a few weeks, spring finally seems to take over. The last patches of snow I can see from my home-office disappear, making way for another white colored delight: snowdrops on meadows that get greener by the day. The same way that nature brings this constant renewal and change through the seasons, the NonStop business is marching forward, renewing itself like nature does every spring.

We are now in full swing TUG season with meetings taking place from Los Angeles to New York to Scotland! Flights are being taken by HPE and Partners alike, and customers are hearing about all the latest and greatest NonStop. Speaking of great; the story at a lot of the meetings has been the fantastic performance of the NonStop Enterprise Division within HPE. Business is up and customers are happy! To top it all off, the technology keeps getting better and innovation is taking place all around! Basically, it’s a great time to be in the NonStop community!

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.