News from HPE’s NonStop Division (May-June 2019)

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.

After a phenomenally successful fiscal year 2018 for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and especially NonStop, we took the tailwinds into the new fiscal year and delivered very positive Q1 results for NonStop. In FY18 we sold more of our x86 based NonStop X systems than NonStop i systems. Customer experience, the ease of migration, great innovations in L-Series RVUs and a very convincing ROI are the driving factors.

Talking about innovations – besides new ways to deploy and consume NonStop technologies through virtualization, we continue to make a difference on improving manageability as manifested with our recently released NonStop Database Analyzer (NSDA), which enables customers to analyze, correlate, and visualize SQL/MX workloads in new ways. On the theme of this issue of the Connection Magazine “Application design and techniques” my team, the NonStop Advanced Technology Center (ATC) plays a crucial role in turning customer needs into a platform experience that allows software engineers to have a strong focus on functional-/business aspects of the solution, while – unlike our competition – our products handle many of the difficult to deal with non-functional aspects of a solution. Let me give you two examples of new or forthcoming products to illustrate my thinking:

    • PathSockets will enable one to readily bring C/C++ and Python applications or services designed for Linux or Unix targets, easily deploy them on NonStop without any code changes and at the same time seamlessly take advantage of TS/MP’s scalability & availability by simply building the application with the PathSockets library.
    • NonStop In-Memory Cache (NSMC) can enable new application designs, such as fault-tolerant, stateful microservices or interesting new availability models for front-end process designs not only for next generation ATM/POS architectures, but also for demanding IoT/M2M type of device handlers. Technically, this is achieved by pushing out the state to the fault-tolerant (process-pair), in-memory cache implementation based on open source Redis.

Combined with the ATC’s powerful, holistic architecture method (from strategy/business outcome levels to technical architecture & design), the ever growing portfolio of HPE, partner and open source software, and popular techniques and practices around lean/agile, continuous integration/deployment, automation, everything as a service, DevOps, APIs, the NonStop ecosystem gives customers a distinct value and new ISVs a platform for uniquely demanding new solutions.

User Group meetings, boot camps, and NonStop related conferences continue to be premier events to learn about the latest developments by partners and HPE, discuss new ideas with NonStop experts as well as get great inspirations for your next project. Mark your calendar for the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2019, November 3-6 at the Hyatt Regency, Burlingame, Ca. We are looking forward to seeing you there and to have a great event with inspiring discussions.

Franz Koenig
Manager ATC
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Author

  • Franz Koenig

    Franz König leads the Advanced Technology Center (ATC), a global team of some of the most senior NonStop architects, technologists and consultants. Looking back to a 35 year career in the IT industry Franz worked in international principal consulting and architecture roles before he took over the ATC. His professional passions are all around innovation, technology and strategy. Franz is married with two adult daughters, lives in beautiful Austria and holds master degrees in innovation management, general management and electrical engineering.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.