News from HPE’s Nonstop Division

Yes, once again! Yes, we said that last year as well and probably the year before, the HPE Nonstop Technology and Business Conference (TBC) continues to be highly appreciated by everyone joining. So, are we patting ourselves on the back or is this another genuine achievement? How do we measure the success of an event? Quantitatively? Counting the number of participants, the number of sessions, … Or qualitatively? Direct conversations with leadership, engineering, product management? Demonstrating innovation? How many new products have we announced? These are all legitimate metrics but certainly this year I believe we need to give a special mention of the number and scale of new products we just announced. So, let’s start there.

Casey Taylor, VP and GM of the HPE Nonstop Business Unit, kicked off the event with a keynote that demonstrated the scale of innovation happening on Nonstop, starting with the next generation converged system, code name Starship, namely NS5 and NS9. The performance boost around compute, memory and I/O are game changers to enter the AI era, processing more complex data. The NS5 and NS9 also continue to preserve all the Nonstop fundamentals of a turnkey solution, something our customers continue to value, as they have voiced to us many times. Maybe the biggest value of the Nonstop platform is to maintain its quality level no matter what directions the IT industry is taking. Going against the flow is hard, but our Nonstop customers and us at HPE know that there is a big difference between a 10-second downtime per year and no downtime. High availability is NOT good enough! Our customers are looking for continuous availability.

At TBC, we could finally announce the release of KLT (Kernel Level Threads), a significant project for Nonstop. This alternative method for parallel processing, typically used in SMP systems (Symmetric Multi-Processing), is now available on Nonstop for immediate gains when porting applications from those shared memory architectures. While Nonstop has always privileged the shared-nothing design for availability and scalability reasons, supporting KLT allows us to take a best-of-both-worlds approach with true vertical and horizontal scale combined. It took some time to release, but let’s not forget that Nonstop is a full software stack, and it means we had a large set of dependencies to coordinate. With KLT, we expand the number of applications we can bring to Nonstop!

But there’s more… on the security front, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and XYGATE Aegis Scan (Vulnerability scanning for Nonstop) have been introduced. The TDE approach to providing encryption at the table level is well known for its success in the industry because of its synergy with the database access control layer. As its name implies, TDE does not require any application changes, so the decision to encrypt is no longer a decision. It is easy to use; in the hands of the application owners, it can be turned on, but with the solid security infrastructure of the database management system. And finally, TDE provides PCI DSS 4.0 compliance, whereas other solutions may not. Complying with PCI DSS (and other regulations) is a requirement for many of our customers, so just like TDE, Xygate Aegis Scan has been introduced on our platform to not only secure your system and detect Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) but also to complete compliance audits successfully. As was covered in many talks, security will continue to drive a significant part of our portfolio, for good reasons.

OK, back to evaluating Nonstop TBC’s success, how about a look at key industry topics and how they were covered at TBC? AI, observability, and digital resilience certainly were very popular topics for everyone, and TBC delivered on those fronts in many remarkable ways. For AI, this technology will have an impact on every part of our product portfolio and how we approach IT operations, development, and so on. Presentations, demos, chat groups, and many one-on-one meetings provided ways for our community to exchange on how to make sure that when we deploy AI, we deploy technology aligned with our Nonstop standards. This means high-quality data is used, and no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data ever gets out in the clear.  It is also an area where we can see the value of having all our partners present at the event, bringing so much value to our ecosystem. One of the best examples in my mind is how our partner Gravic, beyond their business continuity offering, is bringing very creative ideas to solve the digital resilience conundrum (Keeping an air gapped site in sync!). And finally, a fantastic demo on observability brought by our HPE Nonstop Solution Architects of North America, demonstrating that Nonstop is not in a silo when it comes to observability but can easily be monitored by the Dynatrace, OpsRamp, and Grafana of the world.

Nonstop momentum

The success of TBC is also in its capacity to give us a data point on how Nonstop is doing and its longer-term commitments. Customers legitimately want to know what’s coming, and many presentations unveil portfolio decisions and directions we will take in the next few years. Another interesting data point is the number of participants who are new to Nonstop. As of this writing, I don’t have the exact figures, but they should be in the vicinity of 25% of all attendees. I think this is indicative of a very positive momentum for Nonstop. HPE, partners, and customers are all working on growing the next generation of talent to keep this platform running for decades without downtime! Let’s also note the video message of our HPE CEO, Antonio Neri, on Nonstop, an increased number of sponsors for this event, and continued highlights in the press. That’s very positive momentum.

I want to close mentioning the increase this year in real-world case studies by customers, very much appreciated by everyone attending, and of course the tremendous support of our partners and finally acknowledging the perfect execution of the event by the Connect team, once again this year, meaning we can only expect next year’s event in Orlando, Florida, to be just as fabulous!

Enjoy!