News from HPE’s NonStop Division

HPE NonStop – The business that continually renews

“History is not just the evolution of technology it is the evolution of thought.”

James Redfield

As we near the end of the year, it’s clear that 2020 will live in infamy for many years to come.  Between the COVID-19 pandemic, with a devastating loss of life now reaching 200,000 people in the United States, to terrifying weather such as lightning strike storms, temperatures reaching 130 degrees in Death Valley, massive forest fires in the West, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, floods in the South and even a fire tornado being sighted in Northern California, we often feel like we’re living in a horror or disaster movie.

But luckily the human spirit has the ability to still shine through optimistically no matter what is happening in the world. HPE continues to reinforce the theme of using technology to improve people’s lives and that includes new ways to sell systems and system infrastructure to customers. The GreenLake program is all about making it easier for customers to purchase what they need in the way of hardware, software, support and services and pay for it in an easy monthly payment. NonStop is also embracing this program and working to integrate into the GreenLake offerings from HPE so we can offer our customers new ways of purchasing NonStop and can review their usage through the GreenLake Central website.   We are not there yet, but we are steadily working towards that.

At the same time the HPE NonStop business is looking to make it easy for customers to buy the products need in their software stack, instead of individually buying them from different partners. A new business program called NonStop Showcase will make it easier for customers to purchase more of what they need on the P.O. they have open with HPE and to use the HPE Global NonStop Support Center for support on these products.  This is an evolution, where partners can apply to HPE to resell their products and leverage HPE’s worldwide sales force to market them to target customers. .

And this year, due to the on-going concerns with holding large in person events, the NonStop Technical Boot Camp will all be digital and available virtually.  Customers, partners and their HPE counterparts will be able to participate safely from their homes.  No masks, no hand sanitizers, no handshakes, no worrying that you’re terrifying others every time you clear your throat. Join from your dining room table, from your couch, from the hammock in your backyard, from your kid’s treehouse – wear your sweats, or your favorite sweater or even your robe.

We are still optimistic enough to hold this event in a big way, with two virtual tracks in the United States in the Pacific time zone, another track in Europe, and another track in Japan as well as tracks for our Latin and South American customers, as well as a track for our many customers in Asia-Pacific and Australia.

Each of these tracks will be offered for 3 days in November.  And because it’s all online, it’s the right price which means it’s free to attend any talk in any track or any time zone.  For some audiences live translation will also be available. Last year we had 430 people come to the TBC in person with many attending for the first time.  This year, we already have nearly 700 people registered for the event with almost two more months to go.

At the TBC this year, Nov 16^th to 18^th, with a bonus Education Day on Thursday the 19^th in the U.S., you can expect to learn the latest about:  New NonStop X Platforms coming out, new Tape Drives being offered, the latest on CLIMs, on NonStop Middleware offerings, on Database offerings, on Security offerings in the market, on DevOps offerings, on Manageability products and Payments processing solutions.  You can learn more about customer experiences in the last year, the use of Virtualized NonStop, HPE Pointnext offerings and meet with some of the NonStop and partner engineers to talk about the products they work on.  During this event HPE will also be quite happy to meet with customers about anything on their minds about how products ought to evolve and technologies they are interested in seeing NonStop move towards.  This free event will provide LIVE presentations as well as an On Demand library where you can play recordings about NonStop topics at your leisure.   We will also include some rooms for casual connections with old friends during the breaks.

This edition of The Connection Magazine is chock full of new articles, like “Improve Compliance with File Integrity Monitoring” by Henry Fonseca at CSP which can help you understand why File Integrity is important to protecting your business and meeting compliance, to “Managing Latency – Reducing Replication and Application Latency” by Keith B. Evans at Gravic – an article that talks about what causes latency and what you can do to improve performance of your system.   Andrew Price from NuWave and Phil Ly, from Tic Software have joined forces with an article on “Secure REST Services: Real World User Examples” to help customers recognize how to protect sensitive data and applications while still gaining the expediency that REST can provide to share access with trusted business partners as required.

Additionally, we have a database article from Greg Hunt at Odyssey Information Services, called the “Top 10 SQL Best Practices provided by a seasoned database practitioner” reminding you that when you design your database right from the beginning there are many gains and ways to avoid pitfalls that your competitors might be struggling with.  Security is not overlooked in this issue with Trevor J. Morgan from comforte’s article on “Ensuring Data Privacy and Security”.  Trevor takes the time to explain the various regulatory forces at play and describes what companies need to do to be sure they are meeting privacy requirements on their systems.

The HPE Engineering team from India has provided an article to give you some insight into many of the talented people working on NonStop in India.   We have a dedicated hardworking team there with many interesting individuals with a variety of skills and personalities.  This article will give you a little glimpse into their world and the type of people bringing their best every day to the world of NonStop for our customers.

Our friend Justin Simonds from HPE in the U.S. is also back this month with an article about “NonStop Trends and Wins”.  The NonStop business is now part of the High Performance Computing (HPC) group with the rest of Mission Critical Servers. HPC is led by Pete Ungaro, the former CEO of CRAY and HPC includes the CRAY business along with NonStop and other interesting product lines.  Who knows what types of interesting evolutions may come from that sort of cross-pollination?

Finally, last but never least, Richard Buckle is also back in this edition of The Connection with “The ABC’s of an Affordable Business Critical Compute”.  Richard takes an updated point of view on the Total Cost of Ownership for NonStop these days pointing out the ways NonStop fundamentals save you money and actually how affordable NonStop actually is when compared to alternatives.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this edition of The Connection Magazine and join us to feel a little uplifted when thinking about the on-going investment in and evolution of the NonStop platform which continues to stretch before us into the future.  We hope to see all of you at the Virtual TBC this year and look forward to talking with more of you then!   In the meantime, protect yourself during this pandemic – stay safe and look forward to a brighter future when we will come through together into a safer and healthier world, with hopefully better weather!

Best wishes from everyone at HPE,