The 2022 NonStop Technical Boot Camp was held “live” at the Hyatt Regency SFO in Burlingame, California. It was very nice to see people face to face and shake hands after the past two years. Even though I caught a cold, it was well worth it.
I’ll have to say the trend of the show was cloud computing and the move toward public cloud. If you happened by the HPE table you were able to see NonStop running in both Azure and Google public clouds. These were VMWare implementations using RoCE . For Azure, a vNS PoC system was successfully deployed in the Microsoft Azure data center in the UK in October 2022 just in time for the TBC. The PoC leverages a Microsoft Azure solution referred to as Skytap, which supports RoCE NICs and VMware. The system that was displayed at Bootcamp was a small system deployed on two servers. The vNS configuration consists of 2 virtual NonStop CPUs, 2 virtual storage CLIMs, 2 virtual network CLIMs, and 1 virtual NSC. The PoC system had redundant fabric switches and used internal drives as VMware datastores. The VMware environment included vRO (vRealize Orchestrator), allowing the system to be deployed with our vNS Deployment Tools. The VM system fabric interfaces were deployed as SR-IOV interfaces, as currently required by our vNS solution. For those familiar with Virtual NonStop, a typical deployment.
A similar demonstration was done using Google Cloud Platform (GCP), also in October 2022, in time for Boot Camp. The GCP implementation was in US datacenters. The PoC system leverages the Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) solution, which supports RoCE NICs and VMware. The system was deployed on 4 servers, and it also includes a spare server for rolling upgrade tests. The vNS configuration consisted of 4 virtual NonStop CPUs, 2 virtual storage CLIMs, 2 virtual network CLIMs, and 1 virtual NSC. This PoC system also had redundant fabric switches and used VMware vSAN datastores. The system was deployed through direct interactions with vCenter, since vRO (vRealize Orchestrator) was not installed in this environment. Something a little different is the use of Terraform. Terraform is a standard offering in GCVE, and NonStop development will be looking at leveraging the GCVE Terraform provider plug-in for vNS deployment. The VM system fabric interfaces were deployed as SR-IOV interfaces, as currently required by our vNS solution.
Wow! NonStop in public clouds – not just talked about but working. We’ll have to see what opportunities may come about when this becomes a real NonStop product offering.
Another exciting discussion was around NonStop’s move to Open JDK and away from Oracle Java. My good friend and colleague Keith Moore discussed this in his middleware update presentation. OpenJDK is the exclusive go-forward JVM for NonStop. Keith let the audience know that there will be no new releases of “Ported Binaries of Oracle Java SE”. So for customers using NSJ 11 and NSJ 11 Update 1 please move to NSJ 11 U2 as soon as feasible. Customers using NSJ 8 and earlier versions really need to move to NSJ 11 U2. Keith is very excited about our move to OpenJDK. He feels this will greatly speed up our adoption of releases and that OpenJDK is the better offering. Generally. if Keith’s excited it must be a good thing.
Although there were no answers at the conference, there was a lot of discussion around immutable backup and its requirement for ransomware recovery. A number of possible solutions were discussed and we will have to see what pops up out of development or from our partners.
I’m sure the attendees at this conference are planning to attend NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2023. If you weren’t able to attend this year block out September 12-14, 2023, and join us in the first-ever Denver, Colorado NonStop TBC.
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