Of late I have embraced describing NonStop as being a legendary technology producing a legendary product, unmatched in the way it performs and, following fifty years of marketplace presence, continuing to be the best solution for many of the problems business faces today. I began this journey to promote NonStop as legendary only a short time ago, and since writing my initial observations about what makes NonStop legendary, I came across numerous quotes highlighting what and how products become legendary:
“Something is considered legendary if it’s remarkable or well-known or if it’s the best at something.”
Google: AI Overview
“Above all else, great products have a clearly defined sense of purpose, deliver value in a singularly focused way, and do so as well or better than any other product in the marketplace.”
Jeff Weiner, Exec Chairman at LinkedIn / Founding Partner Next Play Ventures
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-makes-truly-great-product-jeff-weiner/
“The most legendary brands give their customers a way to make a powerful statement of identity to their peers and the world at large.”
Mitchell Earl, CEO at Praxis
https://mitchellearl.com/how-to-build-a-legendary-brand/
When you consider NonStop in light of the above, you can see how I have concluded that no matter what others may tell us, NonStop is truly legendary. And why? What makes NonStop remarkable is that it has a clearly defined purpose and allows NonStop customers to make a powerful statement of identity. It harkens back to advertising and to references I had made in the past when Xerox countered the message of competitors who claimed that their product was as good as Xerox with the simple, yes, this IS a Xerox. Almost as good as NonStop means that it can stop, it will stop, and it’s not NonStop.
There remain many loyal NonStop customers who take pride in their deployment of NonStop systems. Likewise, numerous NonStop vendors routinely showcase their market-leading product execution featuring NonStop. There is a reason NonStop attracts such loyalty, and it is not trivial. We often refer to it as being the “I don’t get calls at midnight” syndrome. Better still, “I do not have to face angry boards or investors” to explain why the latest glitch made headlines on FOX, CNN, CNBC, and more.
Even so, this only gets you so far in the competitive world of IT. Many parodies of NonStop leave a smile on our faces. Yes, distributed computing provides improved levels of availability … but at a technological and human resource cost. Clusters? “Worked well after we set them up, but then the senior architect left, and now there’s no one left with the ability to maintain it all.” Run it all in the cloud and leave it to the cloud service providers to explain why their roll-out of a software upgrade shut down the world’s supply chain. For a week!
Fault tolerance isn’t the subject of many recent discussions. For a reason, the almost as good as a NonStop continues to be raised as the thought of building a fault-tolerant system lacking fifty years of experience is a non-starter in today’s market. After all, there’s a reason why no NonStop standalone system was ever top-vented; according to a story told many times, the decision to not have top venting followed a customer demo where Tandem Computers founder Jimmy Treybig spilled his coffee on top of an early iteration of NonStop.
Experience counts. Let’s not discount or plain forget just how NonStop made it to where it is today. Yes, the good news is that it remains unique in its execution, unquestionably so. Unfortunately, when it comes to selling NonStop, its downside is that yes, it’s unique. Then again, the special sauce that makes NonStop unique ensures continuous processing and makes NonStop well-known, to the point that NonStop is considered legendary among IT professionals.
At HPE Discover 2024, abat+ GmbH showcased the finished product coming from a production line manufacturing SUVs, all courtesy of a software solution running on NonStop. I was left a little taken aback by seeing decals for HPE and GreenLake, but none that highlighted NonStop. However, knowing the company for as long as I have and having written about them in the past, I will give them a pass on this occasion as it was an HPE and GreenLake event, after all. It can be said that for abat+, NonStop “gives their customers a way to make a powerful statement of identity.”
Lately, considerable attention has been paid to moving beyond fault tolerance to where disaster tolerance is provided. “Whether it’s a chaotic business climate, a war zone, or mother nature simply misbehaving, the rise of dual sites and, in fact, tripling of such sites, has become commonplace, and with modern replication solutions available from NonStop vendors, keeping NonStop keeping 24 x 7 is now readily achievable,” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Global Director of Worldwide Sales.
Access to technology and products providing levels of availability, reliably and with competitive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), is the realm of NonStop. It delivers and does so when, all around, it might be failing. It does so out of the box, and it does it where modern development platforms are fully supported. From a desktop or with a cloud service, NonStop development caters to those fresh out of college with little to no experience with NonStop. The beauty here is that their favorite development tools and DevOps philosophies are all fully supported, so there’s no limit to what can be delivered today as a solution deployed on NonStop.
For the remainder of the year and likely well into 2026, my mission is clear: Make a lot of noise about NonStop and fully support and promote the NonStop vendor community. Attracting even more solutions to NonStop is a priority. Hopefully, we will become better positioned to ensure decals of NonStop are routinely plastered over all promotions of NonStop at HPE events. Legendary applies to much more than just a single NonStop system or even to a couple of them.
What truly stands out and what makes NonStop the best option for solutions demanding the maximum uptime is the NonStop community itself. Like the solutions they support, the NonStop community just keeps on running, delivering on the mission they all support. Making a noise about NonStop that will not be muted. It is the NonStop community that is the equal of the technology and product that we all recognize as NonStop, and it is the NonStop community that is legendary.
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