HPE NonStop Servers

Please enjoy this reprint from the September-October 2021 edition of the Connection. In early December 2020, I had an opportunity to sit in on a virtual fireside chat with Scott Dorsey, former Founder and CEO of ExactTarget at the 2020 Instill Culture Conference.

In the dynamic world of IT infrastructure, HPE NonStop servers play a pivotal role across various industries, from financial services and telecommunications to retail, healthcare

The first movie to have a robot as a central character was Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent feature, Metropolis. Sci-fi connoisseurs of slightly younger vintage will recall the 1968 premier of Stanley Kubrick’s masterful film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you have been around the NonStop platform for any length of time, you know how influential the platform has been with respect to the evolution of money.

Red Link is the biggest transactional switch in Argentina, processing transactions from ATMs and digital wallets. Red Link is owned by a group of public and private banks that service most of Argentina’s population. Red Link processes more than 47 million transactions per day during their peak time of year. They are interconnected with 60 financial institutions and have more than 1,000 employees, with a large team focused on the HPE NonStop, as it is the primary system used for their transactions.

In early December 2020, I had an opportunity to sit in on a virtual fireside chat with Scott Dorsey, former Founder and CEO of ExactTarget at the 2020 Instill Culture Conference. ExactTarget is a provider of digital marketing automation and analytics software that was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2013. As mentioned in a previous LinkedIn article, this conference brought together a community of forward-thinkers from sports, the military, business, academia, and the venture capital worlds to brainstorm how to build positive organizational cultures.

After the successful upgrade I got the idea to use these servers and learn how to setup vNS on VMware. I managed to get two of these eight servers for my home LAB with the CPUs, RAMs, HDDs and the NICs. The server components were not enough to build a vNS , according to the Hardware architecture guide for HPE Virtualized NonStop on VMware. I had to spend few thousand dollars to buy the missing components like Mellanox ConnectX-4 cards, upgrade RAMs, etc…

The technology landscape is changing. Today, business is global, and it’s 24/7. It relies on IT applications in continuously running datacenters. It requires constant uptime and demands data sharing across an enterprise.

Perhaps the most enduring character from the fictional Star Trek franchise just happens to be Data. With his positronic brain he could out-compute the likes of Vulcans and in so doing, endeared himself to viewers worldwide, given his total lack of emotion. Before Data, there had been Spock, but in Data we saw a significant upgrade albeit one with absolutely no understanding of humanity. In many ways, the mere thought of having someone like Data onboard the spaceship USS Enterprise, gave the scriptwriters that all-important way out whenever situations escalated beyond belief. With Data, there was always an option.