Justin Simonds

On May 2nd, N2TUG’s members came together for our 2024 meeting.  This year, the larger community of NonStop is celebrating 50 years since Tandem Computers first formed to create the NonStop platform, and we took the opportunity to celebrate!  Our theme was “Golden: 50 Years of NonStop.”

In keeping with the 50-year theme, here are a few more early stories.  When I joined Tandem in 1982 they

“The Federal Reserve has launched its long-anticipated faster payments system, called FedNow. It’s the first government-created platform to help your bank transfer money in real time, similar to what the private sector has created through payment apps like Venmo and Cash App that send funds almost instantly but outside of bank accounts.”

Similar to our interview with Karen Ramirez a few issues back, Connect wanted to hear from HPE Product Management Manager Ian Inglis. Ian has been in the position now for two NonStop Technical Boot Camp events, so it was high time to find out more about him and his NonStop Vision.

NonStop SQL/MX a look back and forward Many years ago, a company known as Tandem struggled to stay viable in

There’s an old Star Trek episode called “requiem for methuselah” with a very poignant ending. Captain Kirk has fallen in love with a woman who subsequently died and Lirk is mourning her deeply.

A large Global Company and NonStop customer emerged from a restructuring initiative led by new investors to increase profitability and cash flow, along with streamlining assets. There was also new services and partnerships to be considered in their planning process.

It’s been a while since we reported on an N2TUG meeting, which was in June of 2019. For reasons we all know too well, there was no meeting held in the intervening years, but that changed on June 15th this year!

Gartner has started talking about a new ‘stalking horse’ called the Digital Immune System (DIS). In fact they say “By 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase customer satisfaction by decreasing downtime by 80%.” As you might imagine when a NonStop person hears about ‘reducing downtime’ and ‘increasing customer satisfaction’ our ears perk up.

As you all may know, HPE is on a fiscal year which starts Nov 1 each year.  Traditionally NonStop usually has a great 4th quarter and the pattern is a soft First Quarter.  It’s not written in stone but falls into the general pattern for as long as I can remember. 

IceFire is standard-fare ransomware.  It is a kind known as ‘big-game hunting’ (BGH) ransomware.  What is BGH ransomware? It is a kind of ransomware that is characterized by a double extortion model that targets large enterprises, using numerous persistence mechanisms.  It is very hard to detect since it covers it tracks by deleting log files.

As mentioned in my last post, Cloud was the big topic for the 2022 NonStop Technical Boot Camp.

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.

With his opening words, “It’s not where we are headed but how fast we will get there,” the boss of all things NonStop, Jeff Kyle, set the tone for the latest NonStop Technical Boot Camp (NonStop TBC 22). “We are a platform and not a server; the platform we are perfecting for mission critical applications. We create the data and we transact the data!”

I’ve been doing a lot of research recently based on an article I read online. It was discussing human trafficking and that there were patterns in the transaction flow that could identify this activity. I was intrigued. I was quite surprised to learn that, depending on the poll, human trafficking was either the second or third largest revenue source for criminals.

As most of you know, NonStop generally is not a big participant of Discover and we showcase NonStop at our annual Bootcamp. This year will be a bit different. NonStop will be discussed at Discover. NonStop will be showcased as the platform for the new HPE Greenlake “Payments as a Service” being announced at Discover.

HPE Virtualized NonStop started as just a concept and challenge to the NonStop development team. Andy Bergholz, if you remember him, had sent the team off for some virtualization training and just asked “Could NonStop be virtualized”? “No”, “Never” “Of course not” “Why”? But then, as Andy suspected, there started a lot of “Well, what if…” conversations and in just a little while they had booted NonStop under OpenStack. That’s the way great leaders get things done

Well, it was very nice to actually attend a User Group meeting in person. It seems like it’s been forever. SunTUG 22 seemed to be pretty well attended. Kevin Shabow, the North American Director of NonStop Sales, kicked off the conference and asked for direct feedback from the audience. This harkened back to the origins of ITUG when Jimmy and execs would have open forums about what was needed, what was working, and what wasn’t. Jimmy always mentioned how very valuable direct customer feedback was to him and the team.

Greenlake is a major HPE strategy. You may have seen the announcement “The cloud that comes to you”, which is essentially Greenlake. Imagine Amazon, Google or Microsoft coming into your data center and building you a mini cloud that they then manage for you. You spin up applications and databases, try new business strategies, run sprints and have all the advantages of the public cloud.

An important question that is and has been discussed – is there a fundamental limit to computing?

There is already an estimated $7B being spent on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning (AI,ML,DL) in banking this