NonStop Trends & Wins

Winning Against the Public Cloud

A large Global Company and NonStop customer emerged from a restructuring initiative led by new investors to increase profitability and cash flow, and streamline assets. There were also new services and partnerships to be considered in their planning process. The company’s foremost business objective was to enhance transaction speed while upholding rigorous security protocols for both client and internal data protection. Additionally, there is a need for 100% resilience in its solutions to ensure uninterrupted revenue streams.

The customer’s existing NonStop applications were running on older itanium-based systems. These applications were a group of customized services that had been running for over ten years. To keep up with business growth, the customer needed to evolve their business to adapt to the current expectations of low latency and “always on” its customers and business partners were expecting, given the HPE NonStop heritage.

Enter a large Public Cloud that assured the customer that they could migrate the existing applications onto their cloud and be in production in 3 months with better availability, security, and modernization. It’s a recurring story, and public cloud now seems to be the de facto standard for all processing or at least the starting point for all discussions. Our customer was certainly intrigued and interested in the possibility of a 3-month solution. Alas, as with most things that seem to be too good to be true, it was too good to be true. On closer inspection and analysis, the Cloud Provider conceded that the effort was more along the lines of a 36-month effort, and they also recognized that they could not meet the stringent SLA requirements.

Of Course, HPE NonStop successfully met the “always-on” performance service level agreements (SLAs) since they had already met them over the past 10 years. The customer upgraded to the HPE NonStop NS8X Systems. Moreover, HPE’s NonStop account team furnished a customer reference with a similar technology transition, resulting in a remarkable 25% performance boost, giving the customer a large degree of confidence.

The company found HPE’s approach financially appealing compared to the public cloud offering. Through GreenLake, HPE provided an easily digestible pricing model, yielding savings of over $100 million over five years in contrast to the competition. Furthermore, HPE devised a migration plan that condensed the transition from old systems to new ones into a concise 9-month project timeline, a nice and reasonable contrast to the ‘estimated’ 36 months associated with the public cloud.

I highlight this recent NonStop win to make a few points. Public Cloud is a great answer for many processing requirements but not all processing requirements. Make sure you know all the ramifications before turning over the keys to your kingdom. Public cloud isn’t always cheaper, especially when looking at an “always on” environment such as those running on HPE NonStop. Finally, you rarely hear of a public cloud going down, but parts of the cloud often do fail. If a zone fails and it’s the one you’re in, you compete with all the other customers in that zone for the remaining cloud resources. Looking at all the factors, it’s not a bad plan to stay on a reliable, trusted platform.