There's always something in the air as events season kicks off in earnest. Even as I write this post I know of many have made plans to head to Munich, Germany, for the Connect GTUG - IT Symposium and the turn-out looks to be on track to be better than in previous years.
Clearly, the news that broke a few weeks ago that the first member of the NonStop X family of systems had made it to General Availability (GA) status has ignited renewed interest in all things NonStop, but there's a lot more involved than just the arrival of something new. The NonStop community is always interested in networking, be it social or otherwise, as there's no substitute for first-hand working knowledge of a solution or feature when it comes to deciding on what's best for your IT environment.
Coming off a highly successful mid-year kick-off event for IR folks in the Americas and EMEA held this past January – check out the post of February 27, 2015, NonStop X – a lot to take in and monitor, of course for more observations following that event – energy levels of all parties actively engaged within the NonStop community is visibly elevated. So much is now expected of NonStop even as HP throws more resources behind NonStop – Munich will highlight such expectations so it's no surprise to many that what was once the pride of Boston (and its famous Route 128) is seeing the return of one of its own. Yes, HP is handing over to a third party all responsibility for OpenVMS. Who could have imagined such a thing back when Compaq bought both Tandem Computers and Digital Equipment Corporation?
In case you missed the news, according to the electronic publication, Enterprise Tech, in the article published August 1, 2014, Upstart To Breathe New Life Into Venerable Open VMS reporter, Timothy Prickett Morgan, wrote that "The many thousands of organizations that are still happily using the OpenVMS operating system to run mission-critical applications have heaved a collective sigh of relief now that Hewlett-Packard has decided to license the source code to OpenVMS to a third party company that has promised to enhance it, and more importantly, port it from Itanium to X86 processors."
With HP-UX in decline –not solely due to the actions of Oracle's Larry Ellison – and OpenVMS off loaded as it now has been, for HP's Enterprise customers the choice is between NonStop and Linux or Windows. What really sealed the presence of NonStop as HP's "Halo Product" for the enterprise was the accelerated adoption of industry standard technologies and platforms that provide the NonStop community with a rich choice of options when it comes to implementing modern solutions. And of course, none of this is lost on IR where Prognosis today can be implemented in support of any mix of NonStop, Linux and Windows.
In my previous post, It's about growth and new opportunities and IR sees potential for NonStop X! I made reference to what is displayed on the home page for Infrastructure - One dashboard to rule them all. For those who may not have clicked on the link, what follows is very telling. "Take control and manage your physical and virtual servers from one point of view", and this is perhaps the holy grail of all those who have ever had responsibility for all that transpires within the data center. It's been a heterogeneous world for many years, impacted significantly with the move to Client / Server computing in the late 1990s, and the need to be able to view a different system as you would any other resource be it a disk or a communication line is imperative as solutions today often have business logic running on different systems and troubles for one system may spell trouble for others. As for my personal favorite link on this page, check out Optimize IT Service Management with Prognosis Performance Management Solutions.
In email exchanges with IR's Americas' head of sales, Jay Horton, he said, "While this is very much in its infancy, even as it calls for breaking down traditional application silos, the opportunity to provide significantly better application monitoring solutions that span disparate systems has become a topic that is being raised by many within the NonStop community." Indeed, Horton expects that eventually every NonStop customer will want this capability and said is much earlier in the post of June 3, 2014, The changing shape of NonStop … and Prognosis makes the shifts! In that post, Horton said, "I can see that as NonStop finds new markets - with the advent of NonStop support for x86 - it's highly likely these new customers will be less fearful of change and expect vendors to provide solutions across the technologies."
Events and conferences will pick up steam after Munich with HP Discover 2015 being held in Las Vegas in June, with numerous regional user group meetings following before the events season winds down with the NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2015 already scheduled for mid-November, 2015. Whether you are already across the heterogeneous nature of HP's Enterprise system offerings or not, these upcoming events will go a long way to reinforce HP's strategy for the enterprise and having Prognosis already in use today supporting such heterogeneous deployments (and fully tested on NonStop X) should set very much at ease the minds of all data center managers running NonStop.
