Itineraries are being developed and current workloads reevaluated. Yes, it’s the beginning of the events season for the NonStop community and it’s a time of dramatic change for even the most seasoned NonStop supporter. HPE has two primary focus areas that it aggressively promotes at every opportunity and they are Hybrid IT and Edge / IoT. These two themes dominate all of the discussions and those who have been to an HPE event of late would be hard pressed leaving these events with any doubts about HPE’s commitment to both.
If you have missed it, I recently posted to the LinkedIn blog, Pulse, an article on Striim. You can find it by following this link: Striim looks to leverage new NonStop APIs in support of hybrid infrastructures. This post picks up on a topic I first addressed in an earlier post to the Striim blog: The Long Term Future of NonStop That Strikes a Chord With Striim!
In these posts I highlighted how the future for NonStop is certainly taking a number of unexpected turns as its value appeals to new verticals that must run continuously, without any downtime. I also pointed out that maybe for HPE having NonStop X and vNonStop (now officially called Virtualized NonStop), will usher in a new era of expansion and growth for NonStop. The more important consideration for the NonStop community, as well as those considering the deployment of Striim, is the understanding that there are real time actions that need to be made while data is fresh and oftentimes, in flight! And there is little else to match NonStop when it comes to supporting the real time world – without ever crashing!
In the paid post by NASDAQ on February 10, 2017, The future of fintech: Top technology trends for market infrastructure providers, to the CNBC.com web site, there was a lot to read about data. “Regulation, market fragmentation and new types of risk have catalyzed change in the financial services industry over the last few years. Automation and standardization has changed the way customers interact with market infrastructure providers, leading to an explosion in data volumes.” All the while, avoiding making headlines as a result of a crash, as has not been the case for some financial exchanges in recent times.
Not surprisingly, NASDAQ made the observation that, “Being able to mine data, normalize it, update analytics in real time and present it in a consolidated view is a source of competitive advantage. Until now systems were rules-based, but we are now seeing a seismic change in the approach which will progressively shift toward using machine learning and artificial intelligence to eliminate bias in the analysis and discover new patterns in the data.”
The highlight of the event season, and the one many NonStop supporters will be attending, will be the early June, 2017, HPE Discover conference to be held in Las Vegas. NonStop doesn’t always feature as prominently as the NonStop community would like, but nevertheless, when it comes to running mission-critical application 24 x 7, NonStop has few peers within the HPE product portfolio. What these attendees will be watching closely will be information about NonStop participation in both the key focus areas of Hybrid IT and Edge/IoT – the former being an area where even today, NonStop is being shipped as a hybrid embodying both NonStop and Linux – NonStop for computer, Linux for access to networks and storage – that have been integrated and tested in the factory before ever making it onto a data center floor.
Taking this one step further and acknowledging where NonStop users are headed; building their own configurations, combining NonStop systems with Linux systems has become a whole lot easier with the introduction by HPE NonStop development of NSADI. NSADI is an API to simplify memory to memory data transfers, the support for each system to directly access the memory of the other without any involvement of the operating system. Depending on customer take-up, the developers of Striim will take a look at this as it does offer benefits for users who wish to deploy Striim on an adjacent Linux system even as the data accumulates on the NonStop system.
As for the latter, concerning Edge / IoT, and a topic for another time, when it comes to Edge / IoT, where NonStop may make an appearance then Striim can add considerable value. If you missed it, at this year’s Hannover Fair, Striim announced that it was “showcasing their solution for enabling the real-time, continuous exchance and analysis of IoT data across all levels of an IoT infrastructure, powered by Micrsoft Azure.” For more about this, check out the Striim news release of April 23, 2017, Striim addresses core challenges in leveraging IoT for Industrie 4.0.
As NonStop continues to make unexpected turns – well, at least for some members of the NonStop community they may not be all that big a surprise – there is always opportunity and for vendors like Striim all that they see are new doors opening. Yes, “being able to mine data, normalize it, update analytics in real time and present it in a consolidated view is a source of competitive advantage” isn’t a message that’s falling on deaf ears among the team at Striim! Nor is the message that the future of NonStop will likely see it playing important role in both the Hybrid IT as well as Edge/IoT initiatives – a situation that will foster even greater interest in NonStop as it maintains its leadership role in supporting mission critical applications.
