Mission Critical

Insider Technologies is a leading software development company developing mission-critical applications for the world's most demanding customers. The firm's DNA is in NonStop, with products like MultiBatch and Reflex firmly cemented in its client infrastructure. Now celebrating its 30th year of operations, Richard Buckle stopped by to chat with new and veteran members of the team to hear their reflections on the past and what they anticipate for the future of NonStop. Karl Gilbank (MD), Karl Todd (Product Owner), Dave Shields (Principle Consultant) joined in the discussion.

I hope all of you enjoyed your summer and are excited for the upcoming fall with the TUG season back in full force!

Extending on previous articles on improving outcomes with NonStop by “Aligning Applications and Platforms”, NonStop is also relevant in conjunction with “Cloud” initiatives or in a “Platform” strategy – and important in Hybrid system environments.

The past several years have seen another explosion of data creation. As predicted, the amount of data captured today is at least an order of magnitude more than what was captured just 5-10 years ago. This trend is expected to continue for at least another decade. But capturing lots of bits in a bucket is a relatively easy job for most of IT. Log files and data capture mechanisms have improved to the point where facial, spatial, and other data are passively flowing into collective storage.

Data is valuable. And the more current the data is, the more valuable it is. However, if this data is trapped or “siloed” in a single system, and not available to enable other real-time business intelligence processes, then its value is limited, and competitive opportunities are missed. To avoid these missed opportunities, companies need to liberate their trapped data in real-time, and make it immediately available to other applications. For these reasons, some of the most valuable data is the data flowing through online transaction processing systems.

In a blog on the NuWave Technologies website last year, titled NonStop Applications and API Gateways -What's the Big Deal? we looked at API Gateways, and how NonStop applications can benefit from working with them. Microservices are an important aspect of working with API Gateways, and while that article touched on microservices, it didn’t get into details.

As the support timeline winds down for NonStop Itanium platforms, more and more customers are looking forward to their next step in their NonStop evolution. The NonStop X platform running L-series is the new home where customers are moving. For some customers there is a serious issue in moving to NonStop X. They still heavily use SNA, SNAX and/or X.25 to communicate with other companies. For some banking customers this was a particular roadblock that seemed to require rework of their application and a change in how transaction information and messages will be sent to their partners. Because HPE did not port their own SNAX and X.25 products from Itanium onto the NonStop X platform, some customers felt stuck and overwhelmed by what it might involve to migrate.

Let’s talk about simplification. If you have as yet not had a chance to attend major HPE events and have missed the opportunity to hear HPE executives talking about strategy, you may have missed the emphasis HPE is placing on Hybrid IT. More importantly perhaps, you may have missed the further focusing of that emphasis to where HPE today talks about the need for IT to simplify the transformation to Hybrid IT. Almost by definition, hybrids represent more than one platform and equally by definition, complexity increases.