The Connection

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.

Every business wants more data. Data on their customers, competition, operations, processes, employees, inventory and more. Data can be used to make better-informed business decisions and provide strategic insights that give your company a competitive advantage in terms of efficiencies, enhancing the customer experience, or refining market strategy. Its uses are limitless. Over the last decade, computing power has advanced to the point where generating and storing massive amounts of data has become highly cost-efficient.

We are all aware of the inherent value of customer data within the databases that support our applications. This data identifies customers, accounts, transactional interactions and other patterns that are important for understanding customer behaviors and habits – all of which are useful for improving business processes and customer satisfaction. But what about the value of data about the data processing workloads? Is there value in understanding the processing workloads of our customers? What could we do with workload information if we had the ability to easily organize workload data into meaningful categories and groups, and view the dynamics of the processing patterns over time?

It has been quite a while since I was given the opportunity to spend as much time as I have of late in my office. There is a nice feeling about having an opportunity to follow routines. We all live busy lives and there’s no doubt that having time to kick-around ideas with colleagues represents time well spent, but even so, there really isn’t any substitute for networking with those working with the products you cover in presentations and in articles, commentaries and blog posts. Shortly, the pace picks up considerably as with the arrival of the fall late in September, the number of gatherings of NonStop user groups kicks into high gear.

There has been a lot more interest in virtual NonStop since the support of the VMware Hypervisor. I am aware of many proof of concepts testing virtual NonStop. There still seems to be some confusion around what virtual NonStop means exactly. Many jump to the conclusion that NonStop can now be run in a public cloud such as AWS or Azure. This is not currently possible since, to make virtual NonStop, actually ‘NonStop’ requires some fairly stringent configurations. These things are not readily available to configure in a public cloud. That depends on your definition of cloud; but in general, yes, if you mean a private cloud…