comForte Lounge

At home on the web, NonStop may benefit from clouds!

2012-02-26T14:15:00.003-08:00

A decade ago there were so many discussions as to whether NonStop should support internet clients and today this has become routine. Will we see similar developments for NonStop with clouds?

There’s barely a day that passes without a question arising about accessing NonStop from the internet. Whether companies opt to leverage the lower costs that come with exploiting the internet, or simply expand their user community and open up to any smart device with a browser, the increased adoption of standards on the HP NonStop Server have made it all a lot easier.

In my previous post, “A connected community …” I returned to the subject of the explosive growth of tablets and smartphones and how it had become a lot easier to open up NonStop to new types of transactions sourced from these devices. And again, it was all about NonStop supporting many industry-standard interfaces and services. Surprises, I asked in that post, before responding with well, perhaps the biggest surprise is that for most of us within the NonStop community, there is no surprises. By this I mean to imply that, with the modern NonStop Server we have today, HP has provided us with a platform where network support is already in place – it’s easy to connect to NonStop!

And perhaps our success from opening NonStop mission-critical applications to clients accessing them via the internet, using a variety of web-based protocols and services, is just a foretaste of more to come. After all, having seen how easy it is to externalize the wealth of business logic we had deployed on NonStop to our customers, wherever they may be, it doesn’t seem all that big a stretch to move beyond the wan and begin to seriously consider the cloud.

“The tangible economic benefits of cloud computing,” according to former IDC Australia Managing Director, Len Rust, as published in his newsletter The Rust Report (November 10, 2011), “are driving IT investments as traditional enterprise data centers are transformed into private clouds. With server and storage virtualization as core building blocks, private clouds offer enterprises a step change in efficiency of their data centers, without the perceived risks associated with evolving lower-cost public cloud services.”

What Rust focuses on quickly is the advent of private clouds and the speed with which some companies are morphing more traditional data centers into resource centers, not unlike what Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and others have been advocating as public clouds for some time. Stripped of the potential security exposures and more robustly set up to meet the demands of CIOs, with possible secondary and even tertiary cloud back-up implementations, companies are beginning to realize the value that comes with embracing “elasticity of provisioning”, as Randy Meyer, HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) Director of Product Management, recently highlighted for me during an email exchange on the subject of cloud computing.

“Cloud computing is not only helping organizations to save money and be more agile,” Rust continued in his newsletter, but “‘on-demand’ solutions are also enabling organization to better support their employees serve their customers and gain a competitive advantage. As a result for many, adopting cloud computing alternatives is no longer an option – it is now an imperative.” Doesn’t this sound like so many of the messages we were given when first SOA and Web services appeared in the marketplace?

In a feature Thomas Burg wrote for July – August, 2002 issue of The Connection, “Web Technologies on the NonStop Platform: Why Bother? Which Ones?” he wrote “the days of the Internet hype are over – just about any company has its corporate Web site up and running.” Burg then observed how the statement “‘we need to be on the Net’ was a sufficient justification to spend money on Web technologies.” It seems so long ago when this comment was made and yet, it segues nicely into an area where most companies considering cloud computing quickly transition – who has the experience? Who should we involve in the transformation?

“In the business climate, there is no room for vendors that provide services with marginal value, during these tough times,” Rust concluded. “Only the best will survive and the marginal will struggle and eventually collapse. Successful IT companies have realized that providing able bodies is just not enough anymore, product and service offerings must provide more value. In today’s world, security, returns on investment and solution lifespan are still major concerns.” How very similar is this to what Burg wrote as his conclusion ten years earlier.

“Connecting a NonStop system to the Internet requires careful thought, including a cost/benefit analysis. However, I do believe that people underestimate the effort of (securely) running a Web server on other platforms that the NonStop platform deserves some consideration as well,” Burg observed as he concluded his feature. “HP’s message about the scalability, availability, and low TCO of NonStop servers are convincing arguments in favor of a Web server on the NonStop system.” And how very similar to what we observe as necessary prerequisites for deploying private clouds.

The trigger for further consideration will come with more complete understanding of the value of transactions – not every transaction in any mission-critical deployment is of as high a value as all others. There are many, still important of course, low value transactions that could just as easily be off-loaded onto real-time “provisioned resources” available on low-cost Blades technologies. Perhaps even on NonStop, as price differentials continue to erode. Solutions vendors facing an increasingly more competitive marketplace may elect to embrace this model and companies will need to be prepared.

It will be the experienced vendors with a long standing reputation within the marketplace that will fare the best as companies begin to turn to clouds – particularly, private clouds. And to paraphrase Burg’s final words in his feature from so many years ago, “starting with a small internal solution will give you a feel for what cloud computing can do for you. Go ahead!” We have mastered the web and so yes, it really is time to head upwards, into the clouds!

More than just Mister WIN

2012-02-17T04:01:00.000-08:00

When I look back tothe early days of comForte our main product at the time was MR-Win6530, aterminal emulator for HP NonStop - well, Tandem at the time. MR-Win6530 becamethe leading terminal emulator and is known by many in the NonStop community as'Mister WIN'. This product nickname still sticks and Mister Win is still verypopular around the globe. Needless to say that a lot of users of MR-Win6530know comForte as the Mister Win people, no more, no less. But there is so muchmore on offer.

Fast forward a fewyears and comForte established itself as one of the premier suppliers of dataencryption solutions to the extent that today comForte's technology for SSL andSSH encryption is part of the HP NonStop Operating System. Whilst HPs decisionto include our software in the operating system is a great credit to comForte'sencryption products we are not resting on our laurels. comForte continues toinvest in new products and solutions in the security space. The latestadditions to the security family of products were a single sign-on solution andmost recently a tokenization solution which replaces sensitive data likeprimary account numbers with secure tokens.

In the last 5 years,comForte has enjoyed significant growth by investing in products, by expandingthe organisation internationally and by working closely with partners. This hasenabled us to provide products and solutions to the NonStop space beyond connectivityand security, namely in the areas of application modernization and integration,disaster recovery, and operations management.

Today, comForte isvery much one of the biggest NonStop vendors out there with the broadest set ofproducts on offer. A trusted partner and supplier to many of you. Modernizationis the overarching theme of what we do these days. So, if you would like totalk to someone about NonStop modernization in the areas of infrastructure,application, and security we are there to help.

Last but not least,I'd like to invite you to come and meet us at events around the world, stop byour website at www.comforte.com to see what's out therebeyond MISTER WIN.

A connected community …

2012-02-16T17:34:00.000-08:00

The surprise for the NonStop community with the explosive growth of tablet and smartphone usage is that really – well, it’s a surprise! Read on …

It’s proving hard, near impossible, to escape the impact of mobile devices. Whether it’s a visit to the local coffee shop, waiting in the check-out line at the grocery store, or standing alongside your car pumping gas – a quick look around will provide ample evidence that today few of us can be seen without a mobile device in our hand or to our ear.

As a source of transactions the evidence is overwhelming – even the local auto shop around the corner accepts all of its payments via the Square card plugged into the top of the iPhone. And there’s little curiosity anymore when a business traveler walks up to the TSA agents at security screening and shows them their mobile phone holding their boarding pass. As discussions continue over the merit of mobile payments and electronic wallets, the role our phones, and perhaps tablets, will play in the way we live will only continue to gain momentum.

However, what it does highlight is standards. By now we are all familiar with UPS codes, with RFID tags and even NFC as is used today in pursuit of contactless payments. Being mobile and being able to pursue commerce seems such a natural extension to how we have always done business, and with the standards in place for pretty much anything we want to do, there’s not going to be a limit to how pervasive they will become. Yes, it’s a mobile world.

For the NonStop community this holds a couple of surprises as well as the potential to really amplify the value proposition that comes from deploying NonStop. Surprises? Well, perhaps the biggest surprise is that for most of us within the NonStop community, there is no surprises. By this I mean to imply that, with the modern NonStop Server we have today, HP has provided us with a platform where network support is already in place – it’s easy to connect to NonStop!

And this is goodness, as with the explosive growth of smart mobile devices, phones and tablets, the volume of transactions to be processed will only increase – and database will increase in size accordingly, with not much of the new requirements being placed on NonStop – it is ready!. When I asked comForte’s Thomas Burg last week about what he thought the impact of the increased usage of mobile devices would be, he was hard pressed to think of any “While I do see tablet usage on the rise, I find it very hard to see the impact on NonStop. Or, on comForte either,” was Burg’s initial response.

This is exactly the right answer as it is also an underlying reason why mobile devices have become as popular as they are – getting to information whether it is a bank account, a music of video download, or simply texting a friend, the infrastructure that has grown up around these devices has been almost immediate and automatic. Simply because good protocols and services were already in place – from HTML to XML to all the work done embracing a services orientation as we see today with SOA.

Yes, tablets may still require a terminal emulator to access some applications, but this is true of even the lowliest desktop PC. In general, if there’s support on the mobile device for a browser, then access to the wider world is instantaneous. It really is a testament to just how far NonStop has progressed on its modernization transformation journey.

There was a time not so long ago when at a user event exhibitors prided themselves on having the technology in place to support a simple iPAQ interacting with NonStop and demonstrating limited operator functionality. But not anymore – with NonStop supporting all the protocols we associate with the Internet and the World Wide Web, access has become a relatively trivial pursuit.

However, what will get our attention in the corporate world where NonStop becomes this easily accessed is security. When this topic was first broached it generated quite a different response from comForte’s Burg. “When it comes to the matter of ‘authentication’ in a corporate environment – how do you make sure only the proper iPads get access to the corporate resources? Yes, from a technical standpoint, there are a couple of standards being designed,” Burg explained. “Perhaps, even the potential for NonStop to have a real shot at playing an important ‘security gateway’ role.”

It was only a few years ago where conversations like this would never have included NonStop but so much has changed and for that, the NonStop community is appreciative just as the task of explaining the continuation of a role for NonStop within the corporate world has become a lot easier. Perhaps, in the not too distant future, walking through corporate data centers the presence and impact of NonStop will become as hard to escape as is today the presence of the mobile devices!

Industrial IT – let ‘em roll!

2012-02-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

When it comes to the future of NonStop and to marketplaces more receptive to the HP NonStop Server, it's hard to ignore the manufacturing and distribution industry where there's been a lenghty association with NonStop!

I have always had an affinity for manufacturing. Not the small stuff – but the really big plants, “Macro Engineering”, as I used to refer to it, the type of mills that often stretch for a kilometer. Sometimes, even longer! If the vehicles that are being used to move product around a facility are shod with tires taller than a pick-up truck, that’s even better! I’m even more impressed!

As a teenager I spent time away from school deep inside the pits below large web-offset printing presses. My father was responsible for the operations of a second-tier “suburban dailies and regional weeklies” newspaper plant. With web-offset technology, where images on aluminum plates were transferred to grease rollers that then came in contact with ink before transferring to the paper, there was always a need to be beneath the towers housing these giant rollers to ensure they stayed “clean”. Working during the height of summer, underneath corrugated iron roofs, temperatures would soar past 45degress C on a regular basis!

It would come as no surprise then that my first real job was in Wollongong, a little south of Sydney, which would see me working in the steelworks. While I have covered this previously in a 2008 post to Real Time View, “A question of balance!”, my earlier experiences working with newspapers had me looking for the first job that offered air conditioning and the only job opening where air conditioning was involved was IT!

Industrial IT, as I have heard it best described, addresses the field of computing as applied to the types of operations you would easily recognize as Macro Engineering. Steelworks, power plants, car and truck manufacturers, as well as oil and gas refineries along with many of the very large chemical plants. These are easily recognized – typically situated outside of smaller regional towns and villages, almost as if they had been dropped on the unsuspecting locals as a gift! Of them all, the factories I most like are those dedicated to assembling cars.

Recently, a former colleague from my time with NonStop, explained that while “PC technology is now powering a big share of corporate IT, nobody is surprised by frequent malfunctions and poor service levels anymore; most people have just come to live with the common misery. Complaining against poor IT service levels might even jeopardize their jobs! So anything that looks like office automation, including ERP and CRM systems and the like, may not be as good a market for NonStop these days.”

Fair enough. On the other hand, he then added how, “Industrial IT is a different field. Unlike human beings, machines and technical devices are not patient and not forgiving; should the service levels that Industrial IT systems were designed for be not met, costly outages will occur. In some cases, products will get spoiled or production infrastructure may be damaged - and furthermore, there might even be serious health dangers or lives at stake. In this case, Industrial IT is clearly an area where deploying NonStop make good sense.”

Yes, it really does come back to the superior levels of availability provided by NonStop. But are there NonStop systems still being used in this manner? Can NonStop provide solutions for Industrial? In the preliminary work I have been doing for an opinions white paper for another client, I became acutely aware of just how many large engineering operations depended on NonStop, and in particular how many of them were associated with car manufacturing. And of these manufacturers, many were using products from comForte, including terminal emulation as well as security offerings – it seems even in manufacturing, with Windows PCs sitting in their factories, security is particularly important as even today, some piece of PC malware makes it into their production environment with the potential of causing havoc!

Mercedes Benz, Porsche and Audi continue to rely on NonStop for oversight of their assembly lines. And of these probably Mercedes Benz has the most systems installed. And globally! Yes, every manufacturing plant, including the plant building the SMART car, has NonStop Servers deployed. Rolling off the assembly line it’s good to know NonStop is part of what it makes it all happen! In the post of February 7, 2012, “Partnerships built to last …” on my Blog Real Time View I cover this in more detail, as the value being provided by the HP NonStop Servers is hard to ignore.

The only down side with Macro Engineering is that anything rarely changes and “in general, manufacturing could seem rather ‘static’,” according to comForte’s Thomas Burg. But then again, “the relationship we have with these customers has endured for more than ten years; very little changes apart from the upgrades in response to the growth we see at these manufacturers.” However, in many ways, even this is encouraging as NonStop continues to provide the levels of availability simply not present in other solutions. And the partnership comForte enjoys with these companies will continue for many years to come.

With the continuing transformation of NonStop the attributes that have appealed to car manufacturers for all these years can be easily applied to other applications. “Industrial automation technology used in manufacturing is the same as is needed in support of automated operations in retail, or logistics – an automated warehouse does not care at all whether it stores parts for a manufacturing customer or goods to be distributed to the stores of a retailer, or parcels that need to be forwarded by a logistics service provider,” explained my former colleague. “It is always the same technology, and I usually refer to ‘Industrial IT’ as an umbrella term for solutions driving automation technology.”

Yes, there are more car and truck manufacturers, and even steelworks, depending on the uptime that only NonStop provides, reliably and routinely. PC’s provide value and boost in productivity is hard to ignore, but when it comes to Macro Engineering, it takes so much more and for that, running NonStop is more than up to meeting the demands!

Customers are buying!

2012-01-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

Continuing with the theme of New Year and with opinions and observations about what we can expect to see – this time the focus is on NonStop users and vendors. New customers and new solutions bodes well for a good 2012 …

While it was only a matter of a few weeks that I wrote of welcoming the New Year, and yet here it is. Did you get a gift for the New Year – and do you still recall what it was? The end of January already, and it is a reminder of how quickly our plans for the year can take on a sense of urgency. The end of the quarter is now a mere eight weeks away! For some businesses this leaves but one more quarter before they wrap up their financial year.

However, January has been anything but quiet for many of us within the NonStop community. Already the dates for upcoming user events are becoming more widely known. The venues? I am not sure I could wish for anything better – HP Discover will be held again in Las Vegas, Nevada, (June 4 – 7) and then it’s a flight to Nice before a short drive to Monte Carlo to join EBUG participants in an ACI Exchange at the Meridien Hotel in Monaco, (June 13 -15), before a trip back to Europe late summer to join GTUG as it hosts the pan European event in Dresden, Germany, (Sept 26 – 27). Many others will be heading to SATUG early in March and here’s hoping OzTUG puts in an event in Sydney again.

In the last post, “A return to normal!” I described what I thought of HP’s prospects, as well as of the NonStop Systems future. As I anticipate all that might happen in 2012, the view looks pretty good. As I am reminded so often by those much closer to HP than I am, there’s every indication that customers are buying again. Yes, after a couple of years sitting it out, on the sidelines so to speak, the continuing growth in transaction volumes has led to many “capacity refreshes” being pursued. And along the way, there are a number of instances where NonStop customers have begun to talk more openly about more applications being moved to the NonStop System platform.

So, what will the year hold for customers of NonStop? Rack-mounted NonStop Systems continue to see prices dropping with each new Intel Itanium chip package. For users looking for 2 or 4 CPUs, these simply cannot be overlooked and as regional servers, or simply as development servers, the price / performance metrics are even harder to ignore. However, probably more importantly, in general customers are liking what they see coming from HP today – they like the new direction HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) is taking and these customers and prospects like the breadth of choice now on offer from HP.

Quad-core BladeSystems for NonStop have had a number of big wins of late, and while there are always difficulties in actually describing individual wins or naming the customers, it’s safe to say that within the financial services marketplace, particularly among the better known card issuers, there have been some very interesting developments of late. Something I hope to more fully cover in blogs and opinion papers shortly.

But yes, there is a lot of excitement with the success that card fraud detection vendor, Retail Decisions, immediately achieved following the port of its scoring application to NonStop and it’s big win with this large card issuer. While the details about the opportunity are coming slowly, and it may still be a while before we know the full story, it’s always good to welcome the arrival of a new solutions vendor particularly that they have begun developing a pipeline for their NonStop solution! New applications coming to the NonStop platform is always a candidate for future headlines! In this case, it should provide a compelling read for all customers of NonStop!

And what does the year hold for NonStop vendors? While the NonStop platform continues to attract solutions vendors perhaps it is among the NonStop middleware vendor community where we may see more action. The departure of GoldenGate from the marketplace, now fully integrated into Oracle continues to spur interest among all vendors, where near partnerships are forming and new products are coming to market. And for those providing modernization tools and utilities, whether in support of client access or simply helping to move to more modern networks, the evidence suggests there is still a lot of interest within the NonStop user community.

In the previous post, and already referenced earlier in this post, I quoted comForte’s Thomas Gloerfeld, after he told me that comForte in 2012 “will very much focus on modernizing applications as well as modernizing infrastructure.” In a more recent discussion, Gloerfeld went on to add how “some of the recent investments by comForte in new products to address modernization met with success in 2011. The uLinga product suite now has several customers and a healthy pipeline of new prospects in America and Europe. comForte continues to innovate in the security space and its recent launch of the SecurData Suite of products has met with early success.”

Gloerfeld then added “as for Infrared360 (IR360) - middleware that enables secure, audited, delegated access to Enterprise Messaging Environments (EMS) such as WebSphere MQ™, Tibco EMS™, or other JMS messaging providers that is agent-less (there is no agent deployment to target queue managers, neither is there any client software required) - interest continues to remain very high even among NonStop users as WebSphereMQ continue to be one of the preferred infrastructure solutions integrating disparate server platforms.”

Customers of NonStop will continue to add capacity even as vendors targeting the NonStop platform will continue to bring new solutions and middleware to market. In the last post I closed with the observation of how the integration with the servers around NonStop using standard and modern middleware and infrastructure will continue, and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone in the NonStop community. However, what many customers within the NonStop community may overlook is just how much choice they have and how rich the product offerings really are. And perhaps that is the best New Year’s gift of all!

A return to business as normal!

2012-01-22T18:03:00.000-08:00

With the New Year comes speculation about HP, the NonStop Server and the
outlook for vendors including comForte. However the transformation of NonStop
will continue; users stay focused on modernization …

Welcome to the New Year, and while commentators and pundits have already expressed their opinions about what will happen, and even placed early bets on likely outcomes, at the very least, I have to believe it will prove interesting. When it comes to HP, rumors persist about a likely merger with SAP and then the spin-off of consumer products including PCs and printers, I just don’t hold out too much hope of this scenario developing any legs. It’s great for headlines, of course, but I suspect with CEO, Meg Whitman, now firmly entrenched at the helm of HP there will be considerably easing in possible big plays for the foreseeable future.

And what of HP’s prospects? Indeed, what of Whitman’s future? For someone who initially categorized Whitman’s elevation to the role of CEO as more or less a placeholder and a temporary assignment to give the board more time for a comprehensive look at who is available, I have changed my mind. To date, I see very little that I would reverse and the retention of Donatelli, Veghte and Zadak as direct reports following Ann Livermore’s elevation to a board position bodes well for NonStop – Martin Fink, the head of Business Critical Systems,
where the NonStop Enterprise Division lives, is but one degree of separation from Whitman.

What, too, of the prospects for NonStop? Will we see a greater role for NonStop emerge in the near term? Again, for someone who remains bullish on all matters NonStop, should HP establish its messages for 2012 with just cursory support for NonStop, then it may be all the product line needs. A quick check of the Server page on the HP web site brings up a page highlighting the need to “Accelerate Transformation” – build, consume, manage and secure cloud services for your organization’s needs. While I remain cautious about promising too much for cloud computing, it is relatively easy for me to see NonStop having a play even here, and 2012 may be the break-out year for NonStop in this respect.

The HP NonStop Server platform remains as relevant today as it always was – and this doesn’t represent anything new from me. Looking back at the post of December 27, 2011, “Taking a fall!” where I wrote at how, properly handling fault components is at the very root of what today we have as a NonStop Server, and from the earliest Tandem Computer there’s considerable history in terms of what today’s very modern NonStop Server accommodates … it’s just this very attention to detail and the experience gained from so many operational fault tolerant systems that continue to fuel NonStop Server’s relevance in today’s marketplace.

There’s just so much the NonStop Server of today can accommodate that there’s increasing acceptance of the platform not just for traditional OLTP workloads, but as a safe, secure repository of data – the ability of NS SQL/MX to support mixed workloads remains a tough act to compete against. Even if you are Oracle – could we soon see the SQL/MX “box” from NED, one, of a number of servers, within the data center?

In my last post of 2011 that appeared early this year as the post of January 6, 2012, “Feeling secure?” I observed how for many years NonStop has not been the sole server in the data center, nor has it been a complete vertical product offering satisfying all the needs of business as a turnkey solution. The days of a single product line satisfying all requirements are long over, and in fulfilling highly focused roles, usually in support of mission critical applications, NonStop servers connect with a diverse array of client and peer servers. There’s no alternative
to supporting standards in this new world and the NonStop community is fully aware of this development.

While I will leave for a later post further discussion about standards, the attention to detail in how NonStop provides continuous availability along with its transformation into a modern server utilizing common componentry and chipset shared among all of BCS, and supporting open services and interfaces has made choosing NonStop easier to justify than in the past. None of this has been lost on comForte who continue to pursue every opportunity to help modernize the applications – yes, even as there are modern NonStop Servers there remains many legacy applications.

“Our focus in 2012 will very much be on modernizing applications as well as modernizing infrastructure. There will always be a focus by comForte on security but assisting our customers with modernization projects remains a priority,” according to comForte marketing head, Thomas Gloerfeld. “This is not new nor should it surprise any of our customers and prospects and yet, even at a time when NonStop Servers are becoming more affordable than ever before, there are still many applications dependent on user interaction via ‘green screens’ and this we can easily rectify!”

HP will not be without its detractors and the ongoing debate over the relationship HP enjoys with Intel and in HPs support of Intel’s Itanium architecture, but there can be little doubt that the product lines continue to remain popular among many companies. NonStop will remain the premier product for mission critical applications where true 7 X 24 operations are mandatory. And the integration with the servers around it using standards and modern middleware and infrastructure will continue, and where the day of the “data center in a chassis” may not be too far away. Yes, it’s going to be a fun year to watch, and the early signs suggest that perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of all will simply be HP making a strong showing as it returns to business as normal!

Feeling secure?

2012-01-06T10:42:00.000-08:00

In recent posts I have talked about modernizing the application as well as modernizing the infrastructure, both important areas of product development within comForte. With the New Year celebrations behind us, however, it’s a good time to discuss security!

Returning to Boulder, Colorado after spending the New Year in Key West, Florida I was anticipating much colder weather but surprise! It’s almost as warm here as it is in other parts of Florida. Although the break proved relaxing I still managed to find time to blog. And if you missed reading the January 3rd post to Real Time View you may want to check it out, as I provided commentary about a recent online research exchange conducted by The Standish Group. I will not revisit the same subject material as I did in that post but the part I do want to address here has to do with security – a topic you may have come to associate with comForte’s name.

Standish chairman, Jim Johnson, elected to produce a predictions “top ten” list along the style of late night host, Letterman, and among the many points that Standish included was one identified as “National Bionics ID”. Yes it placed third behind the more popular predictions in support of much broader use of “Particle Transference” and even potentially the “Plaque Eating Guinea Worm” and yes, there was some humor associated with the inclusion of them as possible high-profile developments in 2012 that would attract IT managers’ interests. But behind these flashy bullet points lie some intriguing possibilities.

National Bionics ID was just one perspective on security. In other words, not just a craze or even a spoof, but rather an attempt to highlight just how far we all may be prepared to go to ensure our own security – not just physical, such as we come across routinely as we catch a plane – but in cyberspace where so much more damage can be inflicted on us, mostly unaware! Yes, there are some of us now quite prepared to volunteer considerable information about ourselves simply to duck standing in line or risk a cyber-attack.

In previous posts to this blog I referenced exchanges I had had with comForte’s Thomas Burg and Thomas Gloerfeld where we looked at how best to categorize the products being provided by comForte and we came up with the classifications of Application Modernization and Infrastructure Modernization. But we also added to this pair the classification of Security. After all you can modernize the infrastructure and then the applications as much as you like, but increasingly today if you fail to adequately account for security, you may have simply made it a lot easier to penetrate the business logic and data you may have just deployed.

Modernization is not without its price. Standards and open systems are by default those that attract the biggest followings and where little escapes the eye of those who may not share the same interests as we do and are only too anxious to exploit any opening that may appear. As Standish went on to explain as they further qualified the bullet point National Bionics ID and the likely acceptance of identities tied more closely to measurable, biological characteristics “it will be the prevention of identity theft and just the convenience of not carrying driver’s licenses and identity cards that will drive people to want this feature in their lives.”

Facial recognition is already in use across some cities and, without going into specifics, I know I have been scanned several times of late – the greeting from those screening me at the time was such that they could only have found out who I was from the arrays of cameras I passed on my way to the checkpoint. In the past I have avoided providing commentary about security but as from this year I plan to immerse myself more deeply in the subject and working with comForte, as I have these past couple of years, it hasn’t escaped my attention just how important a role security plays in the business comForte pursues. It’s not hard to miss how it is comForte products today that come as part of HP NonStop product packages in support of encryption of data in transit.

“comForte was successful early in having HP NonStop ship our MR-Win6530 as the standard SSL-enabled emulator on the NonStop console and this has proved popular with the NonStop community,” comForte’s Thomas Gloerfeld observed. He then went on to add how today “HP had been selling an optional SSL and then later, an SSH package to the NonStop community but as of September 2011, HP OEM’s this too and it’s now an integral part of the operating system.” This is clearly a world of standards and as always this is in an interest of mine as there’s a strong heritage of success when it comes to embracing standards, and the NonStop community is no exception in this respect.

For many years NonStop has not been the sole server in the data center nor has it been a complete vertical product offering satisfying all the needs of business as a turnkey solution. The days of a single product line satisfying all requirements are long over, and in fulfilling highly focused roles, usually in support of mission critical applications, NonStop servers connect with a diverse array of client and peer servers. There’s no alternative to supporting standards in this new world and the NonStop community is fully aware of this development.

It may be years before you can “walk into a store, face a camera and walk out with your purchases. No mess, no hassle and no drama.” This was a likely future scenario according to Standish. But for those of us working inside the data center there’s already many steps that have been taken to protect identity and to ensure privacy that in time, and with the approval of society at large, it may not be as fanciful as it appears. The coming year will be filled with many interesting developments but I have to believe, for many of us, security is definitely going to percolate even higher up the list (than third) as we wrestle with addressing the world we are modernizing as quickly as we can!

Taking a fall!

2011-12-27T09:28:00.000-08:00

The message never gets old – even when our own appreciation runs hot and cold; availability is still instrumental for the success of NonStop. Perhaps not the sole reason for deploying HP NonStop Servers but still as influential as at any time in the past!

Lying flat on my back, wondering whether I had broken anything, and feeling far from my usual self, I started to think of just how careless I was. As my feet slipped from underneath me, yes, rushing to complete errands before the holidays arrived, any thoughts I may have had at the time were quickly displaced by more fundamental - ouch! I hurt … and it was entirely my fault.

That was last week, as ice and snow returned to Boulder, but as I write this post I am enjoying the heat and hummidity as well as the glorious sunshine of the Florida Keys and the cold Boulder is but a distant memory. As are the aches and pains I sustained. Right now my thoughts are on the nearby restaurants and bars and on where I will grab a bite to eat - spending New Year’s Eve on Duvall Street, in the heart of Key West, is imminent and I certainly appreciate Margo’s choice of venue.

There are so few occasions where we see failures that we tolerate! But it seems of late all I have been reading about is of highly visible corporations falling down. And I have to wonder, what was going through the minds of the executives in charge as they slipped and fell. Since when have companies developed a taste for risk in an otherwise risk-averse business climate of uncertainty where punishment of late has been swift and uncompassionate?

There were the incidents with the Australian Stock Exchange, not to forget the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And yes, there were problems with RIM and with everyone who was dependent on Blackberry PDAs. Just as other global stock exchanges weren’t immune from faulty components, as I recall, one commentator expressed it so succinctly recently when he responded about how, should he hear just one more time, that it was simply an issue with the network, he will scream!

And of course, I have simply forgotten about how many failures occurred across our transportation industry, whether it’s on the ground or in the air! Scanning the headlines of the Sydney Morning Herald, staple reading for all expat Australians, I came across a report about a QANTAS flight that ran into some pretty serious trouble a year or so ago. “Qantas flight terror blamed on computer” began the headline of the December 19th, 2011 edition. “Wild ride mid-flight on a Qantas Airbus that left a third of passengers on board injured as they were tossed out of their seats has been traced to a computer programming glitch, air investigators have found.”

The reporter then went on to explain how “incorrect data from a sensor measuring airspeed, altitude, air pressure, temperature and the flying angle was fed to the computers controlling flight (and the) computer code, called an algorithm, could not cope with the erroneous data from one of the three air sensors that malfunctioned.” Eventually the pilots regained control and landed safely, otherwise QANTAS may have suffered its own monumental falling down!

Properly handling fault components is at the very root of what today we have as a NonStop Server, and from the earliest Tandem Computer there’s considerable history in terms of what today’s very modern NonStop Server accommodates. Very early in the history of Tandem Computers, the top venting (for cooling) was replaced with side venting after one Tandem Computers executives (could it have been Jimmy?) spilled coffee all over the top of the system just as a customer demonstration was about to start.

Or so the legend of Tandem insists – and yes, that led to an immediate redesign of Tandem Computers cabinetry. It’s a small item and probably inconsequential for other vendors, but it’s just this very attention to detail and the experience gained from so many operational fault tolerant systems that continue to fuel NonStop Server’s relevance in today’s marketplace.

As comForte CEO, Dr. Michael Rossbach, suggested “from my very earliest experience with Tandem Computers, it was their pragmatic engineering approach to addressing all that could take down a computer that impressed me most and for the several decades now, the work we do at comForte continues to focus on the user being able to more easily integrate the latest iteration of the NonStop Server within the most demanding mission-critical applications a company may elect to run! There’s still no substitute for the remarkable level of availability solely achievable from today’s NonStop Server.”

How quickly we have forgotten, or apparently so, the history of Tandem Computers – the pioneers, indeed, dare I suggest, the inventors of commercially successful fault tolerant computers. I may not have been able to recover from my own failings and paid the price accordingly, but for the original Tandem Computer, a fall wouldn’t have caused a problem - it would have immediately recovered from it!

Pan-European event? Returning to Germany next Fall!

2011-12-15T07:50:00.000-08:00

Following considerable activity among NonStop regional user groups – particularly in Europe during the past few weeks – it is good to see that next year, there will be even more support for the NonStop community with new events just being announced!

The year is winding down and there is little need of me to recount the places I have visited these past two months – nearly all of these travels have already been well described in previous posts to this blog, as well as to other blogs I support. However, it’s still worthwhile mentioning just how good it is to catch up with many folks who continue to depend upon NonStop – users, vendors as well as HP NonStop itself. While I had hoped to squeeze in a visit to just one of the user events that was held (missing a trip to Paris, of course, was hard to take) time and circumstances worked against me.

However, for next year, I am already blocking out dates on my calendar. Yes, I am even blocking out the week of June (June 4th – 7th, I believe it is) to make sure I find my way to Las Vegas for HP Discover. As far as 2012 goes I have no more daughters about to marry so I should be fine on that count. Returning to the west coast I hope that there is a track venue open to spend at least one day laying down laps as, unfortunately, this year has been a bit of a bust on that front with weather and breakages having worked against me.

There have been so many changes at HP – people, technologies, and initiatives that it has been hard to keep up. My next “Musings on NonStop” feature to appear in the Tandemworld.Net e/Newsletter will cover some of these changes and will provide further opinions as to what I thought of them, but even so Meg Whitman as CEO, the demise of WebOS, not forgetting the abrupt ending of HP’s foray into tablet PCs and more recently, the unveiling of Odyssey, a new initiative embracing Intel’s x86 chip technology. Look for my commentary on all of this in the December, 2012, issue of Tandemworld.net, but it reminds me of just how volatile IT can be and of how important it is to stay attuned to all that is taking place at HP. It can be just so easy to end up with plans and programs not aligned with what our primary vendor is pursuing and that too may be working against us!

Clearly, the single biggest mitigating factor against situations like this comes with participation in user events. Particularly, the larger events that attract the participation of HP’s senior management and where even the simplest of roadmap presentations can reveal product and feature “gems” we may have missed or discounted for one reason or another. Getting the picture from someone positioned to know, and then having it framed within a context we may be familiar with, often leads to unexpected revelations that can be extremely beneficial to our own technology roll-out plans.

Against this background it was good to receive the first emails from comForte CEO, Dr. Michael Rossbach, about next year’s GTUG event to be held in Dresden, Germany. In cooperation with Connect, it will take place late in the Fall (Wednesday through Thursday, September 26th – 27th) and, as this is simply a part of Germany I would really like to see, I am looking forward to participating. It was back in September 2010 that I rented a car and toured around much of the western portions of Germany, and I am tempted to rent another car to better explore the countryside that borders the Elbe River – something I thought I may never have an opportunity to do even when, in the 1980s, I worked for Nixdorf Computers.

“The official program will start Wednesday morning and run for 2 days through to the end of Thursday and will be packed with presentations, SIGs and keynotes,” Dr. Rossbach wrote in his email. “But (the event) will offer, apart from the office program, hours for discussions as well,” he went on to explain before highlighting how, “late afternoon Thursday will be spent with a guided sightseeing tour which will finally lead to the dinner at the Italian Village – just beside the Semper Opera House and the Elbe river.” For me, apart from the highlights already mentioned, there is more to this story as this event represents more than just another user group meeting.

With the 2012 event in Dresden, GTUG will be essentially holding a pan-European user event. Yes, there will be plenty of opportunities for the domestic NonStop community, but the intention here is to provide something of value to the greater European Nonstop community. In so doing, GTUG will provide a “forum” that HP NED will be only too happy to support, and in a way, builds on what I have seen of late at both CTUG and SATUG events. With the focus of the bigger HP correctly centered on big-tent marketing events where everything HP produces is on display, for communities such as we have today with NonStop, regional events that cater to cross-border participation represent an inexpensive model for “getting the picture from someone positioned to know!”

“We are intentionally framing this as a pan-European event that will leverage the GTUG community,” Dr. Rossbach informed me as I put this post together “in order to lay the foundation, hopefully, for similar events in the future. Whether rotated among the major regional user groups like GTUG, BITUG, and VNUG, our goal is to provide a valuable experience featuring the content the NonStop community wants to hear but at a price that is affordable for the majority of users.” Perhaps, between user groups like CTUG, SUNTUG, and even the community close to San Jose, we will see something develop along similar lines in North America. While there’s been some initial ideas being passed around, I don’t think we need to get much more adventurous than this in order to provide the right environment for users to meet and for HP NED to support!

It may still be months away, but as for me that week is definitely blocked out from any other possible distractions, and I am looking forward to catching up with as many of you as I can! Now, what car should I think of renting once I land in Frankfurt?

uLinga! Turning the corner?

2011-12-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

Heading to year end, it’s good to see that uLinga is developing momentum and even as another NonStop user has gone into production with uLinga, it is looking as if comForte and their partner Infrasoft are seeing the investments being made in the NonStop Server begin to yield positive dividends!

There continues to be considerable concern among some within the NonStop community when it comes to the investments being made in the NonStop platform by software vendors. Is there still the interest in companies committed to running NonStop to look at the mix of software they run and are there software vendors willing to find better ways to leverage the inherent properties of NonStop? Can business cases be made for further fine-tuning of the NonStop Server platform and are there choices that can be made when it comes to improving the overall price–performance attributes and simply doing things better? How much longer will NonStop have a presence in our data centers?

I will refrain from providing an anecdote from my time on the road, of the places I have visited and the people I have seen, but it has been quite an experience meeting with as many folks as I have and to simply observe how passionate they remain when it comes to the NonStop platform. Yes, it is possible to “roll your own” NonStop from a mix of commodity boxes, network connections and smart software, but in the end it remains a volatile mix of technology supported by just a handful of technicians involved with assembling “the system”, and very rarely do these systems deliver the overall robustness initially anticipated.

So yes, retaining the NonStop Server platform in key customer-facing, as well as business-partner participating environments remains a good option for many companies. For more on this topic, check out my most recent post to Real Time View “Today, we have but one luxury!” as well as the discussion just started in the LinkedIn group of the same name, Real Time View.

In the October 23rd, 2011, post “Steps that count!” I wrote of how comForte continues to invest in solutions to help modernizing the infrastructure and in so doing views the NonStop Server platform as a viable platform upon which to develop a healthy software business. In this post I wrote too of how decisions have been made by customers to purchase the most recent addition to the comForte product portfolio, uLinga (from InfraSoft). Whether running HP’s SNAX product or ACI / Insession’s ICE product, there is now a new product finding acceptance within the NonStop community. And now, the first customer case study has been posted to the comForte web site.

For more about a recent uLinga deployment, check out the customer success story “North American Supermarket Chain deploys uLinga for DLSw from comForte” that can be downloaded via the link: http://comforte.com/news/north-american-supermarket-ulinga/ At the time that I wrote the above post “Steps that count!” I also observed how other (NonStop users) have concluded successful Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and are transitioning to pilots and full deployment. Here the news gets better, as I have just heard about another NonStop user that is up and running with uLinga in a production environment.

Whereas the first production deployment featured uLinga for DLSw supporting a network of SNA devices this latest user is using uLinga for DLSw to connect to several IBM mainframe applications. Again, the user is another customer of ACI Worldwide’s BASE24 product, but the deployment represents an even more compelling case for the use of uLinga as there’s little room for error when systems are communicating application to application!

In the earlier post I quoted InfraSoft Managing Director, Peter Shell, when he acknowledged that as a company, “we hope to be able to talk more about these enhancements and product ideas shortly but we are truly excited by the response to date and with how quickly users are going into production with uLinga." Yes, for a company that has been strictly in development mode for nearly two years, finally seeing its’ flagship product in production represents a significant milestone.

The latest user committing to uLinga for DLSw is a North American service provider supporting two banks, and today the NonStop Servers are S-Series systems. As was the case with the first user, the supermarket chain, the lower price for the uLinga for DLSw product coupled with the support provided jointly by comForte and Infrasoft, helped the service provider significantly reduce the price / performance premium that they had been paying in order for their NonStop System to network with established mainframe systems running at the banks they supported.

As Peter Shell responded this week, following the news of the win, “there’s still a lot more value users can derive from the uLinga product family but seeing momentum develop behind the product as is now happening is an encouraging sign.” On a similar note, comForte marketing head, Thomas Gloerfeld went on to add “even as we monitor the sales pipeline for the uLinga product family there’s no hiding that there is a strong outlook for 2012 and having these early wins under our belt as we close the year is not only encouraging but very positive for all the work we have put into supporting Infrasoft.”

There will be more users within the NonStop community who do elect to fine-tune the price-performance attributes of NonStop even as they continue to rely on the platform in support of mission-critical applications. And in so doing, the software vendors active in this marketplace will continue to invest. Perhaps just as importantly, the products arriving in the marketplace aimed at helping with modernization aren’t being overlooked or escaping the attention of responsible CIOs and for this the NonStop community remains grateful.

As new products and features continue to arrive and find favor with the NonStop community and giving their adherents even greater choice, it’s just further confirmation of how relevant the platform remains and for this, all within the NonStop community benefit. Retaining the NonStop Server platform doesn’t look all that controversial after all, and its presence will likely be with us for many years to come!

High, or low, value - all transactions are valuable …

2011-11-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

I am travelling through Europe and visiting new places and I have been reminded of how the value proposition of NonStop remains as relevant today as it ever has … checking out of a hotel and finding the authorization network offline (for Visa and Am Ex) had the staff scrambling for the old card impression swipe-machines!

It was only a few weeks back where I first wrote of how much I was looking forward to my upcoming trip to Europe and of comparisons made to former times when those in Europe simply referred to what I was planning to do as The Grand Tour. Separately, in email exchanges with others I promised to work into the story line more observations about Italy, Croatia and the other places I visited. Now that I am mid-journey I can begin to make good on these promises and how expectations have developed – good and bad.

Since I have also covered some of this ground in a recent post to Real Time View, I will not revisit everything but I will say that Croatia came as a complete and pleasant surprise. It proved to be a place I hope I am able to visit again at some future time. Unfortunately, while in the early post on The Grand Tour I had suggested that I would be looking from ATM’s from Intesa Sanpaolo – good friends of comForte and who have enjoyed their partnership with them – I didn’t come across any during the stops I made, but I was quite surprised by just how many different financial institutions had installed their own branded ATMs even among some of the oldest buildings I have visited.

However, this post is not just about the travels, but before I continue I would like to briefly revisit the subject matter of the last post, “Of things” where I discussed just how connected we had all become and how the information being gathered about us is escalating. Yes, the many ATMs I came across were just one example of this, but there’s more. In that post I briefly referred to RFIDs but did qualify my comments when I opened with “putting to one side for one moment the whole issue of Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and how it is finding acceptance but when you start to consider just how networked the world has already become, you cannot help thinking that with simple technologies, there’s even more that will be networking in the future!”

Yes it did generate some observations firstly from within comForte (before I even posted to the blog) and then later, by others where comments were received. From my perspective, I wasn’t suggesting that the growth in RFIDs per se would lead to more dependence on NonStop – I see RFID’s coming through several layers of concentrators before ever touching a NonStop - but rather, the pertinent information they produce and of interest to users will find its way into the databases of large servers and there’s no reason why a percentage of these cannot be NonStop.

A signal from a container may be missed and the significance of it may not at first be apparent. Nor is the signal from a box of bolts proceeding down a line to an assembly point. But if you are Boeing and need to be absolutely sure which bolt made it onto which 787, the significance isn’t trivial. Just as if the container wasn’t carrying bags of rice but flat-screen TVs or premium Scotch whisky. Whether of high or low value, all transactions are valuable. There will always be value in transactions no matter how miniscule and it may only ever be in the eye of the beholder but all the same, to that user, at that specific time even the lowliest of transactions has value.

Yes, the info will flow through several layers of concentrators before touching database servers but the capturing of signals is only one aspect of what is occurring across our very modern world. The feeds from CCTVs, the exchanges made on our phones whether voice, data or video and the output from our GPSs are all of interest to one party or another. Whether it’s all legally acquired or not I will leave to others – all that I know is that it’s out there, it’s growing and it’s of great commercial value. But will these fuel new, modern solutions on NonStop? Will NonStop continue to be relevant when it comes to these latest most modern of transaction sources?

The NonStop community has witnessed a rich variety of options come from the solutions and middleware vendors operating in the NonStop marketplace and I am sure that through working with end users and from the partnerships that may develop directly with them as well as with other vendors, there will be even greater choice in the future. Changes continue to come from this community as new allegiances are forged and I see no letup in this process any time soon. My recent conversations with comForte suggest that this process is well understood by the comForte executives and they are among the few vendors with the presence across today’s global marketplace well-positioned to capitalize on any changes that arise.

“We continue to monitor what is developing today in terms of new sources of transactions,” comForte’s Thomas Gloerfeld reminded me before adding “it is not as if comForte isn’t aware that more can come through greater leverage of partnerships just as it’s still a little early for the company to be too specific about what will happen next. But when it comes to alliances and partnerships, the process is always on-going.”

There’s still more to see on my Grand Tour and shortly I will be in Rome. And like every traveler, shortly my bags will be tagged and I will keep my fingers crossed that they make it safely to mu next destination. Whatever the source of data is, no matter how it is collected, we simply cannot do as much as we do today as simply as we do it – and yet, how many of us would like to return to the past with paper tickets, traveler’s checks, and letters of credit!

HP has done a terrific job in making the essential NonStop Server as modern as any other platform and vendors such as comForte provides many of the tools to take better advantage of NonStop – so when do we see the NonStop community reaching consensus that yes, the transition from Tandem to NonStop has been completed and yes, the validity of NonSto to provide the solutions we need in today’s business world is unquestionable! Now, where is that ATM? I know it’s around here somewhere …

Of Things!

2011-11-11T03:10:00.000-08:00

The analysts at Gartner Group love to do nothing more than forecast what will transpire in coming years. For the most part they aren’t ever too wide of the mark and in the latest Top 5 predictions lies at least one interesting observation …

As much as I enjoy living in America, there’s much about Australia that I miss. Although these days, with satellite TV, I can watch The Great Race beemed live from the country town of Bathurst and keep up with all the games played in the World Cup. Not that world cup, but The World Cup and where yes, the southern hemisphere continues to dominate. I’m talking about the just completed Rugby World Cup where New Zealand was able to finally win just their second series after many frustrating losses.

However, I do a little more than just watch TV and my iPad gives me a good selection of Australian newspapers to read with my morning Starbucks. And then there’s always my good friend Len Rust who diligently puts out an IT-newsletter, The Rust Report. Len is a former VP for Asia Pacific of IDC, the industry research company that tracks who moved what and who bought that! When I lived in Australia there were many occasions where I ran across Len and at industry events and conferences we would always find time to catch up. Back in 2009, the last time I was in Sydney, we caught up over coffee only to observe that through the years, so little had changed.

In an issue of The Rust Report I received before I left for Italy and Croatia, there was a research note that pulled from recent announcements from Gartner, Inc. This time, Gartner was listing its Top 5 strategic technologies for 2012 and what made the list was rather interesting. And the list includes thoughts and observations already made to this blog. Firstly though, as Len pointed out, what Gartner considers as strategic technology is something “with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.”

What made it to the Top 5?

Media Tablets and Beyond
Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces
Contextual and Social User Experience
Internet of Things (IoT)
App Stores and Marketplaces

Pulling a few words from this list such as tablets, mobility, social user experience and the app store and you have a mosaic that includes many of the themes already addressed in this blog but I have to admit, when I began reading about the Internet of Things a lot of images came to mind. I have just spent several days in Venice and with free time these past few afternoons, I have had the opportunity to window shop and to check out the things on display – the famous Venetian masks, glassware and paintings – with one particular mask looking like it might be the go and there’s plenty of time left. And yes, they are attractive and the product of highly skilled people. However, I do know what they are – but things? When it comes to the world of IT, this seemed just a tad too vague for my tastes.

However, behind IoT is the concept that we are increasingly observing and probably can be best summarized with the words I pulled from my usually reliable source, Wiki. “If all objects of daily life were equipped with radio tags, they could be identified and inventoried by computers (and) with all objects in the world equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on Earth would undergo a transformation. Companies would not run out of stock or waste products, as all involved parties would know exactly which products are required (or have been) consumed.”

Putting aside for one moment the whole issue of Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and how it is finding acceptance but when you start to consider just how networked the world has already become, you cannot help thinking that with simple technologies, there’s even more that will be networking in the future! It’s a modern world, after all where our daily lives will undergo transformation. As for the transaction processing required, it will be enormous, and the data will be highly valued by many companies. And there really aren’t any limits or boundaries when it comes to things – they’re everywhere with more appearing daily!

comForte executive, Thomas Gloerfeld, who heads marketing and who has spent time recently with many of his colleagues, reminded me of how “at the time we acquired Client Server Link (CSL), we realized that for many users, modernization would be best served if the back-end platform was left untouched. Few companies were prepared, for instance, to simply throw-away Pathway and all the mission-critical business logic it supported. But now, with the upsurge in tablets and smart phones and the potential for even more to come – the whole world demanding things everywhere be accessible – comForte will increasingly turn to its flagship modernization product, CSL, for even more ways to support client access.”

There are movies and TV shows featuring views of the present and near future that push the boundaries somewhat – the movie In Time being one of them as well as the TV series Person of Interest. What remains constant however is that yes, things will be tracked managed and disposed of – all in the interests of broadening markets. And for the NonStop community with our knowledge of running systems 7 X 24, this bodes well for an ever-increasing presence on the leading edge of technology.

Modernization has a ways to go but even now, the Internet of Things is just one example as to why it’s important all the critical frameworks and tools are in place. After all, there really aren’t any limits to our imaginations when we seriously start to think of just how many things with which we absolutely must connect!

The Grand Tour!

2011-11-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

For any writer a change of scenery is always welcome and next week, business will take me back to Italy. But this post isn’t about the places I will visit so much as it’s about the many product options available today to the NonStop community!

Shortly I will be departing for Europe where I will mix a little down time with business, and as fate would have it, my time in Europe will begin in Venice and conclude in Rome. It may not be the best time to visit this part of the world, but with Boulder already hit hard with snow storms, returning to the Mediterranean will be easy to take. From all I have read, there’s no prospect for snow at either location.In a conversation I had with a client I was reminded that I was embarking, as had many of the European nobility since the 17th Century, on The Grand Tour. As one writer, who had added an observation to a wiki reference on this subject, noted “The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class young men … the custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. In essence the Grand Tour was neither a scholar's pilgrimage nor a religious one, though a pleasurable stay in Venice and a cautious residence in Rome were essential.

In my post of September 22nd, 2011 “Taking root; modernization in practice!” I referenced to a case study on Intesa Sanpaolo Card, out of Croatia, who had chosen Client Server Link (CSL) from comForte to modernize their implementation of BASE24 Classic. And at that time of writing, I observed how “I may make it to Slovenia and Croatia when I am next in that part of Europe; perhaps later in the year. And I will make every effort to use an ATM supported by Intesa Sanpaolo Card, and support the company utilizing CSL.” To fill in time, I am now taking a boat from Venice to the Croatian ports along the Dalmatian Coast - townships like Sibenik, Dubrovnik, and even Kotor that’s now a part of Montenegro and used to enjoy very strong ties to Venice – so yes, I will be enjoying time in the Adriatic and hopefully, I will get a chance to use a customers’ ATM!

But following The Grand Tour was also important for other reasons. “The primary value of the Grand Tour, it was believed,” the above writer continued in his update to wiki, “lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent.” And this connection between The Grand Tour and the Renaissance and to a time when creativity and innovation simply exploded as powerful families (including the Medici’s) in Florence brought together authors, engineers, painters, philosophers and architects and the “percolation of ideas” that resulted sparked an explosion of new ideas.

The last time business took me to Rome was to influence the post of May 23rd, 2008, to Real Time View, “Roman Holiday!” where I wrote about the content of the Frans Johansson book “The Medici Effect” and at the time, observed how the Medici’s found that, bringing people together from different cultures, with different skill-sets, and creating an environment where they could openly interact anticipating that, as Johansson writes, “where ideas collide, innovation happens!” Johansson then goes on to add “breakthrough insights occur at novel intersections (and) is an enduring principle of creativity.”

Later in that post I went on to suggest how “innovation is important as it is the special ingredient within all companies that puts distance between those that can innovate and those that fail to recognize opportunities as they arise. The history of NonStop – from the appearance of the first Tandem Computer, to the introduction of ServerNet – has been liberally sprinkled with innovative technologies that contributed significantly to keeping the Tandem Computer ahead of other market entrants.”Today, the NonStop Community enjoys their own grand tour but without the need to visit Venice and Rome. Shortly users will be gathering for BITUG and a renewed French gathering. These come on the heels of successful events in India, Germany (Berlin), Canada and Mexico. And it is when the community comes together and “networks” the ideas of users, vendors and consultants and HP flow and these events, no matter their size, still represents the best opportunity as Johansson wrote, “where ideas collide, innovation happens!”

According to comForte marketing head, Thomas Gloerfeld, “it represents a sizable investment for companies, including comForte, to participate in all these events and yet it remains the best way to hear user comments first hand. The rate at which modernization is being pursued is also an important factor for us as we continue to invest in this area and to fine-tune our messaging. It is very important for the NonStop community to understand that, with the ongoing work being pursued by vendors like us, there are more options to consider and an increased likelihood for users to be successful. News about products that are reliable and provide the functionality a user may need first surfaces within user group meetings.”

I will be looking forward to using my debit card at the first ATM of Intesa Sanpaolo that I come across. But as I do, it will not be the ease with which I can access my own funds that will impress me as much as that I am providing additional business to a NonStop user that continues to prove that with the right software and middleware, they can be as innovative, or more so, as any other equivalent cash provider!

Steps that count!

2011-10-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

Returning to the topic of modernization and the steps required in making the journey, there’s a recognition that from a vendor’s perspective, help can come in just a couple of areas that will make a lot of difference …

Having driven 3,300 miles on a circuitous route through the eastern half of the United States I have had the good fortune of seeing much of what makes this country truly America the Beautiful! From driving through the prairies as crops were being harvested to the wooded forests of the Smokey Mountains where ponds and lakes emerging from among thickly forested hills continued to draw vacationers to the first winter’s frosts arriving in the Ozarks - it was quite a journey.

The occasion that had drawn me east had been an association event and while not related to anything in the IT industry (being medical research), the sense of community wasn’t hard to miss and it brought back fond memories from a time when NonStop met. Yes, we are heading into a period where there will be regional user group meetings in various countries and with InNUG still fresh in my memories I only wish I could attend more of them. As I look to 2012 it will become a priority for me and I will try to find time to participate in as many as I can, but for many within the community staying in touch with NonStop and keeping abreast of the changes has been quite a journey too!

It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote the post “Call to modernize – many steps!” where I concluded with the remark on how these steps will be subject to separate posts, as each represents opportunities to leverage products, capabilities and services from comForte, and as a community NonStop users need to be fully aware of the options that exist. In the post I had identified four steps that I said lent themselves to being viewed as prerequisites when embarking on the journey of modernization, even as I noted that there were no hard and fast rules associated with progressing along the journey’s pathway.

However, in the subsequent weeks and following a number of discussions with comForte’s management, it became clear to us that when it comes to the modernization journey, the steps required could be further reduced to where there’s just the need to modernize the infrastructure as well as the need to modernize the applications. This covers everything from the servers to the networks to the solutions supported. And there’s the need of course to stay current with security offerings that impact all participants within an enterprise’s server environments.

When it comes to infrastructure the most important element from my perspective has always been the network as this is where I have worked for many decades and where change continues to be visible. Bandwidths continue to rise, client devices continue to proliferate, transactions are expanding and becoming richer, and the need to “Play well with others” remains paramount. No platform vendor could withstand the market pushback should they elect to go it alone and demand support for a unique networking protocol. Those days are clearly behind us. And yet, there are still many enterprises that put their transactions through all sorts of hoops as they pass information from one server platform to another.

Languages, frameworks, containers and virtual machines, as well as database technologies remain critical elements of infrastructure and each of us has our preferences. Any time spent pursuing discussion groups, online forums and blogs doesn’t leave any doubt that these areas attract the more passionate among our community. Yet it is often the mix of infrastructure in place that determines which enterprise data center is stable and productive and which is not – there are clearly those CIOs with a good “modernization GPS” helping them along their journey.

comForte continues to invest in solutions to help modernizing the infrastructure and just returning briefly to the issue of modernizing the network and empowering the NonStop Server to play better with others, decisions have been made by customers to purchase the most recent addition to the comForte product portfolio, uLinga (from InfraSoft), even as others have concluded successful Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and are transitioning to pilots and full deployment.

“We still have much to do, with plenty of enhancement requests coming from our customers and PoCs as well as ideas for additional uLinga product family ‘members’. We hope to be able to talk more about these enhancements and product ideas shortly,” suggested Infrasoft Managing Director Peter Shell, “but we are truly excited by the response to date and with how quickly users are going into production with uLinga." What these successes have done is allowed the uLinga product family to address even more networking issues and, in the coming months, comForte in partnership with Infrasoft, will be taking the wraps of these enhancements and new family members!

It’s good to have completed the journey, as I have now done after spending a little more than a week on the road, just as it’s good to continue the journey with the NonStop user community as meetings and events continue to be held. But it’s every bit as pleasing to see new products succeed and with that success, drive the development of even more new capabilities and features. It’s now the start of a new year for some companies, including comForte, and as the journeys of many enterprises continue drawing in more companies with the passing of each year, it’s good to know that vendors are showing no signs of letting up on helping with each step along the path!

Modernizing Applications? Client devices may hold some keys!

2011-10-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

Questions have been raised in discussion groups; opinions have been tossed about freely; vendors continue to stay close to their customers. All the same there’s no denying that changes underway with how users interact with systems continue to impact all applications including those deployed on NonStop!

There have been multiple posts to this blog talking about modernization and a number of them have looked at the types of client devices proving popular. For many readers, it’s their iPad that they prize above all else, while for others it’s one of the many smartphones that now run Google’s Android OS. Whatever is our preference, the question doesn’t change: how will these devices find their way into business life, and when will we see them supported by NonStop server? When will the time come when our answers to our business colleagues will be as simple as Yes, we have an app for that!

In a recent pilot interview in the United Airlines in-flight magazine much was made of the heavy bags pilots carry with them on every flight. Back in the late 1970s I even bought one of those distinctively “squar-ish” pilot bags, so I could carry reels of tape with me as I went from one data center to another installing operating systems. But not anymore! It will only be a short time before all United Airlines pilots will be carrying iPads, as they have now been approved by the FAA as a suitable replacement to all the heavy charts and procedure documents that pilots have relied upon for years.

iPads are beginning to make an appearance in classrooms. Our daughter was not all that keen on them, but as a teacher she did participate in an Apple-supported update program and came away more impressed than she had ben. Yes, they will make a contribution and yes, she will take another look. Pilots! Teachers! Even auto manufacturers! There are now so many avenues where tablets and smart phones are making an appearance.

For the NonStop community this is a particularly important trend to watch as any movement within the tablet and smart phone markets will likely affect the way information is distributed, as the NonStop Server will likely be in the middle of much of this. As smart phones became micro payments processors – yes, I now pay for car service to a company that simply swipes my card through their Square Card Reader and my receipt arrives in my email inbox! What we have viewed as client devices is undergoing dramatic change and none of this is lost on those who are part of the NonStop community.

In a recent email exchange with comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, I asked him about the progress that had been made and of the interest levels in supporting applications on tablet and smart phone devices. A few months back, Thomas had given me a cool demo on my own iPad and I could see the potential for even more “apps” to follow. “We have been looking in this area and in fact we have a beta running which uses HTML5,” Burg responded this week. “The beauty of this it that it will run on just about ANY device, including iPad, Android tabs etc. You can even see a screenshot today at:

http://www.comforte.com/J6530_Mobile”

The technology doesn’t seem to be all that difficult to work with and providing products not difficult at all. However, in working with early interested parties, the business considerations remain “up for discussion” according to Burg. After all, it’s the support of the NonStop that is at the heart of providing solutions in support of tablets and smart phones and this is not a trivial undertaking in terms of staying current with HP’s roadmaps and ensuring traditional (and expected) reliability is preserved. But equally as important at this very early stage is to understand what is the best use of such solutions – is it in mobile payments? Is it in support of IT staff on the move co that they have access to the data center? Or is it even more basic than that and whether small NonStop servers become network front-ends routing messages to any mix of private and public clouds where pertinent information may reside?

Wherever this leads and the subsequent discussions, there’s no escaping the reality that when it comes to discussions on modernizing application, it’s hard to separate them from what client devices will be involved. Only this week Facebook has finally succumbed to sizable user pressure and unveiled an app for the iPad that will let its users chat with friends worldwide in full-screen mode! Yes, the humble laptop is looking more and more likely to be a tool very much of the past, and future will be all about modern client devices featuring the latest in always-on technology!

And perhaps Burg summed it up best when he intimated recently of how “major platforms including the NonStop Server will eventually provide support for these devices but the trick, in terms of further embracing modernization, is to fully and correctly understand the business requirements!” Yes, there will be bandwidth issues just as there will be concerns about security and possible corruption of the information on a server but no discussion about modernization can ignore the impact tablets and smart phones are having on those responsible for supporting clients whether internal users, business partners or customers!

When you push the buttons, it better be NonStop!

2011-10-10T07:08:00.000-07:00

There are still many situations where the reliability of NonStop saves us from misfortune and discomfort. At a time when so many NonStop users aren’t sure of what to do to modernize, there remain very valid option in the marketplace.

I read, I travel, I observe, and I participate in events. I also provide commentary and opinions in many forms. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to many, and it represents the very core of my business pursuits these days. It has been noticed by many of us that comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, has been travelling as well, as anyone following his many tweets, Facebook updates, and LinkedIn texts can attest to. Contact with the wider NonStop community is essential to fully appreciate all that the NonStop community has achieved.

It’s also a very important element in determining what’s important to the NonStop community. While the marketplace for NonStop always generates serious debate from within the NonStop community, there are many who argue strongly that there are many market segments, not traditionally associated with NonStop, where NonStop can more than adequately meet the needs of the businesses operating within those segments.

It was just this week that Marty Edelman, well known to the NonStop community and formerly a key contributor at sites like Home Depot as well as SIAC, posted to a Yahoo Groups community that “I do not only 'tune' myself with HP. I don't think what they are doing is perfect. I think they still have some work to do but I do know that for a mission critical application there is nothing more reliable than the NonStop, nothing! Go ask Amazon, Ebay, Google, ... they do not run 5-nines they would kill to get to 1-nine.”

Later in his post, he added quite succinctly, “I don't think a 911 system or an ATM system or the mobile phone system can afford anything less than 5-nines, do you? Would you like to be the one laying on the floor having a heart attack and you discover that your mobile phone isn't working and even if it was the 911 system was down? I know I would not!!!” Even in our very modern society of today there continues to be very important roles where the NonStop Server provides enormous value.

This week I revisited a paper “Legacy Software: Rebuilding the Ship in Rough Waters” first published in 2009 by Aberdeen Research, an organization that pulls data from a client base of over 500,000 contacts. What caught my eye were two simple observations, the first being “when it comes to a software development environment, companies essentially have three options to respond to market pressures. First … stick with the status quo; second, software modernization through migration, upgrade, or other means; lastly … ‘rip and replace’ methodology … typically, the most costly option.” Aberdeen Research that added that “companies who have embarked upon a formal strategy for legacy modernization are seeing demonstrable performance improvements over those sticking with the status quo.

Readers of this blog shouldn’t be surprised by what Aberdeen Research reference as this has been the subject of several recent posts. Modernization has been a reoccurring theme and the value that comes with modernization has been emphasized repeatedly. As far back as the post of July 8th, 2011 “Hiding in plain sight!”, I wrote of how modernization is all about reducing costs and in the process, better aligning with the company’s business and IT strategies. I observed too how the process of modernizing helps bring back focus onto innovation, and with innovation to become more responsive in a changing global economy. Yes, as Aberdeen Research had found just a few years back, software modernization through migration, upgrade, or other means is producing the most demonstrable performance improvements.

However, it was the second observation in the paper by Aberdeen Research that really grabbed my attention, as what they say is so often overlooked these days. In a reference to an earlier benchmark report, “Modernizing Legacy Applications: Maximizing the Investment”, it was shown that “best-in-class companies were largely taking a tools-based approach to legacy modernization and were leaning on the domain expertise residing in third-party organizations.”

Again, readers of this blog may recall the post of August 18th, 2011 “Modernize? It requires more than a re-set!”, where I suggested that to transition successfully to modern IT it’s not just products but the leveraging of experienced partners and the services they provide. Yes, selecting vendors as partners and “leaning on the domain expertise” that have accumulated remains the most effective way we have today to modernize remaining legacy applications. comForte continues to tune its marketing messages, and in the coming months visitors to the comForte web site will see more attention being given to modernization – including “migrations, upgrades and other means!”

Yes, I read, travel and in general stay close to what the NonStop community is doing and what they view as a priority, and all the while the continuing trust that the NonStop community places in the NonStop Server platform shows little signs of waning, despite the outcry’s of the naysayers. As Marty so well expressed it “would you like to be the one laying on the floor having a heart attack (only to) discover that your mobile phone isn't working …”

Call to modernize – many steps!

2011-09-30T06:53:00.000-07:00

My recent trip to India and participation in the InNUG event for NonStop users, only added to my appreciation for how important modernization initiatives truly have become. This post lays the foundation for additional posts to follow …

It’s been a tough couple of days. As anyone living in Australia can tell you just getting anywhere takes a lot of travel time, but as an Australian living in the U.S. it’s a message I sometimes don’t take to heart. And so when the invitation arrived to speak at InNUG, the gathering of the Indian NonStop user community, I accepted without a second thought but now, after a week of travelling with barely two days on the ground, I am now bouncing back to not quite yet anywhere near what I would consider normal!

And what a vibrant community and what a refreshing change to be with such an enthusiastic group! In my post of September 15, 2011, “Valuable Face Time!”, I wrote of how the NonStop community in India enjoys the face time that comes with participating in real events, as much as they enjoy reading blogs, e/newsletters and forum postings that have become such a routine part of our business lives of late, and of how I was looking forward to the gathering. It didn’t disappoint, and I will post more about the event later in the week in my next post to Real Time View.

The presentation that I made at the event built on material from these recent blog postings. Readers may recall how in my post of September 11, 2011, “Modernize the NonStop? Absolutely!”, modernization has become the mantra of the IT industry and if, as IT professionals charged with the oversight of the NonStop Server platform, we haven’t already begun the journey, the path will only get harder with the horizon slipping further out of sight. This urgency surrounding the modernization journey is particularly true of enterprise IT where the future of the NonStop has as much to do with the ease with which it integrates with other platforms and solutions than perhaps anything else.

“Modernization can be driven by different reasons; one recurring theme we see is enterprise integration of the NonStop,” responded comForte CTO, Thomas Burg in a recent email exchange on this topic. “For instance, client-side development is often tied to standards such as J2EE or .NET and it is important that the NonStop can play that game. Another example is the desire for large user bases not to have separate passwords kept on the NonStop but rather to single-sign on based on their Windows credentials.”

In the slides I took with me to India, I took this a couple of steps further down the path to modernization. Other parties may profess knowledge of more, and perhaps even less required steps, but on reflection this seems as good a place as any to start. And this doesn’t include the actual step of upgrading the NonStop Server itself – the assumption here is that there’s already been a migration to the NonStop Integrity line and perhaps to Blades as well.

There’s no hard and fast rule as to which comes first although some of the steps do lend themselves as being prerequisites and this is what I came up with:

Modernize the infrastructure …
Whether it’s the frameworks and middleware we depend upon, as well as how we externalize business logic, or even the terminal emulator we rely on, this is perhaps a good first step! Communications and networking options are also a consideration as is the way applications interact in a secure manner!

Modernize the data base and the access to information …
The value that this provides, particularly when it comes to the NonStop Server, is better integration with the overall stack; SQL/MX today simply requires less DBA resources than is typically associated with SQL implementations from other vendors! Sometimes overlooked, it opens up the system to easy access from modern client devices through any number of connection types, whether SOA and Web services or ODBC / JDBC calls; letting the NonStop Server itself front-end not only the data it oversees but data residing on other servers as well!

Modernize the application and the channels they support …
There are many new solutions coming onto the scene particularly in support of payments and these applications represent completely new approaches to solving business problems. Often written in Java, or even as .Net applications in C#, they prove easier to support in the long run and contribute significantly to the productivity of those supporting the NonStop Server platform! Smart phones, tablets, kiosks, etc. are all proving popular when it comes to client devices of choice and the NonStop Server is as modern as any server when it comes to supporting them!

Modernize the agreement …
Again, sometimes overlooked when modernization efforts are pursued. Solutions may be from vendors who retain legacy “tiered pricing” schemes and any modernization effort may prove to be a good opportunity to swap out technology in favor of ones better priced and better supported!

In the coming weeks, each of these steps will be subject to separate posts as each represents opportunities to leverage products, capabilities and services from comForte, and as a community NonStop users need to be fully aware of the options that exist and that through careful and judicial evaluation can contribute significantly to helping complete the journey.

I continue to work in the virtual world in support of a virtual community and yet, each time I am given the opportunity to attend a real event, I just can’t wait to go. It may be tiring and it may even be painful but there still is little that can substitute for face-to-face user engagement. I look forward to seeing more of the NonStop community shortly!

Taking root; modernization in practice!

2011-09-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

After several blog postings of late discussing modernization of NonStop and the applicability of Client Server Link (CSL) in helping the process, it is good to discuss a real world example. In this post I look at what was done at Intesa Sanpaolo Card where CSL was used to modernize BASE24!

In the weeks leading up to the 2010 NonStop Symposium I published a post to Real Time View “Still clinging to the sides?” that started with observations about my time spent crisscrossing the Alps. From Switzerland down to northern Italy and to its famous lakes, then a drive west to pick up more mountain passes in France before returning through France to Switzerland and onto Germany. I had been mixing business with vacation and my guest really wanted to experience firsthand some of the more famous passages over the Alps, and in one day we traversed three separate summits!

Unfortunately we were well to the west of where I would have liked to go and as viewers of the popular TV show, Top Gear, will attest the pass that has proven most popular of all is Italy’s Stelvio Pass, the second highest in all of Europe, and then heading further east you cross into the Dolomites proper before entering Slovenia, with some of the most amazing roads of the modern era. However, the trip we took last year had as its objective our arrival at the Nürburgring, this was just too many passes, too far away!

I have attended many European BASE24 User Group (EBUG) meetings over the years and I have always recalled the active participation by folks from Slovenia. I have long forgotten the names of those present but I do recall the enthusiasm that they had for BASE24 and for the NonStop Server platform. And I do recall how interested they were to absorb everything they could from those present from other parts of Europe as well as from America. Yes, Slovenia is a place I surely must visit and if I can find the time during my next trip to Italy, I am going to head to Slovenia and nearby Croatia and take a look for myself.

The post I referenced in the introduction began with “we are on the threshold of big ‘firsts’ as we head towards deploying hybrids, clouds, services and other mostly ‘meshed’ technologies that are required to break down silos.” A little later I make the connection between NonStop and other technologies “halo products” and observed how “the modern NonStop server, utilizing blades packaging, likewise retains its status as a halo product.” I then began another thought by suggesting “with so much focus on modernization as we drive to greater innovation” essentially intimating of how many users today are really taking modernization very seriously.

In presentations I have made of late I continue to emphasize how modernization is a journey where the destination appears only when we have successfully turned data into information, leveraged the information for greater productivity, and freed resources to innovate! But who is actually doing this and how widespread is this modernization pursuit? Imagine my surprise then when I found in my inbox a case study on Intesa Sanpaolo Card, out of Croatia, who had chosen Client Server Link (CSL) from comForte to modernize their implementation of BASE24 Classic.

While I am not going to revisit all that the case study addresses, I will include a link to where it can be found: http://www.comforte.com/news/intesa-sanpaolo-card/ and I will cover one particular aspect of their pursuit, that I believe is of particular value to the NonStop community. When it came to the card payment processor’s requirements, they recognized that “to boost efficiency and agility, while leveraging its BASE24 investments, the IT organization within Intesa Sanpaolo Card embarked on an initiative that would enable them to deliver access to BASE24 capabilities through a single, intuitive, Web-based interface.”

In other word, pretty much any client device equipped with a browser, could access critical applications running on their servers, including those on the NonStop Server platform. The very essence of what many corporations equate today with modernization as even mobile devices now come equipped with browsers. “The IT team was tasked with developing new applications for clients and for developing and maintaining applications for the NonStop platform,” a situation well understood by nearly every IT manager where NonStop Servers are present.

Taking advantage of the skills and services on offer from comForte, Intesa Sanpaolo Card deployed CSL and met these requirements and today it has a well-integrated, clearly as modern as it gets, NonStop Server and solutions. I have covered CSL in several posts of the past and it’s always good to actually provide commentary on a company who has successfully taken advantage of the technology and who is pleased enough with the results to publically endorse what CSL provided. In the months to come I will be looking for more success stories in support of CSL – to date, more than two dozen major corporations have already experienced a similar result so it has definitely taken root and begun to flourish!

I may make it to Slovenia and Croatia when I am next in that part of Europe; perhaps later in the year. And I will make every effort to use an ATM supported by Intesa Sanpaolo Card, and support the company utilizing CSL. After all, I may not get to drive through the mountain passes I would so much like to do, but I will be able to at least help drive additional transactions!

Valuable Face Time!

2011-09-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

Regional user group events continue to retain a strong following among the users of NonStop Servers and even though so much is happening across social media channels, there’s still no substitute for the face time that comes from participating in a gathering of your local community.

It is very apparent of late that the NonStop community is appreciating the information that is being posted to online forums, group discussions and blogs. Among the more volatile have been various threads on http://groups.yahoo.com/ (look for the group Tandem_Computers) as well as the discussions on the LinkedIn group, HP NonStop Tandem Professionals. If you haven’t been following either of these then you are definitely missing out on some highly entertaining and yet extremely informative exchanges among knowledgeable folks.

For more than four years I have been involved in providing content for a number of social media outlets. Some of these have been created after much thought and planning while others, purely on a whim. When recently someone suggested I was a fool for being as positive as I am on NonStop I created the group, Fools for NonStop and have been somewhat taken aback by the interest this group has generated – there’s definitely considerable buzz throughout the community. Membership climbed through 150 during the first two weeks and continues to attract new members on a daily basis.

However, it was one of the more recent discussions that caught my attention. A new member asked the group, “is this the real ITUG?” The responses have been light-hearted with someone suggesting perhaps we should consider calling this virtual community, VTUG – the Virtual Tandem User Group and mused that hopefully, there wasn’t a Venezuelan group who might take exception to the use of the acronym just as others were pleased that when the Scandinavians formed a NonStop user group, they elected to brand themselves, VNUG.

My own observation on this topic is that while I am among the more vocal when it comes to the value proposition of growing a virtual community, I am not all that keen to support the current vehicles we rely on – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogspot, etc. as a substitute or replacement for what has been so passionately supported for almost three decades. Finding time to meet face-to-face provides a valuable networking experience that is still unmatched in the virtual world. Yes, I tried Second Life for a short period, with the encouragement of some colleagues at IBM, but it was less than encouraging from my perspective.

User groups continue to hold events. There was a lot of enthusiasm generated by the recent OzTUG event held on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. In a recent email broadcast from Dr. Michael Rossbach, there came news about how much he had enjoyed the 10th anniversary celebration put on by VNUG – still among my all-time favorite user community, worldwide. After all, anyone who has enjoyed the event on the ferry between Stockholm and Helsinki in the early weeks of winter can attest to, this is a boisterous and enthusiastic group!
Yes, the NonStop community continues to enjoy the face time that comes from real events. Next week, I will be off to India as a guest of HP to speak at the InNUG event and I am looking forward to that gathering – I have never been to India and yet, I have been in touch with many NonStop enthusiasts from that part of the world. In a few weeks’ time, CTUG will be having their major event and it continues to prove popular as well.

And while I am not clear as to what HP plans for 2012 when it comes to big-tent marketing events such as we saw this year at HP Discover in Las Vegas (and ignoring what may occur at HP Discover Vienna where the NonStop content will be marginal at best) this isn’t precluding the continuing support for NonStop users getting together in every corner of the globe. In fact, as early as it may at first appear, in his email update on VNUG, Dr. Rossbach laid out the timeframes and venue for a European event in 2012 building upon earlier plans the German user group, GTUG had been considering. “GTUG are working on a conference for HP-users during September, 2012 which we want to open up for an international attendance,” Dr. Rossbach explained. “We want to have you all (join us) in Dresden, Germany!”

I for one look forward to this as events tuned to the needs of the NonStop community continue to attract my attention as I am sure they do of anyone who continues to work with the NonStop Server platform. There’s a growing body of work developing in the virtual world, and the attraction social media offers in terms of immediacy and intimacy is something that attracts many within the NonStop community. However, as successful as this communication channel turns out to be, it really isn’t a VTUG – a virtual Tandem user group.

The attraction of joining with our peers, networking, hearing first-hand what others are doing, and having the opportunity to interact with senior members of the HP NonStop management team continue to remain as attractive as it has always been. And it’s certainly great to see as many user groups as active as they are around the globe – certainly, an assurance for many within the NonStop community who may be unsure of the strength of commitment to the NonStop Server platform.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as I can in the coming months. Yes, continue to follow your favorite online forums, group discussions and blogs but by all means, continue to support your local user community with just as much fervor … after all, it adds substance to what otherwise may be missed in your time spent in the virtual world.

Modernize the NonStop? Absolutely!

2011-09-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

NonStop Server users have plans to upgrade to Blades and indeed, many have already completed the move and that’s an encouraging sign. But upgrading the middleware? The rest of the infrastructure? Embracing SOA and Web services? The time to modernize is now!

Modernization has become the mantra of industry and for many this is no longer something that can be put off. The message, irrespective of which vendor we rely upon, is focused on the same issue – deploying the modern equipment, we can so easily purchase, in support of solutions that map to modern paradigms is a priority!

It’s coming at a time where many of the industry analysts, whose opinions we most valued for so long, are being caught out or left behind essentially as the pace of change has escalated in just a matter of months. Who could have guessed Google would be able to cheaply snap up Motorola Mobile or that RIM would fall that far behind, that fast. Who would have thought HP would be prepared to walk away from a multi-billion PC business, dumping it’s just announced line of tablet/PCs along the way?

And on a slightly different level, who could have thought Steve Jobs would be leaving Apple, even as the industry seems poised on yet another pivotal shift in its axis. After all, what will the iPhone 5 look like, when will we see the iPad 3, and exactly what will Apple do in terms of changing the way TV is viewed?

When you take a good, hard look at what today is the NonStop Server platform the changes in hardware packaging that have occurred over the last couple of years has transformed the platform no less than if it had have been occupied by an Autobot straight from the movie Transformers, and capable of taking on any high-value, must have executed, transaction.

But more importantly, the paradigm we now see is being influenced more radically than at any previous time within IT by client devices. In particular, smart phones, PDAs and tablets …

One analyst has even suggested that the cycle that has existed, from the time the first commercial computer was installed, where we would see the pendulum swinging freely between distributed and centralized computing models, is over. The explosive growth in personal mobile smart devices has ended any future for the distributed model. And the advent of Cloud Computing, whether public or private, is usurping what many in IT saw as one of the true strengths of distributed computing – low cost!

For the NonStop Server platform, it’s a mixed message. There will be some enterprise IT departments who will see multiple NonStop Server nodes running under the oversight of Pathway, as a truly robust private cloud. But they unfortunately represent the minority. For the remaining enterprise IT departments, the NonStop Server will be another “edge” product – yes, a return to an old term and one I am sure has a new name in the new world.

But be that as it may, and whether securing a private cloud, retaining the rights to process high-value transactions, or simply front-ending multiple clouds and providing support for “cloud bursting” whenever the situation demands, the role of the NonStop Server is about to change. And to change for good, and for better…. permanently!

Access to information will be via Services. Networks will be all-TCP/IP. Databases will be relational, with SQL queries dominating ... Java and .Net programming models will continue to compete, and everyone will become a payments processor. Yes, pour mobile device of choice will accept payments from anyone and we in turn will pay others in kind – and there will be a billion “operations” in a very short time.

None of this has escaped Thomas Burg, comForte CTO, who in a recent exchange with me has become increasingly sensitive to the urgency involved. Unless enterprise IT embraces modernization and quickly retires practices of the past, it will simply not be able to keep up across today’s competitive landscape. “Just as the industry is transforming, so too is comForte; we are the NonStop modernization company! That’s it,” Burg said in his latest email.

And this is not a bad thing. All too often what a company stands for, and the business it pursues, can be lost in layers of market-speak. We can all remember when InSession Technologies burst onto the market first with WebGate – but with more than a dozen packages, it proved difficult to decide what business problems did the product WebGate address? With its collection of access and connection products, comForte is electing to re-banner everything under the label of modernization – and rightfully so.

“Business simply has to modernize. From the time a user initiates a transaction from the latest smart device they have acquired, comForte will be helping facilitate its integration with all that’s deployed on NonStop,” was the perspective Burg projected “and that’s why we are pursuing modernization as aggressively as we now are doing! We are one of the largest privately-owned ISVs in the NonStop marketplace and it’s important we communicate that comForte is now aligned behind this message.”

In the coming weeks I am going to return to this exchange just as I continue to look at the external forces driving all of this. Who could have guessed only a few months ago when all of the HP community was gathered in Las Vegas, that changes as radical as what has been unveiled, were imminent?

And if we haven’t already begun the journey, with each passing day the sun’s rays are diminishing, the path hard to see and the horizon is slipping further out of sight. For our business to thrive we simply cannot afford to let that happen, and vendors are beginning to posture differently to better help their customers to stay illuminated and fully aware of where they are treading!

The right partners!

2011-09-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

In this second part of a two part posting on CSL, when it comes to deployment then comForte employees represent a tremendous repository of knowledge and users benefit when they involve the company early in the process …

It was only a few days after writing the previous post that I was able to go back and pick up my car from the shop where I left it after its track adventures, and much to my relief nothing had broken and the car looked remarkably strong. Leaving a car, perhaps any car, at a shop called “The (car model name – just add you favorite car) Spa” conjures up all sorts of images of your car sunning itself, poolside.

But this wasn’t the case at all. The work was done very affordably but perhaps even more impressive, given today’s economy, the proprietor told me as I pulled out of his shop “any time you have a track weekend, bring the car around pre-event and post-event for a complete check-up, and I will do it for free!” Echoing the lines from Casablanca, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

The previous post built on the one of two weeks ago, “Modernize? It requires more than a re-set!”, where I revisited the topic of modernization, and equally as importantly the product Client Server Link (CSL). The theme of the previous post continued to press home how important modernization of computers and application is becoming, and even as it percolates to the top of the list in terms of importance as far as vendors, including HP, are concerned.

Just recently comForte CTO Thomas Burg emailed me a link to a video HP is running on its web site. It does require completing a registration form before it begins to play, but the effort is well worth it. Check out the following link "Welcome to the Hub" on HP's web site. The film highlights how today every company is looking at their application portfolio and assessing the contribution applications are making to the performance of the business.

Some applications can be quickly categorized as strategic, while others simply as much needed “keepers” that can be designated as requiring only the cheapest platform possible. And then there’s a third category that simply begs for being decommissioned or, at the very least, replaced.

With the dynamics we see across the business world where M&A activity thrives, the number of applications supported continues to rise. No IT manager seems to have the time or patience to assess functionality that could be retired with the arrival of new functionality. Likewise, “just keeping the lights on (at the price of not being able to) innovate,” suggested one of the HP presenters in the film, is simply not good enough when the pressure is on to attack new markets all the while facing-down competition.

As Burg later explained for me “the typical NonStop application we see running today usually has a business unit manager who is not fully aware of all that is in play around him, particularly when considering the dynamics HP described in its film. Should these business unit owners fail to grasp the power and flexibility that comes with closer integration to what’s around them, through implementing the same modern interfaces as are in place with nearly all other applications, then their participation within the business unit can be seriously threatened!”

Fortunately, as I recalled in the post of two weeks ago, I have begun to see a re-birth of interest among the community in Pathway (TS/MP), and today it plays a critical role in supporting modernization. New ports to NonStop in the payments marketplace have all elected to use Pathway and it has become relatively easy to externalize instances of Pathway Serverclasses as Web services – a critical requirement when it comes to supporting SOA.

And yet I am not convinced that every NonStop user is fully exploiting the services model. The comForte CSL offering supports a variety of approaches and as such, brings with it powerful technology to help with modernization. However, it’s not just the product, it’s the partnership that develops between comForte, the company, and its clients that is possibly just as important. Aware of what others are doing, the comForte Team have developed the experience to quickly help others navigate this path to modernization.

Somewhat emphatically, Burg reiterated how “the worst possible move to make is to not move! While there are a couple of products on offer for the NonStop community, it is the experience comForte has developed in connectivity and services that separates us from the offerings of others.”

All of us know a good deal when we see one, just as all of us will tend to rely on someone we see going the extra mile to help us. Recognizing and leveraging partnerships is how we best capitalize on changing technologies, and modernization dictates we continue down this path. I’ve certainly found one now for my car and will take every advantage of the opportunity I have been offered, just as I see NonStop users capitalizing on the services skills of comForte.

Modernization is a journey and it goes all the more smoothly when you are alongside someone who has made the journey before!

The right tools!

2011-08-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Last week the topic was Modernization, once again, and where the product CSL was referenced. In this first part of a two part posting on CSL doing nothing to better integrate via services, for lack of suitable products, will no longer cut it!

This morning I dropped my car off for service. It has spent two days on a racetrack lapping a nearby track, where my education continues, and where I get the chance to look at a lot of impressive machinery. However, there’s no escaping the price to be paid, as items simply wear out faster and to get the best out of the car requires patience and a lot of practice.

Only a few hours after I left the car there I received a call from the shop asking me where they could find the special “key” socket that unlocks the wheels of the car. A security tool provided by the wheel manufacturer, one “keyed” lug-nut on each wheel is shaped in a way that only the key socket can remove, and when I take the car to the track I remove this tool from the car and keep it handy in my toolbox so I can quickly check the torque of each wheel’s lug nuts.

In last week’s post I remarked on how modernization is not a set of “op-codes” or a bit switch. It’s not a flag that needs to be re-set that magically transforms the way a computer performs. I could have also added it has little to do with external appearances or even how big it is. Increasingly, movies that are set in the future show very little of any computers, preferring instead to simply have cameras pan across backdrops of giant screens providing complex interleaving of data, looking like a mosaic.

And yet ensuring our computers, and the applications they support, are modern remains a priority for business today, if it is going to leverage the information being captured and do so at minimal cost. Having the right tool to make it easy to unlock my wheel and to remove it, so the suspension and hubs could be inspected, was how automotive engineers went about gathering data from a very modern car. Having the right tool to simplify the access to our computers and applications becomes just as important.

In my previous post I also reflected, once again, on how responsible CIOs are pushing ahead with embracing SOA and Web services even as they begin to consider greater exploitation of cloud computing. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who follows current news commentary –almost every vendor has jumped onto the cloud computing bandwagon.

What is coming as a surprise is just how well the services model ties in with clouds – as if the services designers saw, very early on, that stripping away the complexities of supporting multiple servers, and possibly even multiple server architectures, could be easily overcome if it was all bundled up behind simple access APIs rendering it all transparent to the users.

According to comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, “this shouldn’t come as a surprise to the Non Stop community as they consider the value that comes with support of SOA and Web services; what is the surprise is why there are still companies who haven’t embraced SOA and Web services on NonStop!” Perhaps equally surprising is how many NonStop applications in order to simply remain relevant, will need to become better integrated into enterprise message infrastructures. “Most corporations have chosen a specific standard for the ‘enterprise message hub’ long ago and there is no technical or budgetary reason for NonStop applications not to participate,” Burg then explained.

The longer they hang onto home-grown technologies and commit resources to their maintenance, as Burg then explained, “the more difficult it will be for them to access the data they really need – a scenario not unlike being left alone in the desert! Deployments on clouds will only continue to grow and the more invested in legacy approaches will only make the inevitable more costly to pursue!”

We have seen the benefits that come with the comforte product, Client Server Link (CSL), with the three different options supported – whether simply updating from a dependence on the RSC APIs common among older deployments on NonStop, or adding support for new Java and .Net applications that mandate connectivity to other enterprise systems in a three-tier fashion, or reliably implementing a SOAP server. These are all functions of today’s CSL product.

Burg noted how “at comForte, we have seen how easy it is for companies who use CSL to externalize much of their business logic as services, without paying the secondary price of performance or compromising any security already deployed. Many customers have found out that running translation and mapping services on NonStop is costly and not necessary in a multi-tier environment and we provide an alternative in CSL that doesn’t compromise the level of availability business expects from running critical business logic on NonStop.”

Modernization of computers and applications will continue to dominate the topics pursued by responsible CIOs. It makes the most sense, as the faster it’s pursued the more money business can save. However, like everything business tackles, success may come down to simply having the right tools – and with CSL, comForte offers such a tool.

Doing nothing is just not an option; the goal of ensuring NonStop is well integrated with all what is around it will suffer as a result. And if you are unsure that you have the right tools – or even, just need to discuss – you may want to get comForte engaged.

Modernize? It requires more than a re-set!

2011-08-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

It may not be the first time the subject of modernization has been raised, but in this introductory post featuring comForte’s modernization suite, there will be more illuminated than is typical from just the flick of a switch!

There are many slogans and mantras floating around within IT these days, and they all hold forth the promise of making our lives a lot easier. Whether we are financial analyst wanting the latest stock prices, or security managers protecting corporate information, or simply warehouse managers wanting more complete inventory data when it comes to interacting with a company’s IT capabilities, we just want to spend only the amount of time we absolutely have to staring at the screen in front of us!

My research takes me to many web sites and as I begin to open “doors” and begin paging through the information provided, if what I am looking for is not appearing on the screen pretty quickly I am out of there! We all know how important it is to ensure the message we are conveying gets presented timely and of how our competitors are only a click away and, increasingly, it seems as if the world is even more connected than ever before. Sometimes I feel that I’m standing not just at the wrong door, but I’m on the wrong street altogether!

It’s been a reoccurring theme among the posts I have written for this site that as a vendor, comForte is very much aware of this burgeoning growth in connectivity, just as the company is aware that it is all part of doing business in a modern, global, world. Employees have to be informed about what else is happening, as they pursue business opportunities, else they cease making effective and productive contributions to the business. It’s an everything-connected-to-everything world!

In these previous posts I have observed how responsible CIOs are pushing ahead with embracing SOA and Web services, even as they begin to consider greater exploitation of cloud computing. I have also made several references to comForte’s suite of products in support of these modern information delivery vehicles, not the least being Client Server Link (CSL) – when it comes to modernizing the applications interface, as is the case with adoption of SOA, then turn to CSL, I first observed in a post late last year.

I have also seen a re-birth of interest, among the NonStop community in Pathway (TS/MP). The latest release of Pathway, according to comments posted recently to the Real Time View blog, allows “Pathway Serverclasses to be instantiated on Linux (or Windows) under PATHMON control as if they were local to NonStop and that the value is in that NonStop is always-on and can reliably manage these services!” This has considerable ramifications for the future and for how Pathway will be perceived as the systems increasingly become less homogeneous than at any time in the past.

Perhaps the most important observation I have made, up until now, has been associated with comments comForte CTO Thomas Burg provided me at the time I wrote those earlier postings when he suggested that “CSL is not just SOAP server or client – it is a lot more; something like a ‘anything-to-Pathway’ (as) we think there is no ‘one-size fits all’ paradigm.” But of late, he has further enhanced this message, adding “anything to NonStop and NonStop to anything!”

Burg then added “what comForte’s products do, in a nutshell, is support accessing business logic on NonStop and then, in addition to doing that, having the NonStop accessing business logic on any other platform. It’s more than supporting SOAP and HTML / XML with web and SOAP servers just as it is more than simplifying access to the transaction processing monitor (TP Monitor), Pathway. It’s more than terminal emulation just as it’s more than a simplified way to generating SQL queries. It’s all of the above, and then some!”

Modernization is not a set of “op-codes” or a bit-switch, or flag that needs to be re-set. It is not even a type of optimizer that businesses can use to process all their business logic and data to produce something better and easier to maintain. True, across the IT industry so much is converging on commodity offerings, embracing industry standards and simplifying the way critical applications are externalized to partners and customers alike. To transition successfully to modern IT, it’s not just products but the leveraging of experienced partners and the services they provide.

“No two scenarios are ever alike and comForte has assembled a product suite that covers all potential angles,” Burg explained. “It is the critical combination of just the right products with the qualified services in support of them that leads to modernization projects becoming successful. Pick the wrong combination of products and tap the resources of inadequately prepared vendors and it may severely restrict your technology options and produce sub-optimal solutions that “somehow” manage to work but neither efficiently nor offering any “future proof” properties!

In the coming weeks, I am going to take a closer look at the mix of products that are part of comForte’s product suite and in light of the increased activity within HP’s server group, particularly when it comes to the NonStop server and to the enhanced capabilities of Pathway, and I will expand on the unique value proposition that comes with leveraging comForte. After all, I like to think, while it may not be as simple as resetting a flag, it’s certainly an easier step to take when you happen to be in front of the right door!

Engineering for longevity [Part 2]!

2011-08-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

Last week, we revisited frameworks and in particular, aKuna (underpinning uLinga products); in this post we look at how the flexibility within aKuna helped the uLinga products better address real user issues and do so, in a timely manner!

To continue with the theme from last week’s post, the Corvette is now home, happily ensconced in my garage. The work is all complete and hopefully, in a couple of days’ time, it will once again be able to really spin its wheels – the ride back from Colorado Springs certainly left me with no misgivings about the car pulling strongly once again.

Wrapped in completely standard bodywork that differs little from any other coupe motoring down a highway there’s little indication whatsoever that there’s considerable muscle that can be flexed in an instant. If the math is right, beneath the hood there’s 700 horsepower – more than sufficient to satisfy my needs as a daily drive.

Probably of more interest to readers however, is the progress that the Infrasoft development team has made with building the uLinga product suite of networking products (competitive alternatives to ACI’s ICE and HPs SNAX products) in a relatively short time. Should you be standing in the check-out lane of a well-known grocery chain, watching your purchases being scanned, then rest-assured; there’s no escaping contact with uLinga as the transaction is processed. For the past couple of weeks, more and more stores have been cut-over to the production uLinga implementation and all has gone well with uLinga exhibiting stability and reliability not typically associated with a product just entering the marketplace.

Much of what is being delivered by uLinga and the ease with which it is meeting its objectives, as was revealed last week has to do with the underlying chassis, or framework, that is aKuna – it’s now simply flexing its muscles. And while it was observed in that earlier post how frameworks are rarely the subject of much attention (every good product has one, surely?) with all the emphasis being given to modernization of late, it’s becoming very important for users to be aware of the technology underpinning their favorite solution.

Scratch too deep beneath the shiny surface and you may find nothing but rusty metal dating back many decades! aKuna is a fresh approach and was a decision taken early in the development cycle. “Another abstraction layer that was considered at the time was Apache Portable Runtime (APR),” said David Finnie, head of Infrasoft R&D in a recent exchange. “At Infrasoft, while we looked at APR, it proved inappropriate as it assumed that target Operating Systems (OS’s) were all POSIX-like under the covers. Perhaps just as important for the middleware we were developing, and the expectations our users would have when it came to performance, APR didn’t fit well with the underlying Guardian non-blocking / no-wait I/O model and this is important as it’s the Guardian personality we leverage with such a critical subsystem as uLinga.”

Readers may recall how last week I described frameworks as though they were Rubik’s cubes where the surfaces of the cube could be manipulated to meet various platform and solution needs. When it came to aKuna the top surface was being effectively manipulated by the Infrasoft developers in support of varying application-to-application connectivity needs.

Providing SNA applications access to each other, in this case, SNA client devices to an SNA application, over a modern TCP/IP network without requiring any changes was simply a case of one face of the Rubik’s cube being shown to the user. Rotate the smaller surfaces that make up the cube to reflect a different property, and the Infrasoft developers provided support for SNA application access to other SNA applications, including CICS and IMS, over a modern TCP/IP network, again, without requiring any change except small ones in some instances, depending on release levels of the IBM subsystems involved.

Fashioned in this manner, and yet remaining just another “manipulation” or extension in the way aKuna can be called upon to support what was once perceived as an architectural specialty of SNA. Widely known as Advanced Program-to-Program Communication (APPC) and with a very rich API, its proponents now have a way out from any further reliance on this legacy communication service. uLinga becomes the bridge between SNA applications with a reliance on APPC to leverage modern TCP/IP networks as the face of aKuna is manipulated once again.

Long seen as one of the most challenging obstacles delaying the further modernization of a server, once-revered APPC can now be bridged effectively with uLinga. With DLSw, uLinga was able to provide support for tunneling and now, with APPC support uLinga adds bridging and a way to push the intricacies of SNA further into the background. These techniques aren’t new and yet, available in a single subsystem as it is in uLinga, makes the task of modernizing networks so much easier. What may look like ordinary wrapping belies what capabilities uLinga can so easily be called upon to provide almost at a moment’s notice!

Manipulating the surfaces of aKuna to support both tunneling and bridging isn’t the only value aKuna brings into play. Just as with the myriad collection of surfaces of a Rubik’s cube, the underside of the cube can be just as easily manipulated. The all red surface that supports NonStop can be easily rotated in support of Linux, Unix and even Windows – there’s many colors available with a twist.

Today, with aKuna, combinations of some uLinga features have been brought up and tested on Unix – testing with Linux and Windows is now only a case of “on user request.” Unix, very much like NonStop, was a popular choice for distributed processing in an SNA network, with many in finance and insurance deploying these computers in regional and branch office applications. Conversely, new applications coming to Unix that need to pick up earlier generation financial terminals supported solely by SNA, now have an option.

To return to the illustration of last week that featured the Corvette, I recently experienced a failure of the power steering as a result of the power steering fluid overheating. One mechanic I was working with suggested that of all the fluids in the car, the power steering fluid was definitely the forgotten fluid! As the demands placed on the steering increase, then the need for something more tolerant (of higher temperatures) is mandatory.

And with aKuna, as the demands placed on uLinga continue to increase, Infrasoft have a framework well implemented to meet the demands that continue to arise. “The way forward” is certainly a great way to sum up its capabilities and truly reflects the ambitions of many users today as they pursue modernization strategies.

Engineering for longevity [Part 1]!

2011-08-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

The problem with frameworks is that “everyone has one” but where there’s a need to modernize, what’s underneath the code can be very important. For new product families, such as uLinga, it’s doubly important …

Readers of my other blogs will be familiar with the Corvette that I routinely take to the track and with the difficulties I have been experiencing of late. The flexibility designed into the car from the very outset ensures that Corvette owners can customize the car in any which way they want, and optimize it for wherever they plan to take the car. And the good news here is that the engineers at GM did a marvelous job of designing a structure where everything about the car can be easily replaced or remolded.

Yes, almost every modern car today has a frame, but what the GM engineers put into the design of the frame of the Corvette supports a rich variety of body shapes including many that come from third parties.

In talking with the development team at Infrasoft, the company behind the uLinga product suite, an alternative to ACI’s ICE and HP’s SNAX products, it’s hard to miss the energy going into the support of frames, for a new company making a fresh start, it’s very encouraging to me that from the very outset considerable thought has gone into the underpinnings of the products being built. You will not find a data sheet, nor will there be a manual you can reference, but the framework that supports uLinga is called aKuna.

This is another Australian aboriginal word with several translations including “flowing water” and perhaps more importantly, “the way forward”. Readers may recall that I touched on this topic late last year in the post of December 18th, 2010 “It's OK - we are being framed!” and where Infrasoft Managing Director, Peter Shell, described aKuna more succinctly when he said that the “concept of a framework, or whatever we call them in the future, is that of a continuum.” The way forward, indeed!

“Frameworks are like our navels, everybody has one,” suggested Infrasoft CTO, Neil Coleman, before adding “and a lot of people may actually think ‘so what’ while others may simply ask ‘why bother, just use something already out there.’” True, almost every modern software product developed today relies on frameworks of one sort or another, but what the Infrasoft engineers designed into the aKuna framework now supports an increasingly richer number of feature combinations.

Infrasoft distributor comForte has developed many products for the NonStop server and while they address different business issues, “you will still find code that is shared among nearly all of the products,” according to comForte CTO Thomas Burg. “I think the amount of code re-usage between different products of the same company will correlate highly with the efficiency of the company – and that should translate directly to competitiveness and quality of the products.”

There’s rarely any discussion about frameworks, however outside of a close-knit community of hard-core developers, many in business are oblivious of the frameworks presence and totally unaware of the value they provide. Yet the strength and durability of any car we drive today is only as good as the frame supporting it; software products are no different! For many developers, simply adopting one of a growing number of standard frameworks may be the right approach and for developers’ fresh out of college and new to the industry, they represent an attractive alternative.

“aKuna is not NonStop-centric and great care has been taken to specifically make it inclusive of other OSs. aKuna provides a large array of commonly required services, which all sit on top of an OS-abstraction interface,” Infrasoft head of R&D, David Finnie explained, and digging a little deeper, added “there is certainly OS-specific functionality in aKuna that are obviously only activated when running on that particular OS – checkpoint and backup takeover for NonStop deployments being one example.”

If you could visualize a framework as a simple cube with the top surface providing interfaces to subsystems and applications while the surface underneath sits as close as possible to the operating system (OS), you begin to see the role that frameworks play. In the case of aKuna, this has led to a framework with the ability to let developers refocus the components that are utilized so that new products can be rapidly created. Not that aKuna represents all the code that is uLinga and each product within the uLinga family is just a different configuration of aKuna, but rather aKuna is at the heart of each uLinga product and represents the core of its code.

When the uLinga family was first conceived, the focus was on helping move off legacy SNA networking protocols and onto modern TCP/IP networks, but the early prospects wanted an alternative solution, the DLSw, that traditionally would have involved the development of a substantial body of code. However, with aKuna, the new uLinga for DLSw was ready for first trials in a matter of months.

And the upside is that with uLinga for DLSw now in production, the large part of the uLinga code, which is aKuna, is in production as well. A small point but far from trivial! Prospects now pursuing Proof of Concept’s (PoC’s) of uLinga for CICS and uLinga for IMS are a lot more comfortable being assured of the product’s quality and stability, knowing that the heart of uLinga is alive and beating very strongly. The visible flexibility of uLinga can be traced back to the inherent flexibility of the aKuna framework.

It’s as if the top of my imaginary cube, the face that it presents to us if we look down on it, are simply being rearranged, Rubik’s-cube like, to support each new product – a series of red squares for DLSw, and a series of green squares for CICS, and so on! I will leave for a later post the flexibility inherent with the easily changed colors on the bottom as the ability to do this opens the door for uLinga packages of the future to run on different OSs – a circumstance that some vendors are quickly recognizing.

You rarely see the chassis of a car and you rarely stop to consider the chassis within a software product. But with all the emphasis being places on modernization, shouldn’t we all be a tad concerned about products we run with frameworks decades old? Business managers may not be aware of the significance of frameworks today but as we push deeper into modernization initiatives, it’s probably a very good time to check with your vendors just how ancient the framework is and move onto something more robust!

Advisory Signs – past and present!

2011-07-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

Out on the road, we rely on advisory signs to help us navigate uncertain terrains and to get us safely to our destination. And already advisory signs are being erected for those heading towards Cloud Computing!

I have always paid attention to the advisory signs posted by our highways. The message that they convey is that caution is advised and experienced drivers rarely take them for granted. Whether they are associated with sharp turns, or asking us to chain-up for winter driving or just giving us a heads-up that deer may be crossing, the down side from ignoring the advice provided by these signs usually carries a price tag that most of us don’t want to test.

Looking through my cabinets this week I came across my collection of The Connection magazines, and as I flipped through the covers I came across the November – December, 2006, edition with the article co-authored by comForte’s Michael Horst and Thomas Burg: “Business-Critical SOA-based Services on NonStop Servers.” For an article written five years ago, I found it remarkable how current most of the information provided remains. When it comes to technology, and the almost daily changes we witness, five years is almost an eternity.

“The NonStop platform provides an excellent infrastructure for massively scalable fault-tolerant applications,” the authors begin one paragraph. But then, just two paragraphs later, they add “considering existing mission-critical applications on NonStop, it is certainly not advisable to re-host those applications on weaker platforms just to SOA-enable them.” So, here we go again, more advisory signs being erected cautioning even the most experienced IT professional.

In the post to the blog, Real Time View, of July 24th, 2011, “Nostalgia; comfortable and seductive! And yet …” I quoted Martin Fink, Senior VP and General Manager of Business Critical Systems at HP, who acknowledged that “there will be a significant move to Clouds and with the move, the necessity to look at how many core applications move across … however, there’s always going to be a set of customers who will chose to run their own infrastructure and within that set of customers, there will be those who need NonStop.”

These comments came as Martin and I talked about the future role specialty servers, like the HP Integrity NonStop server, might play with all the attention being given today to Cloud Computing. With the unveiling of HP’s strategy earlier this year and the prominence given to Cloud Computing, many close to NonStop were beginning to wonder whether to start looking at changing careers. But fortunately, it’s becoming clearer that there will continue to be role for NonStop to play.

The coincidence here is that the argument being put forward for retaining the NonStop, even as Clouds, private as well as public, are being embraced, looks very similar to what was proposed by Horst and Burg. Just as today some components may never be moved across to outside agencies, no matter how robust and secure their solutions may be, it was also the case some five years ago when we were cautioned that it may make little sense to re-host NonStop applications onto a weaker platform.

Responsible CIOs are pushing ahead with embracing SOA and with exploiting virtualization and some of the initiatives being created do involve Cloud Computing. But not everything! In fact, along with the consideration of Clouds there’s also the consideration of how to bring something back inside the data center should the Cloud ever be compromised. So the dynamics are shifting to where a server of one type of another really does need to know what’s going on after all. No one is suggesting that we leave considerations such as this solely to those providing the Cloud!

comForte continues to support SOA and their CSL offering is among the better ones available today. One of the strengths of CSL has always been its ability to integrate multiple, disparate programming models and client user interfaces. It may yet be a while before Clouds are represented as just another platform but with the right set of requirements in hand, it could very well happen. Irrespective of any eventuality like this, the point raised all those years ago and echoed more recently by Martin Fink is that responsible CIOs will view Clouds as just another weaker platform and there’s little to be gained from an early exit off NonStop.

Signs, even those along the side of the road, are advisory and experienced drivers usually begin to factor in such things as the condition of the road, the state of the weather, and the behavior of drivers around them before steering through a corner on a highway. I would like to think that seasoned, responsible IT professionals follow similar procedures before ever directing services to anything as outside of their control as a Cloud!

Seeding Clouds; let it rain!

2011-07-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

A presentation at HP Discover that really sparked the imagination was held late in the week - Session 3221, “NonStop and Linux combined”. If Clouds are in your future and your CIO is anxious for input, check out this post …

Being back in Boulder has reminded me in no uncertain a fashion that living right alongside a continental divide comes with a price. There has not been an evening without a dramatic thunderstorm rolling out of the hills and causing havoc among those caught in peak-hour traffic heading home. The rivers are over spilling their banks and local dams are full to the brim.

Yes, these continue to find their way into the mighty Missouri and Mississippi rivers – much to the consternation of the farmers whose land continues to lie flooded. And to think, it was only a year or so ago that there was talk of seeding clouds to make sure we had some rainfall.

There have been lots of discussions about Clouds of late, and it’s not just been weather-related. Among the NonStop community however, while it’s not quite like standing around waiting for the rain to fall, all the same there are expectations that the emergence of Cloud Computing will have a positive impact on the way NonStop Server platforms are viewed. There’s no escaping the headlines surrounding some of the more spectacular clouds’ failures and responsible CIOs everywhere are looking at exactly how best to integrate Cloud usage into the computer operations.

As HP Discover wound down, comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, in his post to this blog “HP DISCOVER 2011 - a very biased wrap-up” described a number of sessions that he attended and in general terms provided very positive feedback. In particular, one session (Session 3221, “NonStop and Linux combined”) held very late in the week, drew the observations from Burg of how it “was a very interesting session on how NonStop can be used as front-end for a cloud-based application, standing-in for the cloud when the cloud is down.”

Perhaps, just as compelling was the next observation Burg made, “like it or not, the NED is part of a much bigger Enterprise … headed by Dave Donatelli … (and) I find it both relevant and very good for NonStop that the platform is being mentioned when people responsible for these larger units speak.”

At a time when HP’s strategy is focused on Clouds, Mobility, and improving performance in the software business, HP still finds a place for NonStop. As Donatelli’s BCS head, Martin Fink, highlighted in his presentation earlier that week, “HP has a seamlessly integrated portfolio of products for your Mission Critical Converged Infrastructure including HP-UX 11i and NonStop.”

With what was presented later in the week, this seamless integration bodes well for a future of NonStop with Cloud Computing. This is not to say I am advocating a role for NonStop within the Cloud, although there may be very strong arguments put forward by some customers for doing so, but where there are Clouds constructed from commodity, mostly x86-based, servers then a future where applications running on NonStop can spill into Clouds, because they were deemed as low value, or because the resources needed to run the application on NonStop were exhausted, is a good thing for all involved.

As Burg walked into the meeting on “NonStp and Linux combined”, he told me later, his first thoughts were “this sounds like an interesting presentation, also the room is full so let’s see!” When it was over, he added, “finally (FINALLY) a vision from the NED which takes NonStop into the future of cloud computing. A tiny step so far, but certainly heading in the right direction. Also, this is not so much about technology (as nice as GuardianAngel is) – it is more about changing minds what NonStop can and should be used for.”

For middleware vendors, such as comForte, acceptance of this model embracing Clouds will certainly present new opportunities to all. Accessing the applications as services, operating across a mixture of traditional platforms as well as Clouds, and securing it all, are among just a few of the areas where customers will be turning to vendors for solutions. In the coming weeks, and as more information is provided by HP, this will get more thorough attention.

No matter where this now heads, the seeding of the Cloud has definitely begun. HP Discover unveiled a potentially ground-breaking solution and one that should meet the needs of many responsible CIOs. Watch for Cloudbursts and look for the GuardianAngel – heavy rains are forecasted for the future and I for one, have no issues with whatever rainfall is generated, 7 X 24!

Matrix Unloaded!

2011-07-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

Three months ago I wrote of how I’m a big fan of the Matrix trilogy – but following HP Discover and discussions with HP as well as with other vendors, while I still like the movies I’m not as sure as I once was that NonStop has a place in the Matrix …

I’ve just returned to Boulder following a one week trip to Europe. Family matters took me to the Polish capital, Warsaw, for the weekend and then potential business opportunities took me to Paris. I wrapped up the week with a meeting with Dr. Michael Rossbach, and the discussions turned to Dr. Rossbach’s observations about HP Discover. We also talked about the impact uLinga was making in the marketplace, and we reflected on the benefits that events, like Discover, can provide for all participants. And we talked about Clouds.

Clearly, HP has been aligning its executive team around the core messages of Cloud Computing and Mobility. We also see the messages of CI-Ready and of the expectations HP has concerning the value that will come with converged infrastructure – leveraging common components for even greater flexibility, and painting a picture where future hardware offerings will surely become even cheaper.

The question is what will really happen with NonStop, vis-à-vis the Cloud? Three months ago, in the post of March 10th, 2011, “Return of the Matrix!” I was very bullish on what HP’s Matrix product offered, and following presentations at SATUG from HP EMEA I read between the lines and concluded that, at some point, NonStop would be able to be plugged into the Matrix and that after a fashion, the provisioning software would be extended to embrace NonStop. When it came to slide-ware, it all looked really cool!

However, not so fast! The more I talk with HP executives and the harder I press them as to whether the Matrix product offering would support NonStop, the less I am inclined to believe that we will see any short-term NonStop participation. Quite the opposite in fact: HP views the NonStop Server platform, as it does the SuperDome, as specialty server platforms, in much the same way as IBM views its System z mainframe, and believes that there will be customers who will be looking for solutions apart from Clouds.

Unloaded from Matrix participation but included as a specialty processor, is a significant development for the NonStop community. This is not to say that there will not be some users who elect to find a role for NonStop in their Cloud strategy, or to tie together NonStop and Clouds. However, irrespective of the progress HP makes with the Cloud strategy – products and services – NonStop will find continued relevance in support for all applications considered too critical to be pushed into Clouds, public or private.

CI-Ready is about a convergence around infrastructure and middleware that is shared, and indeed common across many of HP’s high-end server platforms. It’s about clearly demonstrating just how modern the platform has become via the types of industry-standard and open systems software that is supported by NonStop. What CI-Ready is not about is a convergence around Cloud computing!

As soon as you realize that specialty servers will continue to be needed and that Cloud computing will only offset some functionality (and not likely the core applications), then business needs to go on, and modernizing connectivity, as is addressed by uLinga, remains just as relevant today as at any time in the past. Networks of Branch Devices, ATMs, POSs, even mobile devices, benefit from what uLinga can provide and with the operational “go live” just pursued by one large retailer uLinga is being watched closely by other retailers and financial institutions facing similar networking modernization issues. I will have more to say on this subject in later posts.

Responsible data center managers will not give up core capabilities of the business, that differentiates them from competitors, to Clouds and in this respect NonStop provides the differentiation many CIOs still value. The Matrix will continue to be featured highly in much of HP’s marketing collateral in support of Clouds, and we may yet see NonStop implemented as a part of the solution by some!

But as you consider the highlights of the Matrix package, they do leave many within the NonStop scratching their heads and wondering, so what? It would seem that, after all, the original architects of NonStop really did get it right and a modern NonStop certainly will serve quite a few selected companies well for many years to come as a specialty platform, to be relied on for the most critical aspects of the business.

Hiding in plain sight!

2011-07-08T02:13:00.000-07:00

In this second part I will change gears and revisit the theme from a webinar provided by Thomas Burg earlier this year and where he rejected the belief the steps taken towards modernization of NonStop are expensive or even risky …

In my post last week, Alive and Kicking, I provided as firm a rebuttal as I could concerning any perceptions that may still be present in the marketplace about the long-term prosperity of the NonStop platform. In looking at what users rely on NonStop to provide, I not only suggested the HP NonStop server was prospering but that from the feedback I’m getting from users, it continues to kick aside all usurpers to its premier position atop the availability stack with relish!

However, when systems such as the NonStop server are rarely the cause for headlines, if you are not at the center of outages and services no longer available, as is occurring more often these days, then a platform like NonStop can be taken for granted. When there’s an economic downturn, as we see today, this absence from the limelight (as welcome as it is for those actively in support of the platform) may have unexpected consequences. NonStop may simply be forgotten and be bypassed when there are new business solutions under consideration.

In the previous post I related the steps taken by a UK payments processor to ensure NonStop remained at the forefront of CIO attention but for many others, as efficiently as NonStop processes mission critical transactions, CIO’s may view NonStop as a costly legacy from a time when specialized systems were relied upon by the company to simply stay in business.

For many CIO’s it is hard to consider the NonStop server as modern or to appreciate just how easy it is to integrate NonStop with the rest of the applications supporting their business. Perhaps the NonStop server has been simply hiding from these very same CIOs in plain view! Data that is accessible from a browser, business logic that’s developed in Java, web and application servers from the open source community, relational database management systems searched via ANSI-standard SQL commands – there’s very little that today’s modern NonStop server cannot do.

Modernization is all about reducing costs and in the process, better aligning with the company’s business and IT strategies. The process of modernizing is to help bring focus back onto innovation and with innovation, to become more responsive in a changing global economy. We know all too well that simply surviving and weathering the severest economic downturn many companies have ever witnessed has seen CIO’s budgets pulled back to levels more like the early 1990s than what we saw only three or four years ago.

And yet, modernization may not be the expensive proposition many CIO’s fear. It’s not about rip-and-replacing, throwing away what is in place in favor of something newer, but rather a process that is best pursued in evolutionary steps. Cost cutting and modernization can be compatible and for those CIOs aware of the value NonStop provides, there’s awareness that through simple, manageable changes, the NonStop server can anchor their drive to modernize.

In the webinar Thomas Burg gave a few months ago he did a highly effective job in driving home the message that NonStop can be as modern as we need to make it and that the perception many CIOs share of NonStop applications being inflexible and costly no longer has merit when you consider just how many users have successfully modernized the connectivity and access processes on their NonStop server.

Hiding in plain sight may be a standard routine for fugitives or conspirators and is something we are all familiar with as a popular ruse in today’s movies. However, this should never be a practice our CIOs become conditioned to accept. As my exchanges with Thomas Burg have reinforced, there really is no time like today to turn this all around. Scale-out! Scale-up! Secure, and permanently available – it’s nice to be this inexpensive while impressing cost conscious, risk –averse, CIOs the way NonStop does.

Alive and kicking!

2011-06-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

Even as the excitement generated at HP Discover begins to recede, and daily routines re-emerge, NonStop remains very much in the spotlight. In this first of two posts, I again return to the theme of modernization …

There has been a lot of commentary that’s been floating around LinkedIn groups – yes, social media certainly is entertaining, on occasion, but like most of you, I view the content as I do any story I come across in the tabloids on display at supermarket checkout counters. From my perspective, NonStop is still the premier implementation when it comes to delivering services with zero downtime.

NonStop, and before NonStop Tandem, has played a big role in my business life and I am often reminded that perhaps I have become somewhat sentimental when it comes to assessing the future prospects of the HP NonStop server. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Quite to the contrary, all too often the role assigned to the HP NonStop server is pursued with such efficiency that many within IT fail to recognize this server’s presence and just assume that something else is involved.

I have witnessed first-hand how NonStop generates so little respect for the role it performs! Or, as comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, acknowledged recently to me in an email, “in many instances, NonStop does twice the work with half the people and still does not get any credit. And yes, I have my own theories on why this happens!” And on this point I tend to agree with Thomas.

During my time with Tandem Computers in the early 1990s, when I worked with Tim Chou and Chris Rooke on the NonStop Availability Initiative, (NSA), a cooperative marketing program involving development and marketing, renewed emphasis was placed on just how available the Tandem computers of the day had become. To best illustrate this, Dr. Chou suggested that just as we assume that when we turn on a switch, we have light; just as we lift a telephone handset, we have dial tone; and just as we turn on the tap, we have water, then so it is for anything connected to a NonStop server – it’s always there!

Indeed, whenever new NonStop system was first created, the moment we saw the TACL prompt, we celebrated, as we knew the system was alive and whatever we pursued, there would always be a response. From the appearance of that TACL prompt there was never any possibility we would be presented with the dreaded “blue screen” of death, as is so often the case today with commodity servers.

In exchanges with folks who recently attended a BITUG users group meeting, the topic was raised of how to best reinforce the message that the NonStop server was alive and kicking and supporting business critical interactions. To the enlightenment of all in attendance, the biggest payments processor in the UK proffered their own experience that has helped them ensure the role of the NonStop was widely recognized, and appreciated, throughout the company.

“Here’s what we did; we have monthly dashboard meeting where each platform has to report on the number of incidents, number of SLAs being missed, etc. Every month, the NonStop representatives report ‘zero incidents; SLA kept perfectly’. That very brief report has generated visible and tangible positive attention for the NonStop server!” Reading through the emails that this generated, I couldn’t help but reflect on the days when yes, being able to tell all other participants that no, nothing untoward had happened to any applications running on NonStop was held in the highest esteem by all within IT!

When so much negativity permeates through our community, and when it is so easy to apportion blame for any failure to promote the merits of the NonStop platform at the feet of marketing, it’s still refreshing to read of the enthusiasm for NonStop that is present within the NonStop community. The NonStop is as modern a server as any of its peers within the data center and let’s not lose sight of that attribute. Whether it’s through the presence of a modern ANSI SQL database, or services externalized via SOA and Web services, or even from the support of open source routines developed using Java, there’s very little that NonStop cannot do when compared with peer platforms.

Yes, NonStop is alive and very well, and processing much of today’s business critical transactions, just as it has for many decades now! And yes, it’s not just alive and very well, but kicking aside usurpers with relish! In the coming weeks this will be a theme I develop further and just as last week I expressed interest in discussing further the modernization of networks and user interfaces, so too, am I going to make sure NonStop servers are never left in the corner, ignored with the assumption that whatever they are doing, don’t touch!

Yes, sir – no incidents to report, and every user happy! With that assessment it’s hard not to be impressed and, as for everything else we read, no more credible than what we see at the check-out counter tabloids!

Let’s check under the hood!

2011-06-23T14:17:00.000-07:00

comForte CTO Thomas Burg has provided excellent coverage on what transpired at HP Discover and this post looks at what constitutes a modern computer and how to recognize whether the server you have is modern or not …

In recent webinars and blog posts comparisons have been made between the auto and IT industries. While the relationship may not be apparent at first, both industries are incredibly competitive and both have foundations based on just a couple of key systems.

When it comes to cars, there are fuel delivery systems, exhaust systems, and ignition (electrical) systems. Lift the hood of any car and should you see carburetors, an absence of catalytic convertors, and drum-brakes, you realize pretty quickly that this car is “a collectable.” Sit down at the console of any large-scale server and our characterization isn’t much different – we can tell just as quickly whether the server we are accessing is “legacy.”

As the HP Discover event of last week progressed comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, was very active in keeping us all advised about the topics covered and of how prominent a role NonStop played – all important “news” for those among the NonStop community unable to participate. Postings to this blog site as well as to several discussion groups on LinkedIn continued to materialize late in the evenings. As the commentary developed, the number of times Burg talked about modernization, and the importance of modernizing the NonStop server, couldn’t be ignored.

In the lead-up to the HP Discover event of last week, comForte held a webinar, now viewable on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJtUxr6DNtE&feature=youtu.be It's in two parts and if you have as yet not viewed the webinar, it’s well worth checking out. Like me, Thomas Burg too shares more than a passing interest in cars and produces an effective message about modernization featuring many well-known vehicles.

We easily recognize a modern server, even when there’s no hood to lift, when we see business information residing in a relational database management system accessed via SQL, where business access is via client devices with intuitive user interfaces connected via TCP/IP networks, where the program languages include Java, C#, etc., and where frameworks supporting runtime environments are compatible with what we rely upon when developing business logic, all contribute to the image of a modern computer server.

“I came away from HP Discover impressed by just how much coverage HP gave to the NonStop server relative to other product offerings of HP,” Burg later told me. “Just as importantly was how many times NonStop was mentioned within the context of the bigger HP – a legitimate, modern, server on equal footing with all other HP Business Critical System (BCS) server offerings; clear evidence that within the executive ranks of HP NonStop server is every bit as modern as any of HP’s other servers!”

However, there are still many NonStop servers in use today where thoughts about modernization continue to be put to one side. The application that’s been running for many years, uninterrupted, has masked the presence of NonStop to some extent, and projects other than modernizing the NonStop took priority. When it comes to two highly visible systems (the network and the user interface) we associate with modern computers, fortunately, there’s no reason why immediate action cannot be pursued.

From SOA and Web services to user interfaces and terminal emulators, and to supporting SNA applications over TCP/IP, comForte is continuing to invest and promote solutions solely aimed at modernizing the way NonStop can be connected with peer servers, as well as how users interact with them. “HP Discover proved that NonStop servers are alive and well; NonStop servers are becoming ‘mainstream’ in a good way,” Burg suggested to me, before adding “with Converged Infrastructure, NonStop servers are increasingly viewed as part of the larger IT environment; don’t leave your NonStop box in the corner!”

In future posts I am going to revisit the network and the user interface, as well as touch on the languages, frameworks, and tools that then can be leveraged along the way. However, wrapping up this post, the observation Burg posted to this blog a short time ago continues to resonate with me. He wrote of how “in terms of news, there were no sensational announcements regarding NonStop but maybe this is the biggest news; from an HP-global perspective, NonStop is ‘just’ the high-end part of the HP mission critical server offering!”

NonStop servers will be with us for many years to come; they are at the very pinnacle of HP’s mission-critical server offerings – as Martin Fink stated and Burg referenced, there’s nothing on offer from HP, apart from NonStop, that provides “zero downtime!” No, we don’t have to lift the hood to see what we have with NonStop, as a few taps on any connected keyboard will give us images as modern as you will find coming from any other server.

With all that we are reading of late about the systems and applications that are failing, there’s really no excuse for leaving the NonStop server in the corner of the data center, a kind of de facto “data PABX” when, with the addition of a couple of products, the NonStop server will exhibit as modern capability as any other server in the data center!

HP DISCOVER 2011 - a very biased wrap-up

2011-06-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

About the author: Thomas is the CTO at comForte and has been active in the NonStop community for longer than he can remember. He has a keen interest in all topics related to security, cross-platform Enterprise computing and all things related to IT. For details, please see http://www.comforte.com/company/management/

Having been at many many “ITUG” events, I will try to sum up my experiences from this years’ event in this blog. I was on the program committee of prior events; I also attended several “NonStop-only ITUGs”, the very first HPTF including NonStop (2005 in Houston) – thus I hope I have a somewhat broad view. So let’s start with …

The ugly
My very first cab driver gave me a $35 ride from the airport to a hotel on the strip. But I got to see the highway west of the strip…

The bad
Not too much too report here… But to say it out loud: I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF LAS VEGAS! While – other to an urban legend – it is possible for financial institutions to attend events in Las Vegas, I think five years running is enough. I herewith pledge to hold the next DISCOVER in Hawaii. Or Fiji. Or wherever – but not in a place I feel home in by now. I struggled with the new format of the session scheduler. Other than having to learn a new tool each year, the sheer breadth of content made it very hard no to miss sessions which might have been even more interesting. I put up a sub-schedule for NonStop on my web site at www.thomas-burg.de but that was too late for many people to use. Maybe this is something Connect can do next year?

The good
Let’s start with the food. Seriously. How many of us remember complaining year after year to ITUG that the food was “improvable” – I think this simply happened. Nothing major of course, but I did notice.

Do I need to mention the concert featuring Sir Paul McCartney? The fun part of the event aside, NonStop is now part of a major IT event with more than 10,000 people across all IT attending – thus giving NonStop a much bigger exposure.

Then there is NonStop-specific content which I did like a lot. I know some people disagree on this one, so let me try to prove my point… Does anyone miss the vendor talks where they present their products? I have done several of those for comForte – typically competing in time slot with comForte’s trusted competitors. I don’t see much of a loss here – do you? Due to time constraints I only attended a few NonStop-specific sessions; here are some I find noteworthy:

Session 4775, NonStop HW roadmap: I think everyone who was there will agree that this was a good session. Someone new joning the HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED)! 15 mins of Q&A with honest answers to tough questions!
Session 4622, NonStop Security technical update contained lots of announcements. NonStop security has improved a lot in the past couple of years
Session 4589, NonStop Technical Overview, provided an introduction to NonStop systems for people new to that platform
Session 3221, “NonStop and Linux combined”: was a very interesting session on how NonStop can be used as front-end for a cloud-based application, standing-in for the cloud when the cloud is down.

Moving on to “content beyond NonStop”: Like it or not, the NED is part of a much bigger Enterprise now, namely the BCS (business critical systems) unit of HP, headed by Martin Fink. Which itself is part of a larger unit, namely the Enterprise Servers, storage and networking division, headed by Dave Donatelli. I find it both relevant and very good for NonStop that the platform is being mentioned when people responsible for these larger units speak. NonStop was explicitly mentioned both by Martin and Dave. Hey, NonStop even got mentioned in THE keynote of the event, led by Leo Apotheker. While Leo did not mention the N-word; the keynote speaker from Intel did. You will find his slide on the comForte Twitter feed from June 7th, see http://twitpic.com/5814gc . (If you don’t follow comForte on Twitter yet, this is the time to add http://www.twitter.com/comfortelounge to your feeds).

In terms of “news”, there were no sensational announcements regarding NonStop, but maybe this is the biggest news: from an HP-global perspective, NonStop is “just” the high-end part of the HP mission-critical server offering (Martin calls NonStop “zero downtime” and Superdome “mission-critical”).

Let’s finish with the most important entity of DISCOVER – the attendees. Personally I had meeting after meeting after meeting with customers, prospects, competitors, partners and HP folks. I also took the time to venture away from the NonStop area to talk with the HP secure printing folks, some people from Accenture but I also took a look at the HP Slate 500 and TouchPad. I truly believe the event gaining a larger audience is beneficial rather than an issue; the comForte team certainly feels we were able to keep the community spirit alive (a customer dinner helps) while also making usage of the wider topic coverage.

The author welcomes comments - there will be a group discussion on LinkedIn for just that.

Joined at the hip!

2011-06-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

In this second post about the HP Discover event, the updates I received from Thomas Burg left me in no doubt as to the future of NonStop … and I am seeing more evidence that HP is of the same opinion as well!

Even though I have spent the last couple of days far from Las Vegas and the HP Discover event, I heard all about the major highlights. Whether it was via twitter, or on Facebook updates, or comments posted to discussions on LinkedIn groups, those present at the event did a good job of keeping those of us unable to participate well informed.

I corresponded regularly with Thomas Burg until the event wound down – there had been quite a number of exchanges about blog posts and LinkedIn discussions, and I was looking forward to getting a summary. I am sure further posts will follow, where Burg will describe his perspective of the event in more detail, but what came across very vividly was that he was kept extremely busy with discussions with NED management as well as customers and prospects.

“I liked the event (with respect to it) going well beyond NonStop,” Burg emailed me. A couple of times, however, it was clear he was having a tough time finding any free time, informing me of how “it is very hard to find a quiet meeting room in Vegas (but) I sensed a strong sense of community in some sessions which were well attended, for instance, Winston Prather’s keynote session as well as the Software and Hardware roadmap presentations.”

HP executives, Donatelli and Livermore, both came to the NonStop exhibit and looked at what was being showcased. This was well-received by all who were present, of course, and it was a time for them to see first-hand much of what they had been promoting during the week! As Justin Simonds of HP tells it, “during Donatelli’s key note session, held earlier in the week, NonStop had a PowerPoint slide all on it's own and he had asked for a show of hands of people who had used their cell phone or credit card that morning highlighting how it probably (had gone) through a NonStop!” So yes, HP executives are getting it!

When it comes to HP executives like Donatelli and Livermore, whenever NonStop comes up in conversation the talk quickly turns to how appreciative they are of the contribution NonStop has to division’s bottom line – yes, they are very much aware of its place within the HP product portfolio, just as they are very much aware of how many Global 100 companies rely on NonStop! For many of us looking at the product roadmaps, the push to tighter product integration and leverage, the deep inroads commoditization is making, the market place demands for greater uptime coupled with massive scalability, we continue to believe that the role of NonStop will prosper under HP – there’s just too many smart people who really do get the value proposition of NonStop.

I still don’t think these executives fully appreciate all that NonStop can provide and I am unsure how much they appreciate how NonStop will help them in driving their vision for HP within the enterprise. NonStop is not a technology silo to be viewed separate from everything else in the HP portfolio. It’s now firmly connected at the hip, sharing commodity components and running the same open stacks and infrastructure. But again, it is events such as HP Discover that go a long way in helping build the bridges.

And while there’s been much written of late about the continuing dependency HP has on select members of the NonStop ecosystem, including comForte, I can see a growing role for these partners to play. There’s nothing stopping HP from “priming” mixes of partners’ offerings in the short term, while pursuing even greater cooperation in the future.

In my last post I not only suggested that much would be revealed and perhaps there would be demo’s that would intrigue us all, but that participants should expect to see a future of NonStop that’s better integrated with the rest of the BCS product line – perhaps even suggestions and clues to a more upbeat role for NonStop as HP’s strategy on Cloud Computing clarifies. Thomas Burg probably summed it up best when he told a number of us of how “this was the best user event ever,” acknowledging that “yes, it did surpass my expectations!”

The TONS (Thriving of NonStop) score

2011-06-10T11:02:00.001-07:00

I have been writing this late Thursday night Las Vegas time, after attending the first five days of HP DISCOVER 2011 and I am posting it now, early Friday Las Vegas time. While the event is not over yet (more sessions today), I wanted to share some early thoughts on this.

Please expect some further postings on my take-aways from DISCOVER in the future. If you do not know me, please see http://www.comforte.com/company/management , Thomas Burg, for a quick bio; I am also on LinkedIn.

Giving credit where credit is due to Jim Johnson for creating the DONS (Death of NonStop) score/metrics, I thought I put my early thoughts into the "comForte TONS score/metrics" which I herewith proudly present. So here goes:

The TONS (Thriving of NonStop) score

The rules:

The TONS score is following industry standard best practises and will result in a score from 0 to 100 where 0 means “NonStop will not thrive” and 100 means “NonStop will thrive”.
To calculate the TONS score, please ask yourself each of the ten questions below, and give an honest answer
Start with a score (S) of 0 and a maximum score (MS) of 0
For each “Yes” answer, add 1 to S and add 1 to MS
For each “No” answer, add 1 to MS
For each “I honestly do not know” or “not applicable” answer, do not do anything
The final TONS score is calculated by dividing S by MS and multiplying the result with 100

Some example calculation as well as my personal result follow at the very end

Side note: the TONS score was created by me, a German who holds a masters degree in Physics. So if this looks a tad over-engineered, you know why …

The 10 Questions

(1) Did you just attend a major HP conference where NonStop was mentioned four times during the key note session and was prominent on one slide during the Intel keynote ?

(2) Do you agree that the NonStop business is less then 1 % of total HP revenue ?

(3) If the answer to (2) is “Yes”: Do you find it relevant for NonStop to be mentioned in that said keynote ?

(4) Do you know of at least two major NonStop ISV partners who are actively investing in their offerings and growing their staff ?

(5) Did you attend a keynote where Winston Prather and Randy Meyer shared some very recent customer success stories; including a SVP from an unnamed credit card sharing live at this session why he chose NonStop ?

(6) Did you personally speak with someone migrating off Stratus who is evaluating the NonStop platform right now ?

(7) Do you personally believe that the NonStop is on the radar of Leo Apotheker ?

(8) Do you disagree with a well-known and trusted independent research organization which publicly stated that “NonStop *WILL* die within the next two years unless drastic measures are taken” ?

(9) Did you attend the HP NED Hardware roadmap presentation and do you agree that it was an excellent talk; delivering a positive, upbeat message while also properly addressing some valid customer concerns ?

(10) Did you receive a free T-Shirt at the conference ?

Sample Calculation 1:

All answers are “Yes”. S=10, MS=10. The TONS score is 100.

Sample Calculation 2:

All Answers “No”. S=0, MS=0. The TONS score is not well defined as it equals 0 divided by 0. Please contact your favourite math expert to figure out the TONS score.

Sample Calculation 3:

YES – YES – NO – NO – YES – NO – DoNotKnow – DoNotKnow – NotApplicable – NO

S=3, MS=7. The TONS score is rougly 28.

Sample Calculation 4- my answers:

Yes – Yes – Yes – Yes – Yes – Yes – Yes – **YES** – Yes – Yes. Thus my TONS score is 100.[[Of course I am heavily biased but I do believe that NonStop will thrive if several people (users, HP NED, ISVs, the community) do the right things. It might be hard work but I think it is worth it]]

A final comment

This posting will be used to start a discussion on LinkedIn soon. I am looking forward to anyone publicly sharing his TONS score and how he or she arrived there. If you would rather disclose your score in private, please do send me an e-mail at t.burg@comforte.com.

No longer silo-ed!

2011-06-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

In the days leading up to the HP Discover event I caught up with Thomas Burg and we discussed what we thought the highlights might be – and not surprisingly, we kept our fingers crossed over how prominent a role NonStop will play…

For the past couple of days I have enjoyed the company of comForte’s CTO, Thomas Burg, as he passed through town on his way to Las Vegas. Like many within the NonStop community, the conversation frequently turned to expectations for the upcoming HP Discover 2011, the annual “big tent” marketing event for HP’s enterprise product lines.

Paging through the HP Discover web site, the banners across the top of the page informed me of how the event would feature a number of programs, including Application Transformation (a reference that includes Modernization, and a reoccurring theme of these posts to comForte Lounge), Converged Infrastructure (an acknowledgement of the transformation that will occur with modernization), Enterprise Security (again, a topic that quickly draws Thomas into a discussions), Information Optimization, and Hybrid Delivery.

With little else to add to these last two items, as all HP has provided by way of bylines is “Optimize!” and “Deliver!.” I am expecting much more will be revealed at the conference – perhaps even a demo. However, this list of programs certainly builds on last years “Converge! Transform! Innovate!” and suggests that there’s more substance now than just the rhetoric we all heard a year ago.

The upside of holding a marketing event where more than NonStop is on show didn’t escape Burg’s attention either. “I am personally excited by the event becoming more and more cross-platform. There are a couple of sessions which talk about enterprise-security and enterprise architecture which I hope to be able to attend,” Burg informed me before adding “many of our products are about exactly what CI is about– better integrating the NonStop into the larger enterprise.”

There’s much that will be different, although NonStop participants will still be fated as in former times. As Burg discussed with me over coffee “we are supporting the event by having a booth, and we will be curious about how this will all pan out. We will also have a customer dinner that has attracted good participation, the usual mix of sales and prospect meetings and already (I have the sense that) we expect everyone from comForte to be busy”.

Annual global gatherings of the NonStop community have been held for more than 25 years. For decades these gatherings were the place to go to network, to hear of plans for future NonStop products, and to have the opportunity to describe ideas and requirements to the many NonStop development groups from the primary vendor as well as to the many third party vendors participating. Yes, we all recall the times Jimmy would simply throw his credit card on the bar to keep the flow of ideas coming!

Today we no longer have Tandem, but instead we have the open platform we call NonStop, and it’s clearly a participant in the hybrid delivery program just as it is in application transformation, converged infrastructure and enterprise security. When it was first proposed that user groups combine and support a single enterprise-oriented event, it was under the banner of better understanding what other users were doing, while giving NonStop adherents an opportunity to explain the benefits from deploying mission-critical applications on NonStop.

Leaving the event there will be attendees departing who will have been surprised by what they heard, with others perhaps somewhat anxious about the possible fall-out. Somehow, I have a sense that the ante has been upped this year – it’s no longer a luxury to explore what other platforms provide but a necessity.

The future of NonStop is moving beyond its former image as a specialty, enterprise, “silo”. It has its future tied to converged infrastructure and hybrid delivery, foreshadowing even greater product integration to come. But, of course, more about this in my post next week.

I hope you enjoyed the event and I trust you all enjoyed Sir Paul!

The view looks great!

2011-06-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

In this second part of a two post series on network modernization featuring uLinga, the forecasts are beginning to look encouraging – coming from the head of sales, this is good news, indeed! More importantly, uLinga is solving real network issues …

In the previous post I wrote of my time in San Francisco and of my dinner with Frank Slovenec, the head of Americas’ sales for comForte. I made reference to the wonderful vista that lay out of sight, just over the horizon, behind the restaurant where we had our dinner. In the early evening light, the view of San Francisco with the famous “painted ladies” in the foreground, proved to be the highlight of the day.

Towards the end of that post where I had referenced the progress being made with uLinga, the most recent addition to the stable of products marketed by comForte, and suggested that NonStop users pursuing pilots of uLinga had been pleasantly impressed – an emotion similar to what I had felt when I followed Frank’s advice to head east and look at the view!

“In our meeting we update all product information to be sure we all can identify the customer need which our products will or can address. When it comes to uLinga, it's all new to the sales team but the early results coming from PoCs have been very encouraging,” Frank had informed me. “There's every indication that, as we head to the last half of the year, we will be supporting four, perhaps five, implementations which represents an excellent starting point for the product!"

uLinga is a very important component in comForte’s arsenal of “modernization” product offerings. In the recent webinar held by Thomas Burg, comForte’s CTO, he referenced uLinga as an important component in any program to modernize the communications and networking capabilities of NonStop. While the history of NonStop, and earlier, of Tandem, has a lot to do with the quality of its SNA support with a rich selection of features from not just HP but infrastructure vendors, like InSession, maintaining these products only further entrenched the perception of NonStop as a legacy solution.

Migrating a network goes well beyond the cosmetic changes I wrote of in the past and where I considered the value that comes from terminal emulation and screen-scraping, and even from embracing SOA and Web services and yet the returns can be greater. Standardizing on security, system and network management, as well as the tremendous value that comes with opening access to the NonStop server from any client with applications issuing ODBC / JDBC calls, more than offsets the small investment in time that is required.

uLinga may be new and may not be familiar to everyone within the NonStop community but it represents the latest offering from the team behind ICE, WebGate, and other connectivity services and features. And for many users that I have interviewed and shared a beer with over the past year, it’s this connection to a very experienced team of developers that more than makes up for any of the product’s perceived “newness” to the marketplace.

The row of Victorian houses that are referred to by the locals as the painted ladies have adorned post cards for decades. They have also made a regular appearance in the TV show, Full House. They have survived earthquakes and stand in stark contrast to the glass and steel edifices flanking them. Occupying center stage, as they appear to do, they fit in well with the landscape so much so that it would be hard to imagine San Francisco without their presence. Stepping away from the busy thoroughfares that channel cars and buses to other destinations, it’s a panorama you just have to see!

And much like the painted ladies with what they bring to the view of the city of San Francisco, I can easily believe there will be a time where we couldn’t imagine anything other than uLinga being present in the modern networks we deploy!

Over the horizon!

2011-05-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

In this first part of a two post series on network modernization featuring uLinga, there’s much that can be learnt from spending time with those who retain close ties to the user community and who evangelize new solutions …

I finished the week in San Francisco by joining Frank Slovenec for dinner. Frank had suggested meeting at a restaurant called NoPa, an abbreviation, I was to later learn, for the district of San Francisco referred to as north of the Panhandle. This is an area that I wasn’t all that familiar with, but having spent a few hours walking its street, it’s an area that I would recommend any visitor to San Francisco takes time to visit.

Frank had just spent a couple of days with the comForte sales team. As the head of America’s sales, Frank is responsible for a variety of products on which many within the NonStop community have relied upon for years. I have attended these meetings in the past, and as Frank gave me a quick update I remembered how much fun, and educational, these events often proved to be. As I left the NoPa restaurant, Frank suggested that as we were on Hayes Street, I should follow it east as over the horizon, out of sight, is one of the best views of San Francisco.

I first visited San Francisco in the mid-1970s, but spent my time by the waterfront. I had collected post cards for several years and recognized the sights, but as for knowing where each attraction could be found, I was pretty clueless. Driving up Hayes Street I pulled alongside Alamo Square and as I crested the hill I caught the glorious sight of the city skyline, bathed in late afternoon sun, with the row of Victorian houses, the “painted ladies,” filling the foreground. A complete surprise but a wonderful distraction!

"The reason to bring sales people together is to understand our customers and look at our business and our business solutions from the customer's perspective,” Frank had remarked. “For each customer we look at our products / solutions in the light of the real business impact that they can have for our customer." And when it came to the newest product family, uLinga, I was interested to hear more of the value it was providing and of the impact it was making.

I have been associated with uLinga from the very beginning. With a history of several decades in communications and networking products this shouldn’t surprise anyone, but whenever a new approach is attempted and when customers are asked to look at something completely new, there are always elements of risk and uncertainty. This time however, Frank assured me, the news was good!

comForte supplies a number of products under the overall umbrella of Connect. For the most part, these products address terminal emulation, but Connect does include uLinga, a wealth of code addressing a variety of networking options. Connecting SNA applications running on NonStop and IBM, but via TCP/IP, is perhaps the most widely known capability of uLinga, but increasingly (and in recognition of the preference of users to approach cautiously, with baby steps) connecting SNA client devices to NonStop over TCP/IP has gained considerable awareness among NonStop users.

Data Link Switching, or DLSw, completes the picture when it comes to moving to an all TCP/IP network. Client devices can now leverage commodity components when connecting to NonStop, and the NonStop server can itself be better integrated with other servers in the data center without resorting to the costs of maintaining legacy networking architectures. Frank’s news was that the number of Proof of Concepts in plan had grown considerably and that the early pilots were proving successful. The NonStop community was beginning to give uLinga more than a cursory look and now, the numbers were beginning to look good!

I hope to be invited back to another sales meeting and to catch first-hand the news from the field – listening to the unabashed enthusiasm that comes from sales folks is always contagious! But it will be a long time before I forget about the evening with Frank and the view on the other side of the horizon. It’s all too easy to ignore suggestions and to make the effort to go just a couple more yards, but every now and then, the rewards can certainly outweigh any misgivings we may have had!

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

2011-05-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

In the third and final installment in the series, I take a look at how dangerous it may be to stand aside and not pursue modernization of NonStop! In doing so, it simply let’s other platforms encroach further into NonStop markets!

In the previous two posts about modernization I queried whether companies needed to start from scratch and, perhaps, ignore the cliché that before building something new you need to tear down what’s old. I also suggested that when it comes to NonStop, perhaps all that’s needed is a little nick and tuck, and that modernizing NonStop can be likened to a little cosmetic surgery – the fundamentals are still as valuable as when NonStop was introduced more than three decades ago. Surely!

These posts were influenced by the recent comForte webinar, “Survival of the Fittest – Modernize your NonStop Applications today!” In the first post I described modernization as the act of “making contemporary cosmetic improvements”, a reference to one definition that appeared when I googled the word modernization. But there is a cliché that is proffered more or less as a counter point, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

The origins of this phrase are unclear, although it gained popularity in the southern states prior to the Carter presidency. In fact, some sources attribute its first usage to Bert Lance, incoming President Carter’s first appointment as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, suggesting that Lance viewed the economy of the time as one that required little executive attention.

However, it’s also an-oft repeated cliché when I am at the race track talking about potential upgrades to the Corvette in which we have laid down many laps. I’m always interested in how to wring more performance from the car and there’s not a component or fixture I haven’t considered replacing at one time or another. Conventional wisdom, as I am so often reminded, is to limit changes to just those pieces that require change either as a result of failure or simply wear-and-tear.

The prevailing sentiment across IT seems to be that the faithful NonStop server running mission critical applications, as it does so effectively, should not be messed with. After all, the business depends so heavily on what the NonStop server does that surely, tinkering with it would be too risky! However, it’s this very line of argument that continues to backfire on all those who support NonStop, as its ongoing isolation only stifles any consideration for more innovative usage.

Important business problems need addressing, and they need addressing now! There’s no time to evaluate a possible role for NonStop (within the next solution under consideration) and besides, there’s little spare resource to learn the idiosyncrasies of the platform! The corporation needs to be flexible, consider all options, and focus on improving productivity! Maybe, just maybe, we can get by with a few extra Windows servers …

How many times have we heard such arguments? In some cases, hasn’t it been expedient to just sit back and support the proposals for a quick-fix? The time to step up and make the changes to better integrate NonStop with the rest of the corporation couldn’t be better. After all, with current public cloud deployments, there’s barely a week that’s gone by without a partial failure or a complete melt-down being headlined in popular news publications and broadcasts! Do we really want to forego the value NonStop provides?

The webinar certainly highlighted the benefits that come from judicious and timely changes to NonStop that can dramatically lift it’s visibility within the corporation. By endorsing the belief the platforms that aren’t broken shouldn’t be touched, as is the case with NonStop, we may be doing the corporations we work for a sizeable disservice!

“Corporations continue to use NonStop in support of their mission critical applications; running what essentially is their business, in many cases”, Thomas Gloerfeld, comForte’s marketing head, acknowledged in a recent email exchange. “They need to keep modernizing (and better integrating) the NonStop to keep NonStop at the heart of their business! It’s not difficult or expensive to do and there are viable product offerings that can help them. And they should do it now to stay abreast of changing business requirements!”

Clichés can be seductive, and we can become blasé about what they are communicating. However, when it comes to the NonStop platform, there’s a sense of urgency that prevails, and many knowledgeable corporations will be modernizing and reaping the productivity gains that this will drive.

Survival of the fittest may conjure up images of being lost in a jungle, but when it comes to NonStop, the platform has been “working out” for decades and is perhaps the fittest of all platforms ideally suited for what lies ahead.

The best Technology never wins in the market place ?

2011-05-15T03:04:00.000-07:00

This (Sunday) morning I was using a tablet during breakfast. It was not to carry in the goodies - I was happily reading articles from New York Times, Wall Street journal and Der SPIEGEL (a large German weekly magazine) on it. Before that (still in bed) I had checked my Facebook account. If you are either a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant, you might have done very similar things this morning. [[see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native#Origins for the terms Digital Immigrant/Native if you haven’t heard them]]

However, the “tablet” I used was neither an iPad nor a Motorola Xoom nor a smart phone. I was using a long-forgotten device named Nokia N800 which was released in 2007 by Nokia. The tablet has wireless, USB, Bluetooth; it’s larger sister (N810) has GPS and a keyboard. It can do Web browsing, Skype, PDF reading, … Back then Nokia toted the device as “Internet tablet”.

Four years later, Nokia has an image of having “missed the boat” both on smart phones as well as “tablet devices” – this clearly having envisioned the market for tablets four years ago and being among the clear market leaders in the smart phone area for a long time. I listened to a speaker the other day that showed his iPhone to the audience saying “this is a very bad phone”, only to add that this is in fact the phone he uses and that “this device has defined the term smart phone forever and we can never go back”.

Now where is the relevance of all this to the NonStop market ?

How about replacing N800 with NonStop S-Series and iPad with pick-any-platform-which-today-touts-itself-as-being-mission-critical-including-HP-Integrity-Unix ? Will the NonStop and the HP NonStop Enterprise division share the fate of the N800 (“great device but no-one knows it”) and Nokia (“they missed the boat”) ?

Here are some further examples of my personal hypothesis “the best technology never wins in the marketplace”:

MS-DOS vs. CP/M
Windows vs. very early Mac platform
Betamax vs. VHS
Do you have other examples to share?

So: What has Apple done right in creating the "tablet" market and what did Nokia do wrong?

More importantly, how do you think can the NonStop platform avoid becoming the Nokia N800?

Just nick and tuck!

2011-05-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

In the previous post, to build something new you don’t first have to tear anything down. What is addressed here is that yes, older solutions running on NonStop can be easily modernized!

Yes, it’s hard for many of us not to smile when we hear the expression “modern computer”. Surely this has to be a case of tautology! Qualifying anything to do with a science, particularly when it has to do with computing, as new really looks odd and yet, in an age when technology breakthroughs show no let-up in the frequency of their occurrence, much of what we considered cool and innovative only a short time ago can be found stacked in a corner or alongside a loading dock!

Last week comForte conducted a webinar carrying the catchy title of “Survival of the Fittest – Modernize your NonStop Applications Today” and a podcast has become available, so I have replayed it. It was presented as a not-quite-so-technical perspective on NonStop and drew an audience that included managers further up the organization chart than you would find responsible for the daily management of the NonStop server.

While modernizing the applications falls into the same category as modernizing the computer, very few CIOs will own up to just how long they have been depending upon a successful execution of a mission-critical application and yet, almost in the same breath, they have to admit that they don’t really know how much it is costing them! Whether it’s the developers charged with the application’s maintenance or end users looking for access from an open client platform, retaining older systems consumes a lot of scarce resources.

For many of these CIOs it’s all about trying something new; taking the latest sound bights from an industry or financial analyst and accepting them at face value, no matter how untried or controversial they may be. With almost no consideration of the history, or the need for baby-steps taken that has led to their own IT running what it has today, it’s almost as if the CIO suspects he’s missing out on what every other CIO is benefitting from if he doesn’t take an axe to all that is in front of him as he looks down the aisles of computers wracked high inside the data center!

Good computing remains good computing and there are implementations where decisions taken two, or even three decades ago remain relevant. Perhaps all that they require is a connectivity update or perhaps, alignment with new, fresher approaches to presentation of the information! There’s absolutely nothing amiss with applications deployed decades ago that were designed with a separation between the presentation services, the business logic, and views of the data – this is as modern as anything else available today.

comForte CTO, Thomas Burg, reassured those participating in his webinar of the relevance of NonStop in support of mission-critical applications. But perhaps his most telling observation, from my perspective, was when Burg compared what was required to modernize NonStop to what today surgeons can achieve with minimal invasive surgery. Perhaps this message was directed at the axe-wielding CIO, but even if it wasn’t, the image is spot on, NonStop servers today are among the most modern server packages – energy efficient, small footprint, and supporting standards on a platform among the most powerful available from HP.

“This should have (been presented) to my company’s higher level of technical management,” was the response from one participant. Today the value that comes with deploying NonStop applications is widely appreciated, but perhaps what is not quite as well known is that a small nick here, a thin slice there, produces a degree of mobility and flexibility unimaginable only a short time ago. Isn’t this what we all want to see happen with NonStop? And isn’t it tangible confirmation that really, as well-engineered and as cluster-aware as it is, NonStop has never needed anything dramatic altered to retain its position among modern platforms.

“Please send the link to my CIO,” was another comment recorded and, in response to this request, I am including a link to the podcast here; the first part of the webinar can be found at http://youtu.be/nJtUxr6DNtE and the second, at http://youtu.be/ERcu48M6nG4

Burg admitted later that he was pleased that the webinar did actually happen. Not everyone is keen to openly discuss the few steps that need to be taken to completely modernize the NonStop platform – but after sitting through the podcast, it was obvious to me that today, we are only talking about making small, manageable, changes with little to no impact on the running applications or on peer servers depending upon the workloads they process. Certainly, procedures well worth spending a little time checking out!

Checked the bathwater?

2011-05-06T15:46:00.001-07:00

In a time when so much discussion has centered on the need for modernization, have we lost sight of what truly is modern? Looking at a photo, can we recognize it or must we highlight it with bright arrows?

It’s been well noted in posts I have made to other sites that I do enjoy driving my Corvette and while Corvette and Porsche owners do not always get along, for me, the Porsche 911 is perhaps the world’s most recognizable car. At the time of its introduction to the motoring public it represented the logical next-step, following the highly popular lightweight Porsche 356, but its success has made any further design changes totally unnecessary.

For many, the image of the Porsche 911 comes across a little old-fashioned. Usually, this is a perception based on longevity – it’s been a familiar sight on our highways for almost five decades. However, the car is as modern as any other vehicle you care to mention, and is a testament to the timelessness of the design. I like my sixth generation and very modern Corvette but when it comes to technology, there’s little of the Porsche that is any less modern than the Corvette!

Modernization is capturing much of the headlines in our trade publications, and recently it was the subject of a comForte webinar that I will cover in more detail next week. When I googled modernization, earlier this week, among the responses from the search were “to overhaul: make repairs, renovations, revisions or adjustments to” and perhaps better understood these days, advising us “to become technologically advanced.” A little closer to home was the suggestion that it represented altering “a property by installing up-to-date equipment, making contemporary cosmetic improvements, and deleting obsolete facilities” as well as “to change something to make it conform to modern standards!”

I can’t really put my finger on what it is that has made the architecture of the NonStop server as timeless as it has proven to be, nor can I give you a reason why it continues to thrive in processing mission-critical information. It was designed to be fault tolerant but along the way, in addressing fault tolerance challenges, it not only provided us with the most highly available platform on the market today but it can scale linearly to sizes that are mind-boggling, and it has proved to be impervious to rogue hackers looking for their 15 minutes of fame.

Modernizing a NonStop in one sense is about as necessary as modernizing the Porsche 911 and yet, headlines telling us that we need to overhaul the NonStop persist! We have to bring the NonStop platform up to date! We have to make the NonStop platform conform to modern standards!”

Really? The one image I took away from the comForte webinar slides I saw, as the webinar collateral was put together, was of a bathtub complete with baby and water. It wasn’t so much the picture itself that caught my attention as it was the bright arrows highlighting the baby and the water as though webinar participants could have been confused over which was what!

This is when it really hit me; NonStop users really don’t need to be hand-held as much as users of other platforms. It’s all pretty obvious to NonStop users what they need to do, if anything at all. NonStop may be timeless, but it’s not old! It conforms to modern standards – there are very few client development environments it doesn’t support. And there’s absolutely nothing more to be done to make it technologically advanced!

Modernization may be the topic of the month and for many within the IT community it involves significant changes. However, for all of those within the NonStop community, there’s instant gratification that comes from knowing all along how modern the platform has been.

The slide of the baby in the bathtub didn't make it into the final presentation used in the webinar and perhaps that makes a lot of sense; for NonStop users, there’s never been a need to include arrows pointing to the system that is modern or highlighting the differences between what’s legacy and what’s modern – the NonStop server is every bit as modern as anything else in the marketplace. On the other hand, tearing down the system, assigning it to a dumpster, is about as foresighted as throwing out the baby with the bathwater!

comForte has done a great job in bringing to market tools and features that help unlock the value of business logic wrapped inside applications developed using earlier programming models and dependent upon legacy networking protocols, and many users are grateful that they have gone down this path. Perhaps this is akin to making contemporary cosmetic improvements! And if this is all the NonStop requires to truly make the cut as a modern computer, then I am satisfied with that option.

One size fits all?

2011-04-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

As Clouds continue to build all around us isn’t it time we really took a look at what’s being provided by some of the big players – and would we want to go with them? Checking forecasts, it’s looking stormy!

You may have heard the news already but in case you didn’t, the Cloud Computing services provided by Amazon.com came down last week. Often referenced alongside Salesforce.com as one of the premier examples of how Cloud Computing can benefit a wide cast of users, this outage couldn’t have come at a worse time as increasingly, the focus is on migrating to a Cloud Computing service as a viable alternative to maintaining a data center.

In an Associated Press story of April 22nd, “Amazon failure takes down sites across Internet” the story started out with “On Friday morning, Amazon's status page said the recovery effort was making progress, but it couldn't say when all affected computers would be restored … most of the sites that were brought down by the outage on Thursday were back up on Friday!”

And then to kind of sympathize with Amazon.com, added “It's not uncommon for Internet services to become inaccessible due to technical problems, sometimes for hours or even days.” Whoa! Hold the fort! Down on Thursday but most sites back up on Friday and yes, it’s OK to bet your business on an infrastructure that may routinely (it’s not uncommon!) be down for hours, or even days!

When HP’s CEO, Apotheker, unveiled his strategy for HP that focused on Cloud Computing and Mobility, he proposed that “HP is well positioned to be the trusted leader in addressing this opportunity.” Apotheker dismissed the concerns that HP was late to the game advising the audience that it was still very early in the game and that there would be sizable opportunities for HP. Perhaps this latest news about Amazon.com will serve his purposes well in the quarters to come as he sets about executing.

What about the role of big servers like NonStop? What about the steps NonStop users need to take for Cloud Computing to be of value for them? HP will focus initially on their roll-out of a publically accessible Cloud, perhaps only supporting a couple of the X-as-a-Service capabilities. For customers of HP NonStop servers, attention may turn more quickly to private clouds and the provisioning of applications on NonStop.

What about the role of major vendors like comForte? What products do they have that will help NonStop users step in the right direction? In a recent email exchange with Thomas Burg, comForte CTO, we took another look at the Client Server Link (CSL) product and its potential to help ensure the applications already

“We are finding more and more shops who are smartly rejuvenating existing NonStop applications by bringing in new client developers who front-end existing applications,” Burg said. “They end up with a three-tier environment: end users access a mid-tier web and application server, that accesses NonStop ‘services’ via CSL,” observed Burg and the services running on NonStop could be developed using any programming language and model. Even COBOL!

“CSL is not just SOAP server or client – it is a lot more; something along ‘anything-to-Pathway,’” Burg went on to add, “we think there is no ‘one-size fits all’ paradigm; each customer starts with a different application (on NonStop), different internal skill sets, and different internal business and technical requirements.”

Yes, services are an important element of Cloud Computing and having all within the Cloud accessible as a service is mandatory (for ease of integration and provisioning, including manageability and security). And NonStop is important for Cloud Computing if we don’t want to see more repetitions of the Amazon.com outage. No, we do not have to accept outages that last for hours, even days.

CSL will play an important role for many NonStop customers and having CSL capable of embracing several different paradigms only adds to its importance. As Burg said when he wrapped up his email exchange with me, “the worst option for NonStop users these days certainly is to ‘do nothing’ – it will contribute to the NonStop platform not being alive for much longer! It’s not about the technology you use, but to start!”

On that point, I can make no arguments …

End-users drive modernization! Surprised?

2011-04-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

With so much being discussed on the topic of modernization and with so many vendors stepping up to help out with products and tools, have we ignored the role end-users are playing?

The weather in Boulder swung somewhat unexpectedly and did an abrupt U-turn. Yesterday it was cool but sunny, with windy conditions I could have done without but nonetheless, it took me outdoors. Today I awoke to snow, yet again.

Like many of my neighbors, I really have had it with winter. It’s time to move on! It’s time to get out of the house and enjoy the sunshine! The continuation of winter, however, allowed me to attend to maintenance. In my house this always includes taking the cars in for service. After a harrowing experience in our AWD Skyline a few weeks back, I opted to have the car checked out and, sure enough, after 17,000 miles the summer performance tires were well past their prime.

When I took the call from the dealer advising of the need for replacements I thanked him, and then while I continued with my coffee, pulled out my favorite tablet PC, and did a quick check of TireRack, a popular site for ordering tires. Sure enough, they carried a set of all-season tires and at prices well below that proposed by the dealer. Clicking away, changing the shipping address to reflect the dealer, pulling payment from my PayPal account I completed the purchase and new tires were on their way. Then it was back to my latte …

This year, unfortunately, I missed attending EBUG, the big European event for BASE24 users held this year in Berlin. According to Thomas Gloerfeld of comForte, who did participate, one of the standout presentations was that of Brett King, author of the book “Bank 2.0 - How customer behavior and technology will change the future of financial services.”

The presentation by King, Thomas related, was “very good, interesting and an entertaining presentation about change in consumer behavior due to rapid advances in consumer technology (smart phones, iPads, etc.) and the internet. He expects that mobile will be ‘channel #1’ ahead of internet, ATM, call centers and branch offices.” Thomas that added that for this audience, made of BASE24 customers, it came as a “wake-up call for the banks; do they have the infrastructure in place to capitalize on these changes? Are they winning the race with the telcos for the mobile customer?”

For several weeks now I have been creating posts and writing feature stories on modernization. A big part of this story has to do with the pressing need to reduce the amount of legacy technology we support, to free up more time for our creative people to pursue innovation. In reality, pursuing modernization has a lot more to do with simply staying in business, I suspect.

After all, IT has never really driven business agendas, but rather, demonstrated their leadership when they have responded more quickly to changing situations and circumstances than their competitors. Nothing frees-up budget more quickly than being out-maneuvered by a competitor and losing business to a company that has tapped into a trend more quickly!

Perhaps the BASE24 users who were present have picked up on King’s message and I hope that they did – it’s hard to miss the uptick in mobile device usage of late; and it’s not going away! At any rate, the vendors who were present didn’t miss the significance of King’s observations and I have to believe we will see many more products released in the short term, as part of system and application modernization, supporting what’s clearly destined to be financial channel #1!

My finger on NonStop!

2011-04-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

I experienced my first interaction with a NonStop application from my iPad, and the ease with which it happened, came as a pleasant surprise. But will this be enough to encourage others to anchor mission critical untethered applications on NonStop?

This morning I had the opportunity to access an application running on a HP NonStop server from my iPad. It was a rather simple demo, but it addressed the basics - I was able to do my usual tricks with the iPad in expanding the size of the text, moving the screen around on my tablet, and so on - the usual things I would do with any App on my iPad. The good folks at comForte were using one of their modernization products, JPath host agent, running on NonStop, and they walked me through the process of gaining access. Yes, it was through Safari, Apple’s browser and not via iTunes, and the App Store, but it caught my attention all the same.

It was a powerful demonstration of a very modern HP NonStop server … and the very first time that I have accessed NonStop applications from my favorite tablet/PC. As I played with the iPad, my thoughts quickly took off on a tangent – not entirely unusual for me when it comes to the stories I write. Maybe the topic of mobility, as articulated recently by HP’ CEO, Apotheker (mobility being a major component of his strategy for HP), isn’t too far off the mark. Looking around me at Starbucks the other day, of the iPad users that I could see, many were running videos, listening to music, and reading books.

Jim Tomaney, General Manager, Europe, for FSS Technologies and I had an email exchange while he was resting and enjoying time with his 19 year old son – a definite Gen X-er hanging out with a Gen Y-er! “Why don’t we go buy a bunch of DVD’s,” Jim suggested. But no, the response from his son was “why not join ‘LoveFilm’ (UK's equivalent of NetFlix) - on demand films, based on how I feel right now!” An unmistakable Gen Y response!

Jim elected to join LoveFilm, and while many of the film downloads went well, there were instances where the experience left a lot to be desired. As Jim said to me, after having problems with one particular film, “the system would try again, and then restart from the beginning of the film. Big deal? Well we were 2 1/2 hours into the ‘Seven Samurai’ so you can answer that one yourself!”, and it occurred to me as I read Jim’s email - what if I am trying to load a film to my iPad as I am about to board a plane! More importantly, what if I am trying to complete a complex financial transaction only to have partial information returned as the application tries to restart!

“So while the industry gets seduced by payments started on my iPhone App and completed at the ATM, or similar, we'd better stay focused on RAS - Reliability, Availability and Scalability - because the consumers demand it,” Jim responded. “That means, in the example of LoveFilm (NetFLix) - context management is a NonStop application.” In other words, the point Jim was making was that “in 2011 your online film service (indeed any of the services of this type) needs to be as robust as a 1980s ATM system - is there still a place for the NonStop Server? I think you are going to find that there are more places than ever!”

comForte is the first vendor to demonstrate support of the iPad from a HP NonStop server. I am always out and about and being able to access applications from my tablet/PC is becoming critical, but ensuring the experience is as robust as with any other tethered device is going to become super critical and where comForte appears to be headed with the extensions to its terminal emulation and respective agent support, is definitely a step in the right direction!

I am sure we are going to hear a lot more about this in the months ahead! Untethered applications supported out of NonStop? Any corporate business plan that ignores the immediacy that mobility provides and overlooks the HP NonStop server, will likely fall short of the expectations it sets and of that, I have no doubts!

Shorten these lines!

2011-04-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

With the announcement of cloud computing and mobility as cornerstones of HP’s strategy, it’s time to revisit what will be generated from mobile devices and with that, what role the NonStop will play!

It’s not an uncommon site anymore to see people paying for their Starbucks using their iPhone and Blackberry smartphones. Just the latest example of supporting a “touch to pay” application that is rapidly finding favor with smartphone-savvy users.

It’s all pretty hassle free as it allows anxious coffee drinkers to simply hold up the smartphone’s application’s barcode to the in-store scanner at the register to pay using the electronic tender. United airlines came out even sooner with a similar set-up that gets rid of the paper boarding passes, something TSA apparently is quite happy to see!

"The paperless boarding pass will ... prevent fraudulent paper boarding passes that could be created and printed from home," the agency wrote on its blog according to one news source I saw recently. These “touch to pay” applications will shortly be joined by NFC applications with even more possibilities than just jumping on a plane or grabbing a coffee to go!

NFC, or “near field communication”, relies on short-range wireless technologies, “typically requiring a distance of 4 cm or less,” according to one web source. In a report published by Bloomberg in January, 2010, it claimed its sources were telling of how “Apple is poised to introduce services enabling customers to use their iPhone and iPad as an e-wallet for making purchases via their mobile device.”

“By embedding NFC technology in the 5th generation iPhone and 2nd generation iPad,” so Bloomburg wrote, “mobile payments systems will likely take hold as never before in US, thanks to the technology’s adoption by a major leader in consumer mobile electronics.”

For me, this is just background information framing another subject I want to cover this week. As part of the “Gartner Predicts” the most recent issue in the series “Top End User Predictions for 2011” proposed that “by 2013, 80% of business will support a workforce using tablets” followed with “by 2014, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.”

The statistics I am not going to dwell on, but the timeframes I found staggering until I remembered my encounters at Starbucks and United. Modern workforces we have today are indeed mobile and they have a need to access corporate information. And perhaps the iPad 2 hasn’t arrived with embedded NFC chips, but I’m pretty certain that the iPhone 5 will have this technology.

For the NonStop community, unaware of what their client devices really are these days, this may mean very little. Indeed, in an exchange with Thomas Burg, comForte’s CTO on this topic, he reminded me of how “most workforce members never touched NonStop prior to the concept of tablet PCs. How many people access NonStop from their laptop in any large organization? Very few, probably less than 0.0001%”

Our daughter Anna used an application to deposit a check by taking a picture of it on her phone and forwarding it to her bank’s deposit processing application! I am not sure we know any more what devices our clients could be using, so no, we cannot rule-out NonStop playing the part in the transaction path just yet.

One other announcement from “Gartner Predicts” series I just quoted suggests that “By 2015, companies will generate 50% of their Web sales via their social presence and mobile applications.” Rather sheepishly, Burg responded to this particular item with “NonStop has no play whatsoever in marketing / social media – yet!?@#!

This is what will make NonStop a cool technology; supporting the OLTP databases these mobile technologies will mandate. Coming at a time when there’s still so much attention being paid to the clever OLAP database machines, it’s rather striking to think that the premier OLTP database machine has been with us all these years.

Don’t you just love knowing there’s a server out there with a great SQL data base that will scale forever and that vendors like comForte have already begun prototyping potential connectivity and emulation products?

After all, from where I sit, our patience isn’t getting any better and if we can shorten the distance between ourselves and our next cup of coffee, then that’s a good thing (each of us can agree with this), right!

One size fits all … Not!

2011-03-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

Flexible! Accommodating! One size fits all, no worries! But is that really the case when you consider all that goes into today’s modern systems? With as many variables as we now have, having options is a genuine treat!

One of the most widely used “cool features” of iPhones and iPads is the ability to resize the contents displayed on the screen. Stretching or contracting two fingers results in the picture or text changing size. I have become particularly fond of this capability as a lot of times, I am trying to read something having misplaced my reading glasses …

But the mere fact that this capability exists illustrates one of the great misrepresentations of all times as, at least from my perspective and with all I have experienced, there really isn’t such a thing as “one size fits all!” As I used to observe at my favorite Starbucks in Southern California, we are all packaged so differently there is no longer anything that resembles similarity for any aspect of our physique!

All of this brings me back to an email exchange that I recently had with Thomas Burg, CTO of comForte, someone I am very wary of when it comes to making small talk or engaging in casual conversation. But Thomas is always asking very good questions and I am always left to ponder as the exchange subsides!

Towards the end of my email message on the topic of SOA, SOAP, and Web services I observed that when talking to customers we often cover multiple options for whatever product we are describing. And this statement brought forth from Thomas the observation that “there (really) is no ‘one-size-fits-all paradigm (as much as Gartner’s of the world push this)!”

Yes, all industry analysts would like to see just one reference model by which they could critique the industry - but that will never happen. However, when it comes to system software, especially when it has anything to do with connectivity in a client / server set-up, providing options isn’t just a luxury, it is an absolute necessity. When it comes to supporting interactions between client devices and the services provided by a company’s array of servers, it’s expected.

Client Server Link (CSL) anchors comForte’s modernization pursuits, and interest in what it provides has picked up considerably of late – particularly in the Americas. In part, I have to believe that is because of CSL’s various options in terms of deployment, and ultimately, usage.

“Each customer starts with a different legacy application, different internal skill sets, and different internal (business or technical) requirements,” Thomas said as he explained to me the value in catering to these differences. “The worst option certainly is to “do nothing” – it will not contribute to the NonStop platform being alive longer!”

For users familiar with the RSC product the API’s are preserved and you can run CSL as an alternate implementation. If you are into Java and .NET, and are developing clients that consume Web services, that too can be supported by CSL. If all you need is access to a SOAP server that is just another option for the product.

“We find more and more shops that are smartly rejuvenating existing NonStop applications by bringing in new client developers who front-end the existing applications,” Thomas then added. “They end up with a three-tier environment: end users access MS IIS servers, MS IIS access NonStop services via CSL, and the services run on NonStop in COBOL! I think it is the flexibility of the product. It’s ‘not’ just SOAP server or client – it is a lot more, somewhat along the lines of ‘anything-to-Pathway’”

With all that we commit to, particularly when it’s to do with infrastructure, flexibility should surely rule! And no, there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution, so make sure you don’t slide into the “do nothing” camp and simply miss the opportunity to further add to the relevance of NonStop in the ever so important role of an application and data base server!

Evolution? Even as we all participate!

2011-03-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

What’s all this noise about tablet PC’s and why isn’t it dissipating? There’s an evolution under way and it’s playing right into the strength of NonStop … just watch, but not too long, mind you!

“Apple creep” is on within our family, and there’s a change afoot! Today, my wife came home with an iPhone, even though she had been a Blackberry user from the time they first appeared. It was the arrival of the iPad that changed her mind.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog of how I have had to share my iPad with my wife, and its usage has become contagious. It changed many of our habits – almost no trip has been taken of late without the passenger resorting to checking directions, hotels, and at this time of year, most importantly, the weather on the iPad!

However, the explosive growth in usage of tablet PC’s, such as the iPad, have begun to shake the foundations of IT and just this week USA Today headlined it’s Money section (March 22, 2011) with the story “Tablets take the PC evolution to next level”. Disturbing, to me at least, the path to tablet PCs is depicted as having started in the 1960’s with mainframes and traced the PC evolution through the early manifestations for hobbyists through to Mac’s, laptops, netbooks and even phones.

“Apple’s innovation engine has done it again. First, it forever changed the music industry. Next, it redefined the mobile phone business. Now it’s doing its number on personal computing.” So wrote the author in USA Today, Scott Martin.

The writer then goes on to add “what’s at stake: the spoils of the PC industry and who gets to redefine the landscape.” It is important for many reasons – remember how only the select few gained access to the server from a PC with an emulator, while the rest of us were left with block-mode terminals? Remember the “productivity gains” touted by all who used a PC? The Tandem world proved to be no exception and as we continue to deploy NonStop servers and rack up Blades in the data center populated with even more NonStop processing power, access from PCs today is a given.

Being first to market is always a significant accomplishment and the news just in from comForte is that they have enhanced their terminal emulation product offerings with support for the iPad and have “successfully tablet-enabled a Pathway screen,” according to Thomas Burg, comForte’s CTO.

Readers may recall how it was only last week that I quoted Thomas as saying “supporting new mobile devices such as the iPad will be a nearly trivial addition to our product set!” It would appear that comForte has delivered on Burg’s earlier observation.

My family is now looking on as Apple’s presence grows – yes, an iPad 2 is going to appear shortly and yes, I will likely transition to an iPhone as well. The spoils of the PC industry USA Today talked about, “is increasingly being driven by consumers’ appetite for portability, battery longevity and a different computer experience. What’s happening is that people are changing their habits as they add tablets to their menu of computing needs.”

Next week comForte will provide me with access to their environment and I will get to try it out on my own iPad! Yes, this evolution of the PC is a consumer-driven phenomena but it’s not going to slow anytime soon.

What none of us should lose sight of is that mobility on this scale is going to open new opportunities for many businesses – perhaps even create completely new businesses – and innovative companies will recognize that the “touch first, always-on, instant-on experience of the iPad,” as USA Today reported, has the potential to return corporate attention to the value proposition we have always given NonStop.

It’s available, 7 X 24 X forever! It’s great to watch evolution playing out around us!

Clouds, but with strings attached! Or not?

2011-03-17T17:53:00.000-07:00

HP’s CEO unveiled HPs strategy and already there’s been considerable press. Check out how one approach to addressing rebalancing the maintenance – innovation ratio may involve greater dependence on clouds and mobile devices!

It’s becoming almost impossible to escape newspaper articles about mobility, the latest wireless device, and the storm being kicked up by those competing in the tablet PC marketplace. I have touched on this before – ever since getting my iPad – but its impact is being felt more widely than I had expected.

This week, there’s been a couple of milestones reached – firstly, the very latest in mobility devices, the iPad 2, begun shipping only a few weeks after its dramatic launch at the hands of Steve Jobs, and just this Monday, March 14, HP’s CEO Leo Apotheker unveiled his much-heralded strategy for HP: a key element of the HP Strategy suggesting that “the cloud is combining with mobility to create ubiquitous connectivity!”

This follows an earlier observation on how “traditional on-premises, proprietary computing resources are gradually being complemented and even replaced by the massive, agile and open computing resources of the cloud!”

I will cover some of this ground in my next commentary feature in the Tandemworld.Net eNewsletter, so I don’t plan repeating myself here, but I wanted to call out one phrase that found its way into the HP Press Release of March 14, 2011, quoted above, that being the reference to clouds combined with mobility!

For the comForte user community, much of the business relationship over the years has centered on superior connectivity options. This has its origins in the very early days of comForte when its first products included MR-Win6530 as it peeled away from ACI. Emulating terminals, as well as enhancing the user-experience by exploiting the power of the workstation or PC, has been their forte!

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise to comForte customers that support of mobile devices, including several of the latest tablet PC’s, is seen as a welcome opportunity among comForte’s product managers and architects. “Supporting new mobile devices such as the iPad will be a nearly trivial addition to our product set”, says Thomas Burg, comForte’s CTO. “Some of our products will support this out of the box while others will support it with only minor modifications. We are already successfully running an iPad proof of concept for a demo Pathway block-mode application”.

Too early to be specific, of course, but there’s opportunity aplenty, as we would have said in former times!

Whether the iPad2 makes even deeper inroads into the corporate world remains to be seen but following the announcement by HP of the TouchPad, competition is definitely heating up. According to USA Today, a widely read American tabloid, where this morning’s main feature headlined speculates over “Android ‘poised to fail’ vs iPads” – a surprise for many who thought the tablet PC’s based on Google’s Android operating system would fare a lot better.

Not so, according to journalist Scott Martin, “this is about price, retail channel, and it’s about brand marketing. Apple’s competitors really have to step it up in those areas to contend.” Good news for HP, perhaps, comes by way of a quote from Forrester that found tablet PC shoppers would likely pick PC brands over mobile – with Apple topping the list, followed by Dell, Microsoft and (yet to ship) HP.

Putting the newspapers to one side and just going back through emails and posts on the topic of cloud confirms to me that we are definitely heading towards a new world. I neither rule out a role for NonStop within the cloud nor do I concede that the ecosystem of NonStop vendors will play a major role in helping users achieve such a blend of Cloud and Mobility. Looking further back into the history of NonStop, after all it was the arrival of these fancy new devices that we went on to be called ATMs that laid the foundation for Tandem’s fame!

While HP’s CEO Leo Apotheker may have surprised industry and market analysts, there was little in his strategy for HP promoting HP’s intent to “lead in (the) connected world of servers, solutions and technologies” that surprised those more familiar with HP’s product roadmaps. As for me, and the users and vendors I stay close to, we are hoping the execution runs smoothly as it will be those vendors with a history in connectivity that have the best shot at providing the much-needed solutions all users will be looking for as clouds shed their strings and we all adopt to working in an untethered world!

Return of the Matrix!

2011-03-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

I have always been a fan of the Matrix trilogy and have watched it many times, many years ago. Today, HP has launched its BladeSystem Matrix and NonStop users may be well served casting a keen eye over this product line …

The title of this post may look like it’s a mixture of movie titles, but for those who attended the user community event, SATUG, this week and were present for the keynote presentation by HP’s Kevin Barnard it was something that struck a chord.

Choosing his words carefully, given the audience was made up almost exclusively of NonStop users, Barnard talked of how the recently announced BladeSystem Matrix was a key component of HP’s Converged Infrastructure (CI) initiative and of how it was an ideal foundation for enterprise private clouds.

There’s a moment in the movie Martix when Morpheus faces Neo and explains how “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters.”

And this bemused me, as I could easily visualize Morhpeus as a senior salesman working for IBM appalled when he’s considering the impact the HP BladeSystem Matrix could have on his business – across the enterprise spectrum of users; from executives, to business unit managers, to staff and general contractors!

Much to the delight of the SATUG audience, Barnard turned to Neil Pringle and promised “Yes, you will get one for NonStop very soon!” to which Neil responded right on cue “I can neither confirm or deny ..”, or something sounding similar in intent. From Barnard’s presentation it was pretty obvious that the NonStop community would quickly embrace such a system, should it’s reach widen to embrace NonStop!

The provisioning capabilities, all through software, seemed to be the answer to many a data center’s wishes! Nothing represents, in my opinion, a better and wiser choice than this, and it is a quintessence of modernization!

When it comes to modernization of the HP NonStop server, comForte today provides solutions for application modernization, enterprise integration as well as support for SOA and Web services including more recently, as part of the CSL product suite, connectivity to an Enterprise Server Bus - a first for NonStop users, as best as I can tell. These are all critical product offerings for “assembling the infrastructure” needed within the systems of tomorrow!

The message I conveyed the following day in my morning keynote presentation, and a subject I will cover in more detail elsewhere, paralleled my presentation on comForte, as it too highlighted the investments being made across the NonStop vendor community in support of NonStop, and of the partnership that is developing between NonStop R&D and the vendor community – something that just wouldn’t be happening if the vendor community didn’t see a future role for modern NonStop servers as IT demands intensify around the data center becoming little more than a location delivering services.

The words quoted from the film Matrix came very early in the first movie as the new reality was being explained to the film’s hero, Neo. Truly, the HP Matrix is a system – and one that for me heralds an exciting future and I have my fingers crossed that NonStop will be a participant. Certainly, from the slides Pringle and Barnard used to depict the data center of the future, the presence of the Matrix was obvious as was the presence of NonStop.

But there’s much to be done to convert the slide-ware to something more tangible. However, from what was covered and the discussions that followed over coffee as I manned the comForte booth, HP is certainly headed in the right direction. As the Matrix’s Neo was to later report, “the Oracle. She told me this would happen. She told me that I would have to make a choice!” Perhaps we don’t need to check as Neo had to, with the Oracle from Oracle as this time, HP I am happy to report, has chosen wisely!

Relying on Band-Aids?

2011-03-05T23:44:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago I wrote of how I had caught the dreaded lurgy. This week, it’s about a cut finger that proves troublesome. But as with everything else that’s important to us, the quick fix wasn’t the remedy needed!

I seem ill-feted to come down with one affliction or another with each return to my home in Boulder. I’ve been busy unpacking my goods and chattels and spending my evenings moving furniture around. While picking up one box and ripping out its contents, I managed to cut my finger on something metallic.

Nothing too worrisome, I thought, as I casually applied a Band-Aid and kept on pushing items deeper into closets I hadn’t entered for many years!
Unfortunately, a day or two later, my finger became swollen and my doctor developed cultures to determine exactly which bacteria found its way into my system and what antibiotic products I needed to take to best target whatever it is that is messing with my system!

The Band-Aid wasn’t good enough this time and the quick fix it provided only put off the inevitable – I had to address the real problem with a different product.

Much can be made of the transformations that are occurring across out enterprises – convergence on commodity servers, broader adoption of standards-based infrastructure software, more mobile devices and all the while, restlessness among company executives knowing that they should be doing a lot more with less.

Very few industry experts predicted the explosive growth we have seen in the acceptance of tablet PCs and yet, just take a look around you the next time you are in a convenience store or fast food outlet. They are pretty much everywhere. And there will be demand by some users to access information on the data bases on the HP NonStop server.

Owning one of these intelligent mobile devices has become symbolic of what is happening today when it comes to modernization; if you can’t pull information to your mobile device easily and rapidly, you are dealing with a business that isn’t keeping with the times! If doing more with less is having you consider yet another Band-Aid, then perhaps it’s time to reconsider your approach and to look at products better suited to the demands of today’s modern business executives.

When it comes to modern systems, like NonStop, supporting these new devices goes beyond a simple quick-fix. There are many products in the marketplace today that just provide cosmetic changes and that for many years glossed-over what really needed to be done. Looking a lot like Band-Aids, perhaps these are best put to one side! However, there are those companies that have relied upon NonStop for many years who do appreciate the need for something a lot better than a quick fix!

They quick fixes may have proved useful at one time but the explosive nature in the popularity of the current crop of intelligent mobile devices, where the issue of scalability will surely make its presence felt, suggests something more robust than a Band-Aid is in order. Quickly slapping on another layer of emulation may prove more costly than imagined – reliability and performance will likely suffer and your customers will simply “click away” and choose other business partners.

In future posts to this blog I will be looking more closely at enterprise integration and the products in this space provided by comForte. I will be focusing on the Client Server Link (CSL) product suite as it provides one of the better solutions in addressing the needs companies have today with their growing populations of intelligent mobile devices.

I found my Band Aid didn’t do the job and am now paying the price! When it comes to integrating systems, like the NonStop server, with modern devices it’s still very early in the cycle, but I am pleased to see that consideration is being given to rock-solid, proven technologies that will better position users to deal with future devices’ demands.

PoC? Positive outcomes, Coming!

2011-02-24T16:51:00.000-08:00

When it comes to introducing new products and features, or even a new vendor, the need to jointly undertake a Proof of Concept (PoC) represents value to all involved and through the years, the NonStop community has proved to be more than willing to pursue!

Shortly I will be heading down to Johannesburg, South Africa, for the South African Tandem User Group (SATUG) annual event where I will be giving presentations. Flipping through the pages of my passport reminds me that I have only missed attending a couple of these events and of how, even after one of the longest journeys I am ever called upon to make, upon arrival the reception I am always receiving is unlike any other at other event!

It was many years ago, when I was working for a start-up, Systems Technology (later renamed Netlink), that a group of South African banks migrated from Burroughs to IBM and where the implementation of their SNA network was hampered by the presence of many Burroughs BiSync (BSC) branch office devices. Systems Technology provided a range of SNA protocol convertors including a model that supported the mapping of Burroughs particular implementation of BSC to SNA / SDLC.

In order to assure that these protocol convertors actually met the banks’ requirements, an extended Proof of Concept (PoC) was undertaken and this required Systems Technology posting a technical resource in South Africa for a year. Terry Bishop, who made the “sacrifice”, enjoyed the experience so much, that it eventually proved to be a difficult getting him to return to Australia.
Terry, along with Mark Hutchens, who too was involved with Systems Technology at the time, went on to form Insession and, after adding Neil Coleman to the team, came up with the ICE product line. Many years later, this heritage of tackling difficult connectivity problems, remains intact with the creation of Infrasoft.

comForte, who is distributing the Infrasoft products, arranged to have a couple of webinars dedicated to uLinga and comForte marketing head, Thomas Gloerfeld, made sure that presenters were lined up for the different time zones! Last week, in the post “Learning something new!” I wrote of the value that comes from these webinars and of how one outcome from a successful webinar is moving on to a PoC.

As of now, uLinga, the offering from comForte, is in PoC testing with users and the outcome is looking positive! It a reminder of the level of understanding that is present across the NonStop community of just how important it is to let vendor’s bring new product to market in this manner.

Likewise, it is evidence of the overall dynamics in effect across the NonStop installed base where new ways to deploy the platform are constantly being evaluated – how could you imagine the platform is irrelevant or a remnant of earlier approaches to computing when investments of this magnitude continue to be made in the NonStop platform?

PoC’s are an expensive undertaking for both sides. Users commit resources and time while vendors are often required to go on-site. Like many vendors who pursue PoCs, comForte recognizes the commitments being made by the user and yet, equally recognizes the potential these users have for ensuring the products and features being evaluated truly meets the requirements identified. Successful outcomes often generate considerable savings for the user, and makes the process well worth pursuing.
In the coming weeks I am hopeful that I will be able to write about the first production roll-out of uLinga, the goal behind all the work that goes into event participation, webinars, and PoC’s. I am hopeful that I will be given the opportunity to get into the specifics about the value proposition and what fueled the desire to commit the resources.

As for SATUG I am sure there will be new topics that come from the event that will give me cause to return to the subject of PoC’s! After all, I have so much history with the place I cannot imagine not finding something that engages the user community once again.

Learning something new!

2011-02-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

As a community, we participate in webinars and we take advantage of time spent with the engineers developing new products! And yet how important this is for both parties as they can lead to unexpected results!

One of my cars now has the vanity license plate, ULINGA. You may recall in the post to Real Time View on October 8th, 2010, “Remove the Warnings!” I wrote of having purchased the plates and today, anyone driving through the western United States may glimpse a momentary flash as the car flies by!

This week I was reminded that my explanation concerning the meaning of uLinga was incorrect – during a recent webinar on uLinga I explained that uLinga was an Australian Aboriginal word meaning “to go really fast!” However, its true meaning is “to fly!” Not sure how I made the transition but when it comes to data communications, watching the data fly by is consistent with what network managers look for, I suspect.

Talking of webinars, and their ability to open a direct line of communication between vendors and prospective and current users, I find the benefit in participating goes both ways. While it does depend on the makeup of the audience and how comfortable they are with the medium, the more questions that are forthcoming, the more the presentation targets real user needs. And it never surprises me that those who are the presenters hear of potential new requirements that otherwise could have escaped their attention.

One of the objectives of webinars is to educate the wider user community about the potential benefits of a new product or feature. Often the desired outcome is the transition to a Proof of Concept (PoC) where a user can get to check out the maturity of the implementation and validate its suitability within their environment. In this instance, when it comes to comForte and the work that’s being done by Infrasoft with the uLinga product suite, progressing to a PoC is not unexpected.

Emerging technology, such as is the case with uLinga this early in its lifecycle, almost always presupposes that a PoC will be pursued. Yet, for any technology community and, in this case, when it comes to the NonStop community, when presented with a new infrastructure solution from a well-respected vendor, they are always open to learning something new!
More importantly, learning something new goes both ways!

During the most recent uLinga webinar a question was raised, that at the time appeared tangential to the general discussion, and yet it holds the potential to take uLinga into an adjacent, and yet quite complementary marketplace. While there’s still work to be done to fully validate the opportunity, it’s only being pursued as a result of a user asking a perfectly good question!

Neither the user nor the vendor community should ever be backwards in asking questions, nor should either side turn away from suggestions or proposals, and over the years I have seen this many times among the NonStop community. It is a testament to the amount of resources, globally, that continue to be invested in the NonStop platform and of the new and innovative ways to deploy NonStop and connect it with the rest of the enterprise.

There’s more webinars to follow from comForte and I am sure the mix of participants will vary as the many products on offer from comForte are addressed.

If my most recent experience is any indication of what may follow then yes, I encourage everyone in the community to maintain an open, inquisitive mind, and participate in as many of them as they find the time!

Not the dreaded lurgy!

2011-02-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

News from HP of new tablet PCs and mobile phones running webOS from Palm, suggests HP is aggressively pursuing this exploding marketplace. Expect new NonStop solutions supported with infrastructure from vendors like comForte simplifying the connectivity!

I’ve been hit hard with a solid dose of influenza. Well, in all actuality, more likely just a severe bout of the common cold. Whatever I caught it just won’t let go, and after six days it’s beginning to tick me off!

Had this affliction been something I had caught in Australia, then I would simply call it the dreaded lurgy – an illness that just about everyone in Australia works hard to avoid. “Oh no, not the dreaded lurgy!” This fabled illness has its roots in the BBC radio program, the Goon Show, in the times before the Monty Python Show, where scripts were still heavily influenced by Woy-Woy’s favorite son, Spike Milligan.

However, I’m spending more time reading magazines and newspapers as a result and this time I have to admit, most of my reading is courtesy of my iPad; a tablet PC that now is never far from my side. Paradoxically, it was on my iPad that I first caught the news of HP’s entrance into the tablet PC marketplace. With the acquisition of Palm behind them and the timing looking pretty good as the market waits for news on what’s next from Apple, HP rolls out its newest product offering, the TouchPad.

On paper, the new HP TouchPad looks to be a serious contender. For instance, it does support a camera from day one, but more importantly, it supports the popular Adobe Flash software, a utility, as an iPad user, I have grown to realize is just about the most important software product on the planet!

But will I trade in my iPad on a TouchPad?

In a couple of reports I’ve read, there’s been a reference to comments made by Forrester Research analyst, Sarah Rotman Epps, who suggested that "this product has a chance to beat RIM (BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion) and any individual Android tablet, but not Apple.” She then pushes back a little harder, adding "consumers will consider the TouchPad, and then buy an iPad."

This is the whole point, I suspect. Consumers will buy the iPad; that’s Apple’s declared marketplace. For the moment, I’m keeping my iPad.

But what about NonStop?

The enterprise or corporate marketplace however is another matter, especially for companies relying on HP NonStop servers. If HP can truly muster its resources behind the TouchPad and works hard at getting great connectivity in place, software houses that truly exploit its multi-tasking capabilities, and commit to developing a fully-fledged ecosystem behind the Palm webOS operating system, then the TouchPad stands a chance of being a hit with the data center crowd.

NonStop has a strong tradition in supporting a rich variety of client devices and I foresee tablet PCs becoming the source of many new and different types of transactions – limited solely by the creativity of the clients themselves!

According to one report I read, “HP plans to use its global resources to back the TouchPad along with an entire webOS ‘ecosystem’ consisting of two new smartphones and a line of personal computers built on the platform.” I’m still not sure what Microsoft makes of all of this, but for the moment they’re cool. However, the same report went on to quote Todd Bradley, executive vice president of the personal systems group at HP, in closing with “the California-based computer titan is putting ‘meaningful talent and significant resources’ into webOS.”

comForte is not only a part of the HP ecosystem but with established products addressing terminal emulation as well as support for SOA and Web services, I have the sense that it will not be long before we see NonStop users adding tablet PCs to the list of client devices they need supported out of their HP NonStop servers.

It’s a big gamble and the just announced first offspring from the HP and Palm acquisition has just seen the light of day. Like everyone else involved with the program, I suspect, they too will be watching closely to make sure this delicate infant avoids at all costs catching the dreaded lurgy!

Reassigned? Oh no …

2011-02-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

How strong are your ties to your customers and how closely are you working with them? Not sure? Then be careful you don’t fall victim to being reassigned to somewhere cold!

The weather is warming noticeably, and there are tangible signs that Spring is fast approaching. This may come as a shock to those in the Mid-West, or back East, as they continue to see the snow piled high, but out on the west coast, in southern California, it’s all blue sky and sunshine.

This morning I caught the first un-baffled roar from a Harley Davidson motorcycle being fired up for the first time, and as I passed its owner we both agreed: it’s now official, as there’s nothing more tangible than a motorcycle being unplugged from its battery feeder and being brought back to the real world.

It sure beats having to live in the Snow Belt, however, and having to dig-out from under the many blizzards that have dumped on the region. Having coffee with friends in this warmer weather the conversation often tends to gravitate to how fortunate we are not to have earned reassignments back East!

I was reminded of this, and yes, in a very tangible manner, when I skimmed through the latest issue of InformationWeek and came across the regular feature, global CIO. Columnist, Bob Evans, always makes the read worthwhile and is never at a loss for stirring the pot. This week, it’s all about the Top 10 priorities and issues for 2011, as far as CIO’s are concerned.

Residing at the bottom of the Top 10 list are entries such as “The importance of being Global” as well as “CIO’s as Chief Acceleration Officer” and I was about to turn to something else when I came across the entry “Customer engagement soars to unprecedented levels.” CIO’s engaging with their customers?

Surely not – it’s only a few paragraphs further into the feature article that the author reflects on how, for most CIOs, only a few years ago the “larger concern back then was keeping core operations humming along predictably and mechanistically.” CEO’s seemed to tolerate how “internal IT operations gobbled up most of the IT budget – often 78% or 80% or even more.”

No longer! Customers are “demanding to be more involved in product design, supply chain synchronization, technical support, road map planning, and scheduling optimization.” As a result, CEO’s see that the better “CIO is absolutely indispensible in moving this from a daunting and unfamiliar prospect to a source of unique and enduring competitive advantage.”

Wow! How many CIOs will want to force their way into this exchange or take on the responsibility? Among the NonStop community, CIOs have grown comfortable with the rock-solid reliability that comes with running the NonStop stack and the constant record-levels of availability they provide when compared to other systems and servers – but I’m not so sure they turn to NonStop as often as they should when their customers want to engage them in road map discussions.

Perhaps they should? Any quick check of the media of late highlights how many discussions are taking place about the support of modern tablet PCs, including iPads, for instance, and it should be a given to have NonStop included in the exchanges.

It’s typically the CEO’s iPad, after all, and he will want to access company information from anywhere in the world – at any time! You have to think, when its high level executives demanding connectivity that the CIO’s SLA’s will be updated to add an expanded scope that includes the bosses iPad. After all, this is a vastly different set of circumstances than responding to customers, and turning to the rock-solid, reliable NonStop may happen more quickly!

The feature wraps up this entry on customer engagement with the challenge to CIOs on how “nobody’s going to ask you if you ‘want a seat at the table’ – you’ll either have proved you’re capable and be engaged in the discussion already, or you’ll be reassigned to the infrastructure maintenance team.” Ouch … perhaps there are opportunities worse than being reassigned back east to the Snow Belt, after all!

Don’t fade away …

2011-01-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

In the first film of the Highlander series, the giant immortal Kurgan taunts us with the line “it’s better to burn out than to fade away!” It’s also sung by Neil Young … but need that happen to us?

In my previous post to this blog I referenced the January issue of Tandemworld.Net and highlighted a couple of items,. In particular, I asked whether those who have worked with NonStop for so many years will want to embrace new approaches and methodologies.

I went so far as to ask whether the accumulated knowledge of NonStop we have today will simply fade away as part of the aging process!

However, I immediately followed these questions with my own proposals about the actions we can take and on how it’s not something we should be waiting for others to address … it’s up to me and you.

HP will shortly take the wraps of a new direction; CEO Apotheker will unveil a strategy focused on software, services, and perhaps most important of all, integration. Hardware, up and down the line, will become commodity and HP will fuel its growth with what goes into these boxes.

It will mandate standards, and the acceptance of homogeneous infrastructure underpinning it all. This will require a level of partnership between users and vendors and an acceptance by vendors of the need to be particularly responsive to users’ changing requirements. Nowhere is this more in evidence than when it comes to networking.

You may observe that in many data centers legacy networking products remain in use often for no other reason than uncertainty about what these products do, and of course, users being fearful of change. As Infrasoft took the wraps of its network modernization product, uLinga, their customer interactions had suggested providing modern TCP/IP connectivity between legacy SNA applications like IMS and CICS would have mass appeal.

As Proof of Concepts (PoCs) began, it soon became clear that there was a more pressing need to provide modern TCP/IP connectivity between NonStop and legacy SNA client devices. Today, not only has a new DLSw implementation been added as a feature of uLinga but the support of enough of what had formerly been provided by HP and other vendors: HLS APIs in order for products like BASE24 to function. All implemented as a result of the partnership that has emerged between users and the technical staff at Infrasoft.

Shortly, Infrasoft’s distributor will be running a series of webinars on products and technologies that they support. In a recent exchange with Thomas Gloerfeld, head of marketing at comForte, he reminded me of how comForte had been running webinars for several years and that they are well received by the user community.

“This is an efficient way to update, inform, and educate people on hot topics in the NonStop industry and on how to address the challenges with solutions from comForte,” Gloerfeld went on to explain.

Kicking off the series will be a webinar on uLinga, “Understanding the benefits from modernizing the data center’s network” and it will be held twice to cover the major Geo’s:

For The Americas
Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST)
Register here:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/603956600

For EMEA and Asia Pacific
Date: Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
Register here:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/626465089

There are actions we can take and there is something we should be looking at doing – the information provided in webinars, such as these, can prove invaluable when it comes to updating our knowledge at a time when options and alternatives may not be fully understood. There should be no fading away for some of us.

As for me, I will be on these calls and I hope I will hear from you!

It’s just me and you!

2011-01-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to Cupertino in the ‘80s, my brother Greg and I would often talk about the most recent episode of Miami Vice. It was the cars featured – but in this post, it’s all about the songs!

The publisher of the Tandemworld e/Newsletter will soon distribute the January 2011 issue in which I wrote a feature story about the expectations for NonStop, now that the 35th birthday party is behind us. Rather than trying to speculate about what may happen in the next 35 years, I limited my observations to what may transpire in the years left in this current decade.

I anchored that story around a series of quotes I lifted from an email a good friend provided me. But as I did so, I was aware of just how different the landscape has become even in the years since I was at Tandem Computers. Not the least being the solutions and infrastructure products being pursued by the vendor community.

Today, it’s hard to escape the diversification that’s taking place – while NonStop remains the premier platform supported by these vendors so many products and features are available for adjacent platforms that the impression quickly develops: staying solely focused on NonStop is a losing proposition.

Conversations with these vendors reveal just how important modern programming languages and frameworks have become, and how implementing a solution across multiple platforms has never been easier. This only works, of course, if developers embrace these modern languages, mind you!

Therein lays the rub, unfortunately. Will those associated with NonStop for so many years want to embrace new approaches and methodologies? Or, will the accumulated knowledge of NonStop we have today simply fade away as part of the aging process?

I think there are actions we can take and it’s not something we should be looking to others to address, as I wrote in the Tandemworld feature, it’s up to me and you.

Writing this, my thoughts returned to the old television series of the ‘80s – Miami Vice. One episode really stood out for me as it featured The Eagles songwriter Glenn Frey as a pilot, I recall, and his song, Smuggler’s Blues. Playing with the words only slightly, you may recall it:

You ask any marketin’ man,
He'll say there's nothin' we can do,
From the office of the President,
Right down to me and you, me and you.
It's a losing proposition
But one you can't refuse.
It's the politics of programin’,
It's the coder’s blues …

In an earlier posting on December 3, 2010 “Call this art?” I wrote of how so many programmers of my generation are struggling with the transition, while harboring warm feelings for languages of the past, like TAL or COBOL.

Following the posting, one reader commented: “while I agree the world was a kinder and simpler place in the COBOL era I don't see how we can put the genie back in the bottle...It would be like asking college new hires not to use Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Google - they wouldn't know what to do if you gave them a Webcrawler & Telnet prompt”.

True, the lid is off, the genie is well and truly out, and the modernization of NonStop continues. And no, staying focused on the NonStop platform isn’t a losing proposition even as diversification continues, nor is its relevance diminished even as it embraces modernization.

In the coming months and maintaining the modernization theme look for the upcoming Webinars, across Europe and the Americas, that will kick-off in early February with a special on “uLinga; modernizing your network” - more to follow, shortly.

As I continue to watch what will develop over the next couple of years, as we head towards the end of the decade, how vibrant and relevant the NonStop platform remains is now in our hands. It is, as the songwriter penned, truly going to come “right down to me and you, me and you”. And I seriously believe we can continue to make the transition!

It’s going to be hot!

2011-01-14T03:56:00.000-08:00

Keeping warm through the coldest days of winter may not normally lead to thoughts and musings on tablet PC connectivity, and yet, in pursuing warmer temperatures in the house, it followed rather naturally!

It’s been so cold in Boulder these past couple of days and the home heating hasn’t always managed to keep up with the demands. I have even resorted to turning on the gas fireplaces, although this hasn’t always gone without a hitch.

When the house was built there were a number of hand-held controllers provided with which to turn on the televisions sets, start the stereo, and ignite the fireplaces. Looking a lot like the original Palm Pilot, they were state-of-the-art at the time and offered many advantages over having shoe-boxes full of remotes.

However, their batteries have been failing and it’s proved difficult to get fireplaces working, and the thought crossed my mind – why should I be maintaining this ten year old equipment? Surely there is an app for this in the iTunes app store! I haven’t seriously looked as yet, but given today’s enthusiasm for tablet PCs, I have to believe that such an app will arrive shortly.

In an email exchange with Thomas Burg, comForte’s CTO, we talked of where the current popularity of tablet PCs could be headed and what software may be required. “We did have requests for ‘6530 emulation for Palm devices’ over the years, but never a lot,” Thomas wrote me, before adding how comForte did “have one customer who is using HP Tablet devices to access a NonStop system.” It turned out, according to Thomas that it was pretty straight forward as comForte had “handled this using a JPath servlet.”

With the latest tablet PCs coming to the market I see a lot more evidence to suggest that these devices will represent a real force to be reckoned with – perhaps led my business leaders, looking for something a lot more elegant to take to meetings yet just as capable as any PC when it comes to displaying the latest spreadsheets, graphs and charts and presentations!

Will we see adoption of a three tier model, or just two tiers reflective of more traditional client-server computing approaches of the past? Certainly, Thomas reassured me, there would be early favoring of the three-tier model and with the product Client Server Link (CSL) comForte has many of the pieces already in place. “CSL would connect the middle tier to NonStop with the middle tier supporting an interface for iPhone/iPad application, or perhaps just a web browser,” according to Thomas.

“Authentication, certainly very important for NonStop users, would likely be handled with tablet PCs, including the iPhone/iPad, authenticated to the middle tier that, in turn, authenticate itself to the backend tier, avoiding direct end user access to the NonStop tier,” Thomas concluded.

I’m often asked why I persist with positioning NonStop as the backend server in this mix, and I’ve puzzled technologists with my preference for NonStop over L/U/W solutions. And my response has always been consistent – the more business leaders, let alone the rest of the enterprise, become dependent on this latest generation of tablet PCs, the greater the need for security and uptime.

Always on, always available, whenever I need it has become the catch-cry of these executives and I see few alternatives to NonStop when it really counts. As much as I would like to see a more robust two tier solution appear, for the moment, I will stay plugged into Thomas and watch what develops.

After all, it’s not just lighting a fireplace or changing the channel on a television that will determine the future of this latest iteration of mobile computing – there’s real work that can benefit from extending the reach of NonStop to include these powerful tablet PCs, including the mighty iPad!

Watch out – they’re passing us!

2011-01-07T07:08:00.000-08:00

Change continues to run rampant as younger generations of IT professionals turn to tools that they have grown up with, much to the consternation of their elders. And there’s no stopping them; this is good for NonStop!

It was during a routine call with Thomas Gloerfeld this week that the certainty of change really hit home. Thomas, who heads marketing for comForte, expressed his belief that no matter what we (the NonStop vendor community) pursue, then even as they work on NonStop young techies are already all-over the latest technology, whether Microsoft or Apple.

These young people face fierce competition, not so much from the established, often grey-haired, veterans of the industry, but from the kids that are now in grade school, that are already their peers about a decade earlier than any of us could have expected.

According to a story I came across last week, a 3 year old was taken aback when, given a printed photograph, he couldn’t make it zoom out when he stretched his fingers over it. Perhaps even worse, an older marketing executive, anxious to improve their skills, attended graduate school for marketing in the digital era, and was perplexed when none of the other participants responded to emails. Turns out, among the group of twenty-something, email is so twentieth century and communications happens via texting, tweets, and facebook posts!

There’s a lot of buzz at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that follows a similar tack. According to a special report to CNBC.com by reporter John Moore, “Mobility has been the key driver behind products like smartphones and the iPad. Consumers want much of the functionality they get with a PC when they’re on the go, but with more user-friendly touches.”

I am seeing this first hand now that I have my iPad. But what I found a little more illuminating was Moore’s quote of Sara Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst, as she observed that “there are a lot of ways PCs are changing that’s influenced by phones and tablets. Consumers are expecting an instant-on and always-on experience from their devices.”

I think it’s great to see that we have a younger generation coming up through the ranks where the instant nature of a PC’s access to information is as expected as we once only demanded of telephones. And innovate, this younger generation will surely do! Yet it takes a heck of a lot of technology behind the curtain to assure that what’s expected can be delivered. Only this week we have seen LinkedIn taken down, Skype go off the air, and according to a colleague of mine, soon to IPO Intuit beginning to sense that there’s better things they should be doing to address availability!

John Moore’s final observation about the opportunity this provides the major vendors included a quote of Shaw Wu, an analyst with Kaufman Bros. where he suggested “the difference with HP is they can benefit from a lot of these trends. All this content that everyone accesses through their notebooks, smartphones and tablets has to be stored and processed in the data center. HP is the Number One player in terms of infrastructure, and they’re going to take more share in the data center.”

It would be reassuring to many of us that NonStop would be a part of this as HP executes, but then again, for all those who saw Martin Fink pull the covers away from the Superdome2 box last year, there nestled in the blade cabinet were tow NonStop blades – and I have to believe as Fink continues to push for polymorphic computing, future uptime will directly correlate to just how many NonStop blades have been plugged into the box! And for that scenario, many of us will be extremely thankful!

It’s now in our hands!

2010-12-28T16:26:00.000-08:00

The era of mCommerce, and the business that will arise from untethered access to information, has been boosted with the arrival of the iPad; can NonStop leverage the opportunities that its growing popularity will create?

This Christmas Santa brought me an Apple iPad, something I had placed high on my wish list. Actually, getting my hands on my very own Applet Tablet PC has proved a lot of fun, and already I have downloaded several free “Apps” from Apples App Store on iTunes.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only recipient of an iPad gift this Christmas. According to the folks at Amazon “as of December 25th, (Apple’s) products topped the most-gifted items in all categories in which it competed except television and video products.” In other words, “Cupertino scored a clean sweep in tablets, laptops, desktops and portable music players!”

In the past I accessed information via a browser, but today I am quickly coming to appreciate how much easier it is to access popular web sites via an App icon – yes, for me, “there’s an application for that” means more than just an advertising slogan. Corporate IT departments are responding by providing their own Apps in support of many high-visibility applications.

When one hospital surveyed its community of doctors, interns, nurses and administrators it proved to be the interns who would benefit the most from the use of iPads. Rarely are interns assigned workstations or given dedicated areas from which to work, most often they have to wait for doctors and nurses to step aside before they can get access to patient information.

Slow as they appear to be sometimes, when it comes to leveraging new technology, medical practitioners have seen advantages as well. As a doctor recently blogged, “one morning, I found all the workstations occupied and I needed to text page my team. From the hall, I simply opened my iPad and used the ‘shortlink’ to the paging system to let my residents know where I was.”

Noting the almost instant success Apple has seen with the iPad, an InformationWeek columnist recently wrote of how we are seeing Microsoft beginning to look like an end-stage company, before asking “what's … its chances in mobile, or search, or tablets, or any of the other growth markets that are driven by younger professionals' demands for tools that are social, collaborative, instant, and always on?”
Will NonStop play a role in such a dynamic and fast-growing marketplace? In response to a blog on Barrons Tech Trader Daily web site, posted by Tiernan Ray in December under the headline “Apple: iPad + Mac = 12% PC Market Share, Says Goldman”, a reader posted the comment “Yea the servers and backroom guys will have Windows’ Machines, but front line will be Macs!”

Surely, if servers and backroom guys can have Windows then they can have NonStop – every bit as modern as any other server on offer today! While so much ink has been devoted to eCommerce losing the popularity stakes to mCommerce, there will be no letup in the demands of users for the same levels of security, availability and massive scalability as has been demanded in the past.

Always on? Nowhere have I read that NonStop cannot play a role. After all, at a time when convergence occupies center stage for many of us, when it comes to driving strategies, this is one opportunity that for me becomes a no-brainer!

It's OK - we are being framed!

2010-12-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

Frameworks are important for ISVs; without them, flexibility is lessened as is meeting changing customer requirements. aKuna is the framework at the heart of uLinga and Infrasoft reaps the benefits!

Everyone should experience building a home, at least once in a lifetime. But having experienced it, and enjoying the process, I am sure I can also add that when it comes to building a home, once is enough. Very quickly homebuilders learn that changes made when the design is on paper, with an eraser, carries little expense, but once framing commences, and the design leaves the architect’s drawings, the expense associated with changes can escalate quickly as “user requirements” are being addressed.

In a previous posting, where I had written about the uLinga product and how the folks from Infrasoft had quickly responded to different customer requirements by adding the support for DLSw, and how this had been made easier because of the investment made ahead of time with the creation of the framework, aKuna.

As Peter Shell told me in a recent email exchange, “TAL and COBOL essentially have no library code aside from a few utility functions that are provided by Guardian, whereas the C runtime library has so much more. Java and C++ however, provide an immense set of libraries, so much so that it is often difficult to decide which to use!”

Unfortunately, for ISVs like Infrasoft, the availability of these libraries for Java and C++, as rich as they are, can prove to be just as problematic as having nothing at all! As Shell was to inform me, “the emphasis of most of the Java and C++ libraries has been on ease of use rather than focusing on performance and, as such, is great for application code. However, for system level code where CPU and / or memory performance is critical, I often find them excessive. No one is writing a device handler, for instance, in Java any time soon!”

As a framework, aKuna is bringing value to Infrasoft by allowing functions required of a new feature to be introduced quickly and with greatly reduced risk, as much of what is required of the new feature has been debugged and tested extensively. What Shell then added was how, from his observations over the years, “my concept of a framework, or whatever we call them in the future, is that of a continuum.”

“Their development doesn’t stop at the simply utility functions, in fact it doesn’t stop at all! In time, everything it turned into libraries where the product is just a bunch of libraries bolted together,” Shell explained. “Because this adds a degree of pressure to really think hard about how to externalize the functionality, you end up with nice clean interfaces, clean design further encouraging code re-use.”

It’s also pretty easy to mix and match functionality while enjoying the benefits from not re-writing code, I suspect.

Today, uLinga is involved in PoCs and the list of requirements continues to grow through the customer exposure. The speed with which the uLinga product developers respond is not because of late hours poring over code listings and banging away at a keyboard, but rather through intelligent “assembling” relevant functionality into the features required.

It reminds me of my experience of building the house. The process may not be as simple as rubbing out the outlines of walls with an eraser or drawing in new ceiling embellishments, but the frameworks that modern software developers produce take the process of solving business problems a lot closer to satisfying changing user requirements than we have ever witnessed before, with far less risk than we could have ever imagined!

The kids are alright!

2010-12-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

There are those who fret over the lack of investment being made to market NonStop and to attract a broader community, and yet, kids fresh out of college are deploying new applications on NonStop without even knowing it!

In the prologue to Back to the Future, Doc Brown appears in his DeLorean time machine and urges Marty and then Jennifer to come with him. To Marty’s question of where, Doc responds, “Back to the future … It's your kids, Marty. Something gotta be done about your kids!”

As Marty urges Doc to back up so as to have a longer section of road to launch the DeLorean, Doc quips “Roads? Where we're going, we don't need ... roads.”

This week I have been revisiting the topic of modernization and have been unable to put to one side the comments I posted last week and where I quoted a different Marty, this time Marty Edelman, from his article in The Connection (Nov – Dec, ’10) where he writes “achieving modernization is a journey of many steps … no one coming out of college has ever heard of (Tandem’s tools) … (but) after embracing modern development practices … (this) enabled me, as a manager, to hire kids out of college and have immediate productivity from them.”

At a time when many within the NonStop community fret over the lack of investment coming from HP to educate our kids in how to write code for the NonStop, I see this quickly becoming a non-issue. As Randy Meyer tells audiences whenever he can, his own son fresh from college, yet knowledgeable in development frameworks with products like Eclipse, was able to bring up a program on NonStop with no prior education in NonStop, and had it work the way he wanted it to. “Cool,” came back the response!

There was a time when college kids, freshly drafted into the ranks of professional (American) football, could be easily recognized carrying a clipboard as they learnt on the job! It wasn’t unusual to see a highly ranked rookie doing this sideline routine for several years – we all recall how long it was before Steve Young of the San Francisco 49ers had the opportunity to start, being a back-up to Joe Montana for so many years.

But today, it’s all changed. Enormous salaries necessitate that new recruits have to come to the team ready to play as of the very first weekend of the season! The team franchises cannot afford to have such expensive resources sitting on the sidelines.
“Roads? Where we're going, we don't need ... roads.” Our kids will do alright and the benefits of deploying modern code onto a platform that doesn’t fail and can scale linearly removes a lot of complexity from the routines these kids had to develop in college. It allows them to move on quickly to solve today’s business problems free from the constraints they thought were just a part of coding a computer.

Shouldn’t we be actively promoting the story that NonStop is the system you don’t have to worry about? Forget the past and forget the roadmaps so eloquently described by other vendors. It’s not necessary – it’s the very transparency of NonStop that is today’s magic and the real breakthrough is that HP is ensuring that the specialized knowledge, once needed to program a NonStop server, becomes nothing more than folk lore.

For all of us heading back to the future, where we are going we don’t need (NonStop) roads (and roadmaps) and we don’t need to follow around with our clipboards the old guys either; it’s still a journey but all we need is the tools we used in college to address the business needs of those companies that take us on!

Call this art?

2010-12-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

As a small child I struggled with painting. Yes, I knew what I wanted to paint, but became easily frustrated when I couldn’t quite get my brush to communicate my ideas. I worked at it for many years but as I reached the 6th grade there was little visible progress.

One day, in a fit of sheer exasperation, I threw paint at the paper, scribbled all sorts of nonsense and then dragged my brushes through the mess. There was some structure as I had started out painting the interior of my classroom. Yet the school principal claimed it was a fine interpretation of school and declared it a break-out piece of modern art.

I have passionately disliked modern art ever since. Exactly when did Picasso give up real painting to throw ambiguous shapes on his canvas? When the November / December, 2010, issue of The Connection arrived, the picture of an elephant atop the article by Marty Edelman caught my attention. More Picasso?

Fortunately, I read the article and it’s a well put together story on modernization. Of the many points that Marty makes, two stand out as they resonate with me and confirm other data points I have come across this year.

In explaining that there’s a difference between modernization and service oriented architecture (SOA), Marty describes how modernization is “about modern development, security, and operations practices” and how “SOA is an approach that allows … complex system to be transformed into a network of integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources.” He then adds “achieving modernization is a journey of many steps.”

Marty then makes another observation when he writes of how “no one coming out of college has ever heard of (Tandem’s tools) … (but) after embracing modern development practices … enabled me, as a manager, to hire kids out of college and have immediate productivity from them.”

For me this confirms that the transition from a legacy Tandem to a modern NonStop involves change. But what constitutes change that will have the longevity sufficient to support the investments needed to undertake the changes?

In the same issue of The Connection, Sundaresh Krishnan (Sundar), a program manager with HP, wrote about the Converged Infrastructure - Ready (CI-Ready) partner program. “HP is reaching out to ISVs and encouraging them with special incentives to modernize their NonStop applications,” Sundar starts out describing the CI-Ready program before adding how with credentials “this means your NonStop applications are Modular and Open.”

The value from gaining CI-Ready credentials, Sundar then states, “sets a partner apart from other vendors in the market place.”
Checking through the list of certified vendors on HP’s web site at http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/partners/converged-infrastructure-ready-solutions.html there’s a couple of names very familiar to the NonStop community, not the least being comForte with its CSL product offering.

The CSL product anchors comForte’s modernization offerings and is an extremely credible way to externalize applications as Web services and to embrace SOA. As Marty noted earlier, this is a vital component as users begin their journey that will transform Tandem into NonStop.

There’s much that remains for HP to communicate the upside potential that comes from gaining CI-Ready credentials and these early wins suggest that ISVs are prepared to help HP pursue its goal. There is a lot of effort ISVs are making to ensure that, as users embrace change, their partners will be there for them throughout the journey. This is art that is surely better appreciated by all NonStop users!

"Opening Stand," and reaching for the fences!

2010-11-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

“In cricket batsmen often need a slice of luck to build a decent innings,” was the opening line in a recent column “Opening stand” in the magazine The Economist , Nov 20th, ’10 issue. “A good start builds confidence and experience that boosts future performance,” the author then suggests. “A strong debut seems to lead to a shinier career,” the article continues.

“Let IT managers make a handful of choices that result in an integrated set of servers, storage, and high-speed networking,” comes the call in the opening paragraph of the column, “QuickTakes” in the magazine InformationWeek , Oct 11th, ’10 issue. “Many will conclude they can’t do this with the mish-mash of servers and other parts they have,” the author observes.

I was drawn to these two articles as I leafed through magazines piled on my desk, relaxing after a weekend of driving on a difficult race track under trying conditions. Leaving the starting grid at the start of the day in pouring rain and with standing water along one of the main straights, helped little in promoting confidence.

But in cricket, as with IT, and as in tracking cars, it is about teams. The friends that were with me helped me determine my tactics. And I made a good start; making the necessary driver adjustments that the changing weather dictated and bringing the car safely back into pit lane.

Introducing a new product often trends in much the same way, particularly when the new product is aimed at helping IT better reduce the number of choices they have to deal with – fewer options tend to favor tighter integration and support the convergence and transformation much of the industry is talking about.

Standardizing on open networks, such as TCP/IP within and outside, the data center, is at the forefront of every data center manager’s plans for networking future. It’s their experience gained through the years that has allowed them to make timely adjustments and to avoid the mistakes that come from cobbling together the mish-mash of componentry they may have inherited.

When the wraps first came of the InfraSoft product, uLinga, there were two distinct packages – uLinga for CICS and uLinga for IMS. Targeting the elimination of SNA from within the data center, catering for inter-system networking and focused solely on TCP/IP, the team at InfraSoft was quick to realize what adjustments had to be made to better meet the needs of NonStop customers.

After all, just as in cricket where “a bad start is not easily forgiven; selectors appear to discard potentially high-ability players who had the misfortune to debut abroad.” In Infrasoft’s case, the first customer wanted to deploy uLinga not inside the data center but rather, across the network and in support of older legacy SNA client devices.

Without a second thought, the team adjusted and in a very short period of time, leveraging the framework within uLinga (a set of libraries and tools the team has begun calling aKuna – more on that later), released uLinga for DLSw (Data Link Switching).

Competitive products already existed, but the ability to adjust the way that Infrasoft did, and in the timeframe the customer needed, certainly gave Infrasoft a chance to hit the ball out of the park for six (or hit a home run). Time will tell if they did, but they’re flexible enough to be in a position to make that happen!

It has definitely improved the reach of uLinga and greatly enhanced the value it will bring to those within IT; rationalizing their technology, pulling back from the choices made in the past, just as it has laid the foundation for a broader product offering than first envisioned. A strong debut, indeed!

Pulling back the curtain!

2010-11-19T19:02:00.000-08:00

It’s Friday and it’s a track weekend. I will be taking the car to the track for the final weekend of quite an eventful year. For the past couple of events I have been hauling a trailer behind the SUV with the Corvette safely strapped down tight.

Watching other, more competent, drivers lose their cars and hit walls and embankments has convinced me that it’s just a wise move to have a back-up plan, as goodness knows what trouble I would be in if I came off the track with a badly damaged car. But I am now well prepared for any eventuality!

Unfortunately this Saturday’s event has been cancelled due to the weather – a storm front has entered Southern California and the organizers have made the wise decision not to let us push our luck on a wet track. We will be allowed on track just on Sunday.

Earlier in the week I had an email exchange with comForte’s Thomas Burg, and we began looking at recent blog postings and discussions on the topic of web connectivity and at the very confident push by HP’s NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) in support of their web server product, NonStop iTP WebServer (iTP).

For those who may not have seen the latest data sheet on iTP, it opens with the observation “today’s enterprise IT infrastructures are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. Heterogeneity comes with a price and the inability to integrate a diverse IT landscape can result in lost business opportunities.”

What follows a little later in the data sheet clearly pulls back the curtain on NED’s latest positioning efforts, when it says “iTP WebServer software is a strategic product that supports Web and SOA application and solution deployment on the NonStop server, providing standards-based integration of NonStop applications in a heterogeneous IT infrastructure.”

Looking past this comment, you will soon read of how “iTp WebServer software products are designed for transaction processing and electronic commerce.” There you have it – a definite tie-in to past marketplace successes that do make a lot of sense.

I am always marveling when I look at the latest news announcements on one web deployment or another at how quickly the IT community seems to forget the past and what helped make previous deployments so successful. The HP NonStop server anchored nearly all the worlds ATM networks and more than two thirds of the POS networks!

As companies prepare to dive deeper into the internet and to build greater reliance on web interfaces, Thomas and I remain puzzled and somewhat frustrated at the lack of awareness of how good a platform the HP NonStop server remains.

It’s ideal for the role of front-ending any businesses presence on the internet. HP NED has identified its latest products as strategic and that is encouraging. I will expand on this in more detail in my next post to my blog, Real Time View, but for now, it’s good to note how HP is not the sole supplier to the NonStop community, joining several other vendors, including comForte who have provided solutions for some time.

It is a reflection on how important all vendors view interfacing directly the HP NonStop server to the internet – after all, it’s become the single biggest source of transactions so why ignore the best transaction processor available! Why hold back on positioning the best platform there is as we prepare to interface a high volume source, prevalent today in the internet, with the heterogeneous mix of applications present in the data center!

Road to Bali!

2010-11-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

In the 1952’s Bob Hope movie, Road to Bali, our hero has to leave Melbourne, Australia, in a hurry and ends up becoming a deep sea diver in Bali. While it wouldn’t take much to make me leave Melbourne, it probably would require even less incentive to get me to head up north to that fabled isle!

The allure of Bali remains strong and so the temptation to participate in the Asia-Pac ACE conference for BASE24 users was hard to resist. Unfortunately I was not able to attend, but making an early appearance since joining comForte, Say Kuan Koh was on hand for the occasion at the sumptuous Grand Hyatt Bali.

Former OzTUG Chairman, and now Managing Director of Infrasoft, Peter Shell was also on hand and helped support Say Kuan.

In an upcoming issue of the Tandemworld.net eNewsletter I wrote of how I expect a lot more cooperation between HP, major solutions providers, including ACI, and middleware vendors such as comForte, for the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) to be successful with the push to modernize.

User community events give solutions providers and middleware vendors access to a large population of users, all with what’s just happened recently with their applications in the forefront of their consciousness, and full of ideas as to what they would really like to see implemented.

A presentation by ANZ following their recent deployment of Prognosis, highlighted how they were able to find a problem (in this case, an erroneously configured “dead station” in a pool of sixteen good stations) in just twenty minutes, when previously, such problems had taken two and a half days to fix.

Hearing of this, it highlights for me just how much pressure is being directed at IT!

A follow-on story of how ANZ’s Managing Director couldn’t change his PIN number and how Prognosis was able to correlate incorrect PIN denials to a recent program changes, touched a nerve in every attendee that produced wry smiles on many faces, I was told.

The latest message coming from HP however, where standards and commodity technologies represent the future, has customers retreating from the playing field hoping that solutions vendors will do most of the heavy lifting. Changes to data bases, to the user interfaces, to the network, and even changes of programming languages and models, all in the pursuit of modernization, represent a new direction that most users are unprepared to take.

Lest there not be any misunderstanding here, staying close to the needs of customers remains paramount for all involved in technology, but when the path through convergence and transformation involves hybrid clusters, clouds, and even newly-envisioned Megaplexes, figuring out how to best make use of them, and when, will be the domain of solutions providers.

NonStop is as modern a platform as any other server in the marketplace and the types of applications that can now run on NonStop, whether Java or .Net, is essentially unlimited. It still needs cooperation, however, for this all to work and customers are looking to the solution providers to spearhead the modernization efforts.

HP can throw as many evangelists as they can muster into the fray, but results will only eventuate when solutions providers become involved and rework their solutions to better utilize all that is new from the vendor. This shouldn’t be news to anyone – NonStop has always been a solutions play!

Bob Hope escaped to Bali to avoid an unfortunate situation where he found himself committed to too many relationships. Fifty years later it seems apparent to all associated with NonStop that perhaps trip to Bali was about developing even more relationships. From everything I heard, this seems to have happened, and bodes well for even greater acceptance of the NonStop push to modernize.

Can I hear fences going up?

2010-11-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

It’s been hard to miss the latest remarks of Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. The unfortunate victim caught dead square in the cross-hairs of his gun sights this time just happens to be HP. Specifically, it’s incoming CEO, Leo Apotheker, as well as its new Chairman (and former Oracle President and Chief Operating Officer), Ray Lane. As the recent posting to The Motley Fool financial newsletter suggests “Who need the ‘Housewives of Beverly Hills when the CEOs of Palo Alto are far more entertaining?’” as it chronicles the outburst from Larry, as he goes after the new crop of executives starting work at HP this week.

What’s triggered this latest round of outbursts from Larry is the lawsuit Oracle launched against the software giant, SAP, following disclosure that SAP ended up with code and manuals of Oracle’s competitive product offering to something SAP was developing. Or, as the most recent article on the matter to the financial newsletter, The Street, observes quoting Charles King, principle analyst at technology research firm Pund-IT, “I think that the level of rancor in some of Larry Ellison’s public comments, and the aggressiveness (Oracle) is pursuing this with, seems out of balance with the level of misdeed that were done (and) that the level of vituperative rhetoric could risk damaging the relationship HP and Oracle have.”

Indeed! And what has led me to even touch this topic is the most recent news announcement from comForte, posted to their web site, disclosing their “signing of an international distribution agreement with Network Technologies International, Inc. (NTI). Under this agreement comForte will distribute NTI's market leading disaster recovery solutions. The DRNet family of products provides a powerful, efficient data replication engine ensuring continuous data availability.” This comes almost a year after Oracle acquired GoldenGate, where I was working at the time, and perhaps it couldn’t have been better timed.

I continue to view the GoldenGate product suite as perhaps the premier offering on NonStop when it comes to data replication and transformation, but with these outbursts from Larry and the deteriorating situation between Oracle and HP, it does make you wonder how enamored Oracle executives will continue to be with the NonStop marketplace and how quickly their commitment to the NonStop server will be curtailed.

According to Thomas Golerfeld, in a recent email exchange we had, and looking beyond any comparisons with GoldenGate “DRNet takes comForte into a new area and it extends our foot print in the security space. It’s all been about encryption of data (in transit, at rest, better management of Safeguard) and now we can offer customers business continuity solutions” To comForte executives, this relationship with NTI represents “a logical extension of what the company has done so far” and further populates a critical market segment, important for all NonStop users.

As the article in The Motely Fool observed, “Oracle and HP have become Silicon Valley’s serial acquirers … Oracle is moving into hardware with its Sun purchase, and HP wants to take on Oracle and IBM in the realm of enterprise services.” Wherever this takes us, any business dependent upon data base solutions from one or the other may really need to rethink the commitment of the vendor in order to continue to rely on support for tools and capabilities – after all, if this squabble continues, there’s no predicting where the lines around strategic offerings may be drawn!

Question time at CTUG!

2010-10-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I wrote of how I was looking forward to attending the Fall Canadian Tandem User Group (CTUG) event held in the Toronto offices of HP. I was also going to pay attention to see how strongly the central message conveyed at the NonStop Symposium would be featured. And I have come away impressed on all counts.

The story of modernization continues to occupy center stage for the NonStop community, and it wasn’t diluted in any way at CTUG. NonStop today is a very modern platform. While its ability to support Java is widely known, perhaps the support today of .Net applications on NonStop that’s been provided by solutions vendor AJB Canada takes NonStop even further into marketplaces predominantly populated by better known platforms from their rivals.

While I address the subject of the final Q & A session in my post to the Real Time View, I only cover part of the response. The question that caught my attention had three parts – “what was the key product / service that most benefited NonStop; what could have been done better; and what were the challenges that lay ahead for NonStop?” Randy Meyer was given the microphone, and he suggested that “the original architecture of NonStop, as it was expressed in the mid ‘70s,” was not just the key product developed but key to all else that followed for Tandem Computers.

Perhaps his next answer shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone in the audience and I thought it was a realistic assessment of an almost-missed opportunity. “NonStop could have gone to commoditization a lot sooner,” Randy suggested and acknowledging, to all present, that perhaps NonStop held onto proprietary technologies and architectures a little too long.

It was Randy’s response to the third question that has really caught my attention and ignited my passions, perhaps more strongly than anything else I’ve heard this year. “Accommodating dynamic shift in demand,” Randy started out as he explained that, as commoditzation takes HP along a path where processor packaging (e.g. Blades) will begin to look the same, and the mix of platforms operational at any one time (in response to the business environment) may differ from one day to the next and potentially even from one hour to the next. HP’s customers will be demanding new infrastructure that helps them implement ways to account for (and ultimately pay for) just the mix of platforms that is being used for any given period.

As a user event, CTUG was very well run and in many ways gave me the impression that it lent itself to becoming a model for how major regional events should be held in the future. As I can’t see HP returning to ITUG-style summits, CTUG demonstrated for me how to hold a good user event and I have to believe, across the globe, we are going to see even more events like this. I see nothing wrong with this eventuality and, indeed, look forward to becoming even more involved as similar programs gain traction with other regional groups!

Canada to "modernize" - see you at the fall CTUG!

2010-10-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

Next week I will be travelling to Toronto, Canada, to participate in the Fall CTUG user event. Coming only a few weeks after the NonStop Symposium, it will be interesting to see what responses there are to HP’s key messages. What I took away from the NonStop Symposium was a message of “modernization” and it’s been a consistent theme across my posts to the Real Time View. The most recent post “We don't need no badges!” looks at programming languages and touches briefly on the hesitancy of some developers to consider learning modern languages, whether out of fear that they will not master it to the same level as they have the older language, or a deeper-set fear that says maintaining expertise will ensure career longevity.

Modernization is more than just languages, however. NonStop users are increasingly under pressure to step up and modernize user interfaces, as well as the application interfaces used to communicate with other applications in the enterprise. I have just been looking through the slide deck that was produced in support of the Converged Infrastructure Ready (CI-Ready) initiative, unveiled recently by HP, in which, the NonStop platform is a participant.

Modernization of user interfaces and modernization of application interfaces are at the top of the list. The real objective of the CI-Ready initiative, however, is that in pursuing modernization and standardizing on a selection of modern frameworks, tools, interfaces, and languages, given today’s support for middleware and infrastructure by all the key HP operating systems, there’s a much stronger case to be made for application mobility.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be revisiting this theme and taking a closer look at the CI-Ready initiative and at the first vendors to be badged CI-Ready, just to explore the impact this initiative has in the vendor community. The scenarios described within the CI-Ready initiative cover topics such as modernize the data store, modernize application infrastructure, modernize development tools, and modernize management tools, and a quick check of the comForte web site quickly illustrates how well-aligned comForte is with this program.

Modernize the network – turn to uLinaga. Modernize the user interface – turn to J6530 / JPath. Modernize the application interface (SOA) – turn to CSL. Modernize the management (operations) tools – turn to TOP. And comForte is not alone in this respect – checking the web sites of other vendors highlights how many there are that are developing product offerings that fall under the heading of modernization.

And this is the good news for all in the NonStop community, and something not to be ignored – today’s NonStop has become a modern platform and there’s little to prevent almost any of today’s applications from running on NonStop. I’m looking forward to my visit with the CTUG user community and I will be paying particular attention to how far the user community has come in embracing modernization but I have to admit, from some of the brief discussions I had at the NonStop Symposium, they are all over this subject and that bodes well for the future of NonStop in Canada!

Just the Chilli Crabs?

2010-10-14T13:31:00.001-07:00

I’m often asked about the prospects for NonStop. Will there be growth in the coming year? Will more companies be buying NonStop? Will more NonStop servers be shipped to existing customers of NonStop? How big is the installed base and what’s driving the growth? Is it uniform around the globe, or are some regions doing a lot better than others?

In other words, once you get past HP and its marketing teams, how deep are the investments of others into the NonStop server and just as importantly, are new vendors being attracted to the platform by the realization that there’s indeed potential to build a thriving business! The good news here is that the resounding answer for almost all of these questions is “YES”!

I was reminded of this today as I came across the news announcement from comForte GmbH posted to the company’s web site. In the release the company announced the formation of comForte Asia Pte. Ltd., that will be based in Singapore. In 2009, comForte made an acquisition and established an office in Sydney, Australia, and with the new office in Singapore, according to the news release “comForte continues to invest in the Asia Pacific channel in order to better service its customers and to fuel its growth in the region.”

I have always liked Singapore and have always thought its location was ideal for any company’s regional headquarters – ever since Boeing introduced the 747-400, most European cities were in easy reach, and the east coast of Australia was less than 8 hrs away. In fact, my wife and I didn’t even hesitate to fly from the American west coast to Singapore one Thanksgiving … for just one evening of Chilli Crabs at one of the restaurants along Singapore’s famous south east coast!

The addition of an office in Singapore should be welcomed by most NonStop users. When it comes to pointing to concrete signs of growth, very little carries as much weight as the commitment by a vendor to a new regional presence. As the news release noted “Asia is a very important growth market for comForte and by opening the new office in Singapore we are increasing our geographical foot print and are getting closer to our customers and partners in the region."

As I meet with executives from the vendor community serving the NonStop market I see the news definitely getting better. Anyone checking out the posts to LinkedIn groups associated with NonStop can read how vendors saw a definite uptick in business following the recent NonStop Symposium – the number of users participating was certainly encouraging.

There are never any guarantees, of course. And there will be a lot of work involved. But I have to believe comForte will not be alone in Singapore, it probably isn’t already. Perhaps there’s more growth in the Asia Pac / Japan region than elsewhere, as more companies there buy NonStop, and then again, perhaps it’s just the Chilli Crabs after all. Either way, this is good news for all who follow the NonStop marketplace and comForte’s executives should be commended for continuing to build!

Cooperation and leverage ...

2010-10-08T12:09:00.001-07:00

There will be a lot of activity within the NonStop community, I expect over the next couple of months, as we enter the serious part of the year when companies put the finishing touches on new applications before the start of the holiday season. For vendors that are trying to finish the year on a positive footing, deals that are completed in this timeframe will help position them for stronger growth in the coming year.

Nowhere has this been more visible than in the days following the recent NonStop Symposium. As I follow-up with my clients, it’s become obvious to me that we are seeing the landscape changing rather dramatically, with customers investing in vendors, partnerships between vendors in different markets being created, and even stronger ties between the community’s primary vendor, HP, and the ecosystem of vendors that depend so strongly on them.

Mastercard has invested in Opus / ElectraCard Systems, a provider of payments platforms. HP has completed OEM deals with both comForte and XYPRO to plug holes in their security offerings. ACI has ditched its own manageability products in favor of more comprehensive offerings from Integrated Research (Prognosis). Even cooperation between former rivals seems to be fashionable lately, and a way to better penetrate a NonStop marketplace which is showing the first signs of improvement.

Throughout the meetings and events where HP has participated this year we have heard the key message of “Converge! Transform! Innovate!” but increasingly, when it comes to convergence and transformation, I have to think this is as much a message to its vendor community as it is to HP customers. After all, it’s really all about leverage! HP is hoping their customers turn to HP to help them along the path to innovation, leveraging their products, expertise and services. Likewise, increased cooperation between vendors benefits HP and their customers as the increased leverage cooperation produces substantially improved capabilities, not to mention support and services.

In my previous posting I wrote of how I have long thought that, as part of the bigger HP, the mission of the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) would become more focused on software, as hardware continues to commoditize. I wrote of how a senior manager with NED graphically portrayed the future of NED as a software-only organization. Perhaps this is not part of any immediate tactics that can be seen coming from the bigger HP but it definitely would not surprise any of us who work with HP on a regular basis.

I believe that in pursuing cooperation, partnership, and aggressively leveraging the ecosystem in which they operate, vendors will become stronger and develop the wherewithal to meet a growing community’s demands for products. Crossing into adjacent product spaces and improving the paths between them, with the tighter integration of security, manageability, operability, etc is a sound strategy and one that benefits all of HP’s customers. And that’s a new development every HP customer will surely welcome!

From the NonStop Symposium ...

2010-10-04T06:44:00.000-07:00

The NonStop Symposium has ended, but I can not get over the great time we all had in San Jose – the spirit of the community was equal to the best I have experienced in the past. Scattered around the exhibition hall were some thirty plus exhibitors, by my count, a far cry from the two NonStop vendors hard up against the very farthest exhibition wall that we saw at HPTF.

Talking with vendors in San Jose it was apparent that the event was very successful for them – the ComForte stand, located right at the main entrance to the exhibition hall, was lively, and well visited! I was able to catch up with a lot of old friends now part of comForte and the positive expectations for the remainder of the year was a much discussed topic.

There were more participants that had been expected and it will probably be reflected in many more positive comments made in other online forums. Anytime event planners develop a program for 500 participants that can attract a final audience of 600 plus, the impact is immediately visible. Indeed, Monday’s General Session had to be delayed almost thirty minutes as registration hustled to process all those trying to get in.

The senior management of the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) that were present for the very full general sessions and the break out tracks that followed, were impressed and came away with an understanding of how well the community supports these kind of product-centered events. I have long thought that, as part of the bigger HP, the mission of NED would become more focused on software, as hardware continues to commoditize. In a briefing with one member of the NonStop senior management, the potential future of NED as a software-only organization was spelt out in no uncertain manner.

Perhaps it’s then no surprise for any of us to read on Friday how HP announced the appointments of Leo Apotheker as their new CEO and of Ray Lane, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as their Chairman. Apotheker was a co-CEO of SAP and Lane was a co-CEO of Oracle and this gives HP every appearance of becoming a software business. Combined with the numerous papers produced by The Standish Group on the eventual appearance of The Megaplex, a pre-packaged hybrid computer running any mix of NonStop, Liux, Unix, and potentially Windows,– it certainly begins to look as this move by HP to more of a software focus is the case.

NED management was impressed with the turn out and was actively engaged with the community. But it also threw open the planning for next year’s event given that there would be no repeat of this year’s NonStop Symposium. Instead, the format would return to the big tent events we routinely see with HPTF. However, Winston Prather, NED’s boss, was impressed enough to recognize the value that comes from the visible energy a vibrant community generates, and he views its retention a key consideration for future HPF-like events – now being called Discover 2011!

I hope the HP team is successful on this account, as the NonStop Symposium was a great success, and I look forward to many more to come as HP works with the Connect organization to ensure the retention of such a vibrant user community! After all, the week was very special for me and came as a surprise to many of us who really warmed to the occasion.

SOA – and a cloudy future!

2010-09-24T07:05:00.001-07:00

I have just returned from a trip to Europe that included a number of “firsts” for me. This was the first trip where I drove a car in Germany, Italy, and France. It was my first time to see the lakes of northern Italy. It was the first time I swam in the Mediterranean along the French Riviera, the Côte d'Azur, and it was the first time I drove a car around the famous Nürburgring race track in the Eifel forest that separates Germany from Belgium. While I will not go into the specifics to do with any of these “firsts”, for readers who may be interested, check out the latest post to my social blog, Respect the ‘Ring!

The thought of “firsts”, however, takes me back to this year’s HPTF event in Las Vegas and to the presentations that were given. This is probably an opportune time to revisit some of the comments that were made as we head to the NonStop Symposium in San Jose. What really struck me was that, with the technology becoming available we can, for the first time, truly integrate our many, silo-ed business applications in a way that doesn’t require us to revisit the application code. It’s also the first time in a long while that many businesses will have the chance to lay the foundation for future business application deployment. It is, for many of us in IT, essentially the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to influence the direction of all future IT investments.

When I started to post blogs to this site the HPTF event was very much central to many of my editorials. Commentary I developed locked in on the messages first unveiled at the show that championed “Transform! Converge! Innovate!” and I have returned to this theme on several occasions. In the post of June 26, 2010 HPTF - Modernize! I wrote of how the message of transformation was deeply rooted in our desire, as IT professionals, to modernize and to break the innovation gridlock. Later, in the post of July 7, 2010 Just to keep the business functioning? I went on to observe how IT may be still uncertain about web services and the future of externalizing applications as web services, and yet, web services represent the best place to start on a path leading to the type of transformation and innovation corporations now are beginning to understand that they need!

You cannot separate the concept of modernization from initiatives to transform and to converge. Innovation, likewise, without having embraced modern technology, will be of little of value to companies expecting break-through solutions based on what they have relied upon in the past. In two previous blog posts on the topic of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) I looked at how the path to SOA had very humble beginnings and yet, looking further out, it is possibly the key to unlocking the potential that will arrive from hybrid packages and private clouds.

In the first part, of a three part SOA posting, August 27, 2010 SOA everything! Really? I reflected on how one company was looking to modernize the user experience and to do so, wanted to access NonStop applications from the industry-standard browser. I noted how today, SOA plays an important role in transforming business, as it has become the single most acceptable technology for integration and externalizing applications to the world at large. In the second part on SOA that I posted on September 4, 2010 There’s SOA and then, there’s Services! I pointed out how, as company’s IT looks ahead to possible greater deployment of private cloud computing, even more relevance will be placed on the need to externalize applications as services.

It should come as no surprise to anyone with ties to the technology underpinning business IT today that the simplest tasks often are embraced earliest. This has definitely been the case with modernization. as we modernized the user interface first leveraging the technology that blossomed with the arrival of the Internet. This too drove the requirements to modernize the network, and today we recognize the impact TCP/IP has had on business networks across all market segments. Even our approach to data, and our ability to perform analytics on petabytes of information, has seen us pursue the latest database technology, and modernizing the business applications themselves has seen companies transitioning to freshly-minted solutions even as they left behind relationships that have existed for decades.

In a recent conversation with Brad Poole of comForte, who will be giving a presentation on SOA and Web services at the NonStop Symposium next week, he talked of how he was beginning to see companies “mandate SOA for everything particularly when it comes to tying together once silo-ed applications.” While Brad will highlight some of the benefits of the CSL offerings, and the different performance options that come with CSL: he suggested that companies do see some relief ahead: “despite often marginal performance that can result, management persists with the understanding that, in time, Moore’s Law will come to their aid!” Common pipes or fabrics, and enterprise busses layered on top of Fiber Channel, InfiniBand, and in the case of NonStop, ServerNet, are relegating many former approaches to the legacy bin. According to Brad, and he will cover this in his presentation, “it’s been a gradual process but today, very few CIO’s want to chance their future to technologies other than SOA based on Web services!”

There’s no ducking the issue that IT needs to invest and be prepared for what clearly is coming down the path – cloud computing. Whether we elect to talk in terms of integration with public clouds or private, secured, enterprise clouds, investments we may make today that would steer us away from easily being able to accommodate this technology will have a very short lifecycle. Modernization can be considered an important attribute of Cloud Computing just as we consider SOA and Web services to be tangible examples of what is modern. Even if the only vehicle we use to integrate the services that are created is a service bus product, this still represents a dramatic step forward that clearly will assist those who elect to take the first step along this path towards greater innovation.

After all, while I experienced a number of “firsts”, businesses today stand on the threshold of being able to fully integrate their many application silo’s for the very first time. Surely, something we would not want to miss!

There's still so much more that can be done ...

2010-09-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

The NonStop Symposium is only a few weeks away. As I poll various stakeholders, the news looks a little better and the numbers are encouraging. From my own experience with ITUG Summits in early 2000s, the early figures always look pretty dismal only to produce a major correction four to five weeks out – and this year, “the registration curves” I am familiar with appear to be returning. In an email exchange with Wendy Bartlett, I was also encouraged to hear that there will be a sizeable foreign contingent participating as well.

In former times when the community came together under the banner of ITUG, there was always an air of excitement – new products, new solutions, new partners, new people. As I put this post together I am only a few hundred miles away from the venue of the 1992 European ITUG event held in Nice, France and the memories flood back of evenings around the bar with Jerry Peterson, Randy Baker, and many others from Tandem and the ISV community. I was still a part of the DSM organization at the time, working on NonStop NET/MASTER but it was during that event that I interviewed with Chris Rooke and Gary Sabo for a marketing position that led me to join Chris a few weeks later.

As fate would have it, I suspect Chris is only a couple of hundred kilometers away somewhere in Germany and if the planets and moon align just so, we may pass each other in a few days time, in a blur so as to speak, on one of Germany’s primary autobahn’s – the A5! We may even be able to hook up for a quick beer and pork knuckle. Friendships that develop at user events, such as we had with ITUG, seem to last for a lifetime and the bonds that were created around the Tandem computer have proved particularly strong.

We are no longer part of a Tandem community but part of a much larger HP community. In particular, the Business Critical Server group, within the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking business unit that is a major part of Enterprise Business within HP. In other words, now renamed NonStop, the Tandem many of us grew so familiar with is just another server offering within a gigantic $50(plus) Billion group within HP – a position many of us lose site of from time to time.

The significance? A consistent thought now across the many stake holders that make up the NonStop users community is just how exactly does any company influence a $130(plus) Billion corporation? Let alone an individual? What does it take to get the good ship HP to alter course and what chance is there of anyone on the bridge ever seeing me afloat in the sea of IT? Just as sailors try to avoid the giant container ships that ply the international sea channels, are we better off just getting the heck out of the way?

I’ve spent a lot of time driving through townships and small villages as I transit from one major city to the next and so far covered more than 1,500 miles. Whole communities that have simply grown up around a junction in the road or an intersection of a byway with a river, where you can see the church in the center of town, the castle on the hilltop, and the small square where everyone gathers. The residents of these towns are part of a region that is part of a country that today, is part of the European Union. With a population now greater than the United States and an economy that, in good times certainly, looks every bit as large and as robust as that in the United States. And yet, the voice of the township is never lost in the bigger picture – there’s always an ability to influence policy and to orchestrate change, as and when it’s needed.

Today, I sense the user communities behave in much the same fashion. It’s all too easy to just look at a large vendor, like HP, IBM, or Microsoft and concede that there’s little that can be done. Can policy be influenced or a change be orchestrated any less than before, when the community was developing around the Tandem computer? Or has HP become way too big for us? As I head to the NonStop Symposium I am going to be paying a lot of attention to just how much engagement develops between all of the community stakeholders including HP.

In the past we had so many users participating in the process but today, and in many respects, thankfully, vendors have become a lot more active. I put this down to the thinning of the user ranks that has occurred over the past decade where barely a NonStop customer has the staff in place to cover the basics (of operation, maintenance, and support) let alone large development groups with enough capacity to let individuals actively participate in the running and oversight of a community. Very few companies today can afford to give individuals the time that they would need to be effective and to this end, we now see so many ISV’s holding regional events, staffing registration desks and monitoring sessions. And I am sure that this will be very visible in San Jose in September – indeed, the very occurrence of this NonStop Symposium came about following a gathering of ISVs concerned about the future of user events.

Yes, we can still influence HP and yes, we can be agents of change. The forum may be far different from what we are used to and the community leadership may be struggling for an identity. But HP is still made up of individuals – managers and executives and if enough of them hear the same message, it will generate review and consideration. The communities past complaints about pricing have made an impact and the cries about the proprietary nature of the platform have been heard. Tandem is long gone, in many respects (and with no disrespect, either) and today we have NonStop and the community is the better for it! As we plough deeper into services models and await the emergence of enterprise cloud computing, there’s much that we should be lobbying for and I for one, will not be quiet on any of these points.

My time in Europe will be over shortly and I will head back to prepare for the NonStop Symposium. And as I do so, I will be acutely aware of how modern and progressive the NonStop platform has become and how the community had so much to do with this transition. Let’s just see what happens in the coming week and let’s not be passive about this after all, I see a future where NonStop is present in every platform HP ships!

There’s SOA and then, there’s Services!

2010-09-04T09:17:00.001-07:00

Since posting to the blog last week and developing discussions within a number of LinkedIn groups, I have talked to several comForte folks about their take on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The perspectives and points of view that they shared while talking about their Client Server Link (CSL) products made it clear why this has become such a popular topic and why so many companies are depending upon the NonStop platform and view it as crucial component in their modernization efforts.

Today, the hardware supporting the NonStop platform is as modern as any currently available. Users new to the BladeSystem, and to running NonStop applications on Blades, are early participants in a new wave of computing where the basic building blocks are commodity items, and where the packaging can be shared with many different operating systems. Eventually, the expectation across the industry is that manufacturers, like HP, will soon be able to offer just a small number of generic blade packages capable of being installed in standard chassis and pulling power and cooling from a shared chassis infrastructure, and where the prices will be significantly lower than what we see today.

However, the story is less than glowing when it comes to software and the take-up of what is generally considered representative of today’s modern software product offerings. For instance, so many solutions running on NonStop continue to feature COBOL and TAL modules and data is still pulled from Enscribe files. While Pathway continues to evolve and reinvent itself, underpinning the containers and run-time environments mandated by Java, J2EE, and .Net programming models, SQL should be the preferred end goal for all architects providing oversight for new projects featuring the NonStop server.

Whenever I post to his blog, I return to LinkedIn and start discussions on as many groups as I can to promote the storyline associated with each post. One group I always update is the LinkedIn group, Tandemworld.Net. Stephan Amsbary was very quick to comment this week on how “SOA is the ‘current best’ model (when applied to) loosely-coupled / reusable architectures. Yes, it’s a natural for Tandem, (oops, I mean NonStop) ... We were doing this already with Pathway's Requestor/Server model.” In other words, SOA offers an almost immediate big bang for the buck when it comes to externalizing existing Pathway servers as Web services for adoption within an SOA deployment.

However, while I have referenced Stephen’s quote in an upcoming article in Tandemworld.Net it was an earlier comment Stephan made that really did get my attention. In Stephen’s comment he wrote of how SOA and Web services are not one and the same, explaining how many of us continue “making a common mistake - they are not synonymous … SOA is just that, a Service Oriented (based) Architecture, (and) it can use any exchange vehicle it likes. Web Services (and XML-messaging) is just one way to execute it. SOA continues to get a bad rap because of this confusion. I am running into this misconception …”

After reading Stephan’s comments my thoughts turned to cars, and the choice of cars we have given different situations. We would no more drive a high performance Dodge Viper to be safe on a highway, as we would an ever reliable Bentley to the convenience store for a head of lettuce. And we would not drive an American full size SUV on the race track. On the other hand, the SUV feels safe on the highway, the Bentley provides a solid platform that can go the distance on trips across the country, while the Viper revels at the race track! Security? Reliability? Performance? Each requirement or necessity steers us towards a different vehicle.

When it comes to planning for SOA, in the most recent discussion I had with the folks at comForte, after last week’s post to the blog, our exchanges followed a similar path. The choice of technology you deploy, as you externalize business logic as services, can often be associated with other equally important considerations. As I observed in the previous post, there are alternatives to full Web services deployment and where the performance gains quickly outweigh any advantages that global standardization on SOAP may provide. I had remarked on how this becomes more obvious in exchanges between applications residing within the data center or where the applications only need to be externalized for in-house usage.

When it comes to implementations of SOA, the choice of partner becomes extremely relevant. Having the products that can provide an easy way to rejuvenate green-screens through screen-scraping technology, for instance, as comForte offers today with JPath,will be welcomed by companies capable of only making a minimal investment, but in terms of application modernization, its value is lessening with time. This has as much to do with training, as it still requires developers to be aware of the NonStop server, and today one of the main advantages of implementing SOA is that it reduces the need to be aware of where the applications resides.

Returning to Stephan’s comments, there’s clearly the choice to use SOAP / XML for the underpinnings of a SOA implementation, but there are choices. The architecture is proving extremely accommodating and shouldn’t be thought of as restricting the actions that can be taken. When comForte aquired the CSL product suite, it broadened the scope of possible implementations offerings that they could market. Coming from green screen deployments isn’t the only path leading to SOA, and there’s even more users with a variety of client–server implementations.

CSL offers substantially more return on investment as it offers three distinct approaches and companies can start out small and grow at their own pace as they develop the expertise. CSL provides an API that client developers can use directly to interface with Pathway servers. CSL also provides a stub that’s generated out of the CSL Studio product which greatly reduces the amount of client development involved. In both cases, it is the native Pathway message that is sent from the client so some awareness of Pathway on NonStop will be apparent. However, in terms of performance both, usage of the low-level API as well as the code (in the form of a code stub generated by CSL), will require a lot less CPU resources than other SOA options.

However, should the decision be to go with SOAP and the CPU resources are available, CSL SOAP provides a product for externalizing existing Pathway applications as services, as well as any new Java, J2EE, or even .Net applications that may be present on the NonStop server. In all cases it will be SOAP messages sent over HTTP connections to the NonStop server where no knowledge of Pathway on NonStop will be expected of client developers. With CSL, the NonStop as a server (and even as a client) will honor the contract for services that the exchange of Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) files represents.

As a model for exchanging data and leveraging business logic, the services model offers considerable value, and as company’s IT looks ahead to possible greater deployment of private cloud computing, even more relevance will be placed on the need to externalize applications as services. For those companies just concerned over the need for modernization of their software, and would like to ensure that they retain options when it comes to trade-offs between performance, reliability and safety, the choice of products does exist. For the NonStop community, the presence of comForte’s CSL products caters to such companies and shares their concerns.

SOA everything! Really?

2010-08-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

Late in 1999, while I was still working for Insession, our pre-sales group advised me of an opportunity they had run across working with a telephone company. At the time Insession’s sole product was ICE, an implementation on NonStop of IBM’s SNA APPN stack, and the opportunity involved considering the support of a non-SNA protocol as part of ICE, as well as services needed to pull apart the message payloads that would then flow in and out of the stack.

The prospect wanted to modernize the user experience and to do so, wanted to access NonStop applications from out of an industry-standard browser. They wanted Insession to add support for new protocols to ICE including HTTP and HTML. The rest is history: WebGate was created and went on to not only include the support of a HTTP Server but also support for a SOAP Server as well. This represented the first tentative steps taken to ensure applications running on the NonStop server could be easily integrated with the applications on clients, as well as on other servers, using modern user interfaces.

Today the NonStop community has many options available when it comes to modernization and yet, embracing SOA and utilizing modern protocols and services like SOAP and Web services, has only made its presence felt at a relative handful of NonStop servers. There are still many IT executives who just aren’t aware of the capabilities on offer or have elected not to include the NonStop server in their plans for SOA. Sad, considering the NonStop server is perhaps the most appropriate choice when it comes to aggregating information and ensuring mission-critical data is never lost or compromised.

I have already touched briefly on the subject of SOA and Web services in postings to this blog. In the posting of July 7th “Just to keep the business functioning?” I wrote of how the “services” model evolved and, very quickly, astute companies realized that adding Web services powered front-ends to legacy applications bought them time to selectively upgrade business solutions while facilitating modern usage of solutions that kept the business running … (becoming) an effective way of externalizing a wealth of applications to audiences that hadn’t even existed back in the early ‘90s – the business could now go “on-line” and compete globally essentially for free, thanks to the easily accessible internet!

NonStop servers have undergone a tremendous transformation of late and the support of run-time environments, including both Java and the .Net models, is empowering many companies to take even greater interest in SOA. Businesses that had relied on terminal emulation and application pass-through are beginning to capitalize on the wealth of product offerings, so much so, that of late the discussion has turned to whether there’s a need to externalize everything as a service! After all, once the flexibility that comes with SOA becomes known, architects begin to consider using SOA for any and all interactions no matter how short the connections may be.

Where should the lines be drawn and can you go too far in pursuing a services approach when it comes to externalizing your business logic to customers, business partners, and the world in general? Should SOA and Web services also be extended to include inter-system access to business logic even by adjacent servers in the data center?

In the posting of July 7th, I went on to add Web services are not a panacea, much less a silver bullet, and there remains a need to be judicious over when to deploy Web services, but for companies looking to reverse the 70:30 ratio (support for legacy systems versus pursuing innovation), Web services represent the best place to start on a path leading to the type of transformation, and innovation, business is so anxiously looking for!

I have since had a number of discussions following that post, and I have heard of many companies looking to balance the productivity gains that they see coming with SOA and Web services deployments against the performance criteria they also need to meet as part of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It’s no secret that moving to Web services can generate message sizes that are ten, and often a hundred times, bigger than the original message size. Bandwidth capacity has certainly grown dramatically over the past decade and the arrival of multi-core chip technology made a contribution to how we can handle bigger workloads – but are we pushing a model best serving one purpose into areas where it may be less than the optimal solution? Are we trying to push the proverbial square peg into too many round holes?

In my most recent discussions with comForte presales folks I have begun to see the value that comes with having multiple solutions for better externalizing business logic. Where this becomes more obvious is in exchanges between applications residing within the data center, or where the applications only need to be externalized to in-house usage. There are alternatives to full Web services deployment and the performance gains quickly outweigh any advantages that global standardization on SOAP may provide. Being able to take advantage of different options and leveraging different feature sets can bring with it considerable benefits.

In the latest paper from The Standish Group, “Roadmap to the Megaplex”, you will find a reference in Step 2: User Experience Modernization that suggest there’s two ways to modernize the user experience – rewrite all the screens using a GUI creation tool for instance, or use a conversion tool. There is even more that can be done, and The Standish Group calls out four distinct usage scenarios in this paper – reuse (of what’s already deployed including user screens and inputs), integration (of the old with the new and where current business logic is leveraged in support of new applications), migration (when it’s time to phase out a legacy application in favor of a new product), and core (a reference to where critical business logic and data can be externalized to new architectures including J2EE and ESB implementations).

Modernization of applications will never be pursued by everyone in the same way – the value and history of the business logic and data involved may dictate quite different approaches. Sometimes the extensions to Web services considered important to some companies, including WS-Security and WS-Addressing that benefit greatly when SOAP messages are exchanged between clients and servers, may offer other companies no discernable benefits whatsoever. Worse, the fine granularity that comes with the exchange of SOAP messages may overwhelm the network bandwidth and CPU capacities of the systems involved.

When it comes to modernization and enriching the user experience, SOA will play an important role in transforming business, of that I have no doubt. It’s become the single most acceptable technology for integration and externalizing applications to the world at large. But the degree of adoption will be predicated by where we come from and the work that’s already been done in separating the business logic and data from presentation services. SOA comes with a price and it may not always be the best choice; knowing there’s options and ways to mix and match adjacent technologies can only help businesses better chart their own course to becoming more innovative and competitive.

Still like all that's big?

2010-08-20T06:16:00.001-07:00

Living in America, it’s hard to miss all the “excitement” that the coming mid-term elections are generating, even this early in the process. While some of it can be amusing, its nothing more than same-o, same-o, with little to separate the merits of either candidate’s platform, and for the most part they are succeeding only in turning-off the majority of their constituency. It’s big politics, however, and with the current economic downturn showing every sign of further stumbling even though the economy looked to be spluttering back to life, it is hard to escape the constant barrage of messages that pour into our television sets.

I am left standing on the sidelines through all of this. Through a quirk in the way immigrants are treated, as a “green card” holder I am not allowed to vote in the US for the past twenty years, and as a non-resident of Australia I haven’t been able to vote in Australia either. On the world stage, I have no vote and cannot participate in the most basic of democratic principles available to us all, having essentially slipped through the fingers of big politics.

When it comes to technology it’s hard to escape big IT! In a recent email exchange with a former colleague I asked him whether he thought the industry was headed for a period of decomposition, but his quick response was a resounding no! Everyone today loves big IT vendors, it would appear, they have the wherewithal to pull technology offerings together and drive out the complexity along with the costs. What worries most CIOs is the ineffectiveness in tying everything together. Models based on the integration of best-of-breed have been put back on the shelf. Software, hardware, middleware – it’s all proving a bit much, and for the CIOs, it would be a huge benefit if they could just turn to one vendor that has the big-picture view comprehensively addressed, and have their trucks turn up and unload a tightly integrated, fully-working, all-singing, all-dancing, solution that meets all CIO’s business needs.

Even as the industry appears to be on the threshold of even further consolidation, where only four or five big vendors, including IBM, HP, Oracle/Sun, Cisco, and perhaps Microsoft, remain capable of delivering integrated solutions for the enterprise, I’m not quite prepared to rule out opportunities for growth among the remaining smaller vendors. They may not be candidates for acquisition in the short term, but even with the push to standardize on fewer integrated stacks, there will be plenty of opportunities to help navigate the complexities that will surely remain. After all, once a decision has been taken to, say, rely on the complete offering of Oracle / Sun, getting there is going to present considerable challenges.

Having written this, I can’t ignore the passionate declaration of Star Wars’ Princess Leia, held captive on the Empire’s Death Star under the command of Governor Tarkin as he prepares to destroy planets harboring renegades, “the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Through the melodrama this represents is the reality that there’s every chance the big vendors will miss opportunities to innovate simply because they lack the ability to mobilize in support of the little things! Let alone provide adequate services across the big solutions they offer.

In a back-page editorial in the August 9, 2010, issues of InformationWeek, writer Art Wittmann looks at whether Oracle will do a lot better in the marketplace now that it owns Sun. “IT pros will have to deal with the Oracle sales team and after-sales support. And this is where the problem lies. Most survey comments that relate to sales portray the Oracle team as arrogant and the Sun team as inept. But far worse, every single comment from Sun customers pertaining to service said that service on their Sun products had gotten demonstrably worse since the merger,” Wittman reports.

“There’s no doubt that IT organizations value having just one ‘throat to choke,’ but if you’re already doing some choking now and aren’t seeing satisfactory results, why would you risk a purchase as strategic as something like an Exadata (database appliance) machine? At least if you integrate the software and hardware yourself, you can try to play the two vendors against each other,” Wittmann wryly observes. And this is where I see the big picture losing some of its shine. All-singing, all-dancing, productions should be left to Broadway or Hollywood directors!

And for me, it will continue to come back to issues with databases and networks, for the most part. While my immediate past had been heavily focused on databases, it’s the network that poses the more interesting challenge, in my opinion. There’s no question that TCP/IP dominates all discussions these days – but X.25, SNA, SNA-APPN, and even BiSynch and Asynch, are all proving annoyingly difficult to shake off.

For the past couple of months I have been heavily involved with Infrasoft’s uLinga, as it works out the kinks in moving from SNA and SNA-APPN to TCP/IP across the data center, whether the applications residing on a system adjacent to NonStop are CICS or IMS. As I have been looking closer, I am more than a little surprised at just how much SNA remains. I am just as surprised at how much of a company’s ongoing dependence on SNA seems to involve complex network structures interfacing to business partners and customers that would have moved on from SNA a long time ago if it could have been done more easily.

In the coming months I will be talking to a number of parties looking at ways to simplify the transition, and the challenges they create for all involved. I will be working with a small number of boutique vendors specializing in this area. With all the posturing that’s going on among the big vendors, and despite their violent agreement on the key components that constitute standard stacks, there’s just some things best left to be pursued by gifted individuals from smaller companies.

Slipping through the fingers of big vendors, many small vendors are taking advantage of the opportunities these challenges provide, and it doesn’t bring with it any fears of annihilation at the hand of those carrying fearsome death-rays, but rather, are proving to be the great help for many corporations anxious to move on. There’s a couple of interesting Proof of Concepts (PoCs) about to get under way that I plan on watching and if all goes well, I will cover shortly, but for the moment, I’m going to sit back and watch another politician promise me a brighter future!