Monday, April 23, 2012

Shedding Some Light on SCTUG


At the spring SCTUG we had the pleasure of having Randy Meyer, Director NonStop Product Management, Strategy & Technology-HP, do a presentation on the “Nonstop roadmap for the next 3 years and beyond”. This presentation focused on data center elasticity, converging systems onto both the private and public cloud, and touched on their relationship with Intel and how that influences changes in the future.

One very interesting bit of information Randy mentioned was that they are currently in the works to sell several  blades to a few very large mobile phone carriers in Japan. The purpose of these systems was to create a gateway to allow U.S. phones to work in Japan, creating essentially a “GSM Phone Gateway”.

Our next presentation was done by Randy Ireland and Khody Khodayari of NTS, where they showed off their new performance analyzer, NTS Bridge. It collects all of its metrics from the NonStop using under-the-covers system calls and uploads it into the NTS group. It then analyzes the data, running it through multiple sets of analyzers, then it compiles a report within minutes and sends it back to the customer.  The report outlines possible pitfalls, system degradation and can pinpoint system issues and specific timeframes, which allows the customer to play back the data to make tuning decisions. They also build a gadget that shows the status of every NonStop in your infrastructure. It is no different than a system monitoring system, but they condensed it down to a Windows desktop gadget. One thing they kept pointing out was that these systems were basically built by kids fresh out of school without any NonStop experience. The presenters reiterated several times that you don’t need to have NonStop experience to work on NonStop.

Justin Simond’s, Master Technologist Enterprise Architect - HP, presentation "Migrating from Oracle to Nonstop" was focused on the external costs and overhead of running on Oracle vs. the Nonstop. He highlighted several benefits of running dbs on NonStop, lower DBA costs, size of the database, number of transactions etc. This was certainly the most technically detailed of the presentations.

Jay Price
Sales Representative
XYPRO Technology Corporation
www.xypro.com