Connect NonStop Technical Bootcamp 2020
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Chairman's Chat - Autumn/Fall 2019
October is nearly upon us and the weather has definitely taken a downturn recently here in UK, so won’t be too long before the leaves fall off the trees and the clocks go back. Of course that also means it’s time for this Autumn/Fall edition of the BITUG Newsletter which we will issue shortly.
It seems a very long time ago now, but for those that missed it we hosted a very successful European NonStop Technical Conference (ETBC) in Edinburgh in May. This was our 2nd Large event we have hosted (previous was eBITUG in London on 2017) and it was again a major success and am pleased that BITUG will again host such a conference in London in 2021.
Coming up soon will of course be the annual Connect Technical Bootcamp in San Francisco. A number of the committee including myself will attend and we are all looking forward to hear how ‘NonStop’ has done over the past year worldwide, any new announcements and future plans for the platform now that it’s a ‘Software’ business only. I for one am very curious to hear of any real-world vNS installations in past year and if vNS is on any NonStop organisations radar.
If you don’t get chance to get to TBC (and I know it gets harder each year for many Nonstoppers to get Travel authorisation) then fear not, as BITUG will bring you an update on all the latest news at our upcoming Little SIG on December 3rd kindly hosted at Barclays Bank’s offices in London. We have a draft agenda for this one-day event which includes updates from HPE, as well as a presentation piece on Monitoring NonStop estate using Elastic Stack, a piece on MQ v8 replication and best Practises as well as a session on recovering your NonStop from Bare Metal which is becoming a requirement in the financial sector in particular. Registration is open now, so please go to https://www.bitug.com/little-sig-2019 for further details and to register.
This will be my final Chairman’s chat for 2019 as my realm of Chairman comes to a close in December. It has been a great pleasure serving the BITUG membership as Chairman this year and am pleased that we have only seen membership grow. Of course if you know of anyone who is not yet a member of BITUG (remember it is free for NonStop user base) then please pass this Newsletter along and get them to sign up at www.bitug.com/join.
Finally a Big Thank You from me to rest of my volunteer committee, our Vendor community for their support and of course you, our members. We can’t run BITUG without you.
I look forward to seeing you at TBC or our upcoming Little SIG.
Collin Yates
Technical Director
TCM
BITUG Chairman 2019
Email: collin.yates @ bitug.com
Chairman Chat - Summer 2019
Summer is coming!
Hard to believe but summer is upon us already here in UK. It only feels like a few weeks ago that we hosted the first annual European NonStop Boot Camp (ETBC) in my (near) home city of Edinburgh. We had around 230 like-minded NonStop professionals turn up and by all accounts it was a very well received event. Thanks go to my team of committee volunteers who helped put the event together. It was a great mix of presentations by HPE, Vendor sponsors and users together with a couple of evenings of fun and entertainment. Not to mention of course a pre-conference Golf Day hosted and sponsored by TCM, which all who attended said was brilliantly put together. We were also incredibly lucky with the weather - it was warm, sunny and not a breath of wind - all three not particularly typical of Scotland! If you attended we hope you had a great time and look forward to seeing you again in 2021 when BITUG will next host the ETBC. If you need to convince your bosses it’s worthwhile going, then please just take a look at some of the feedback we received which you can find here.
BITUG now turn our attention to our Little SIG in December. This will be a one-day none-sponsored event held on December 3, at Barclay’s Bank offices in Canary Wharf, London. It’s mainly for our UK-base members, but all are welcome. We usually have an update from any announcements made at the TBC which is held in San Francisco the previous month. We’ll provide more details and agenda a bit closer to time, so keep an eye out in your mailbox.
BITUG is a non-profit user group – one of the largest NonStop user groups worldwide – brought to you by a very dedicated committee made up of users and vendors like yourselves. Without the support of you the users, the vendor community (our sponsors) and of course HPE we could not exist. Thank you all.
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you all that membership to BITUG is FREE for NonStop users and very reasonably priced for organisations and vendors. If you know someone involved in NonStop and not yet a member, please do get them to join by going to our website join link: https://www.bitug.com/join/.
We also welcome any and all feedback, ideas, suggestions etc., anything which you think will benefit the NonStop community. Please feel free to drop me a line at collin.yates @ bitug.com at any time.
Have a great Summer! (or Winter if you are down-under)
Collin Yates
BITUG Chairman 2019 and Technical Director, TCM
Email: collin.yates @ bitug.com
Chairman's Chat Q1 2019
Happy New Year to all!
As the incoming Chairman for BITUG in 2019, I thought I would get in early and wish you all a very Happy New Year, health and happiness for 2019.
I’d firstly like to thank Damian for all his hard work as Chairman last year and I hope I can continue the momentum and enthusiasm that he put in. It’s also a time on behalf of committee to say thank you and goodbye for now to Dave Ross and Dan Lewis too. As long-time committee members, due to other commitments and ventures they have decided to leave the committee. All the best, both.
To boost the team, we welcomed two new committee members at end of last year– David Worrall from HSBC and John Bycroft from comforte. Please join me in welcoming them again.
If you are interested in joining the BITUG Committee, please get in contact with us via website or my email below.
BITUG is a non-profit user group – one of the largest NonStop user groups worldwide – brought to you by a very dedicated committee made up of users and vendors like yourselves. Without the support of you the users, the vendor community (our sponsors) and of course HPE we could not exist. Thank you all.
The NonStop product family has changed over the past few years and I firmly believe it’s never been in a better place – with huge opportunities to expand into new markets and as a long-term ‘Tandem-ite’ (old NonStoppers for you young’uns) I am very excited for the future. It’s great to hear (and meet) new NonStoppers and with the likes of the new NonStop Under-40’s group presided over presently by Daniel Craig am sure that enthusiasm will continue long after us ‘oldies’ retire! (www.nsu40.com)
Of course, with all this change in the NonStop world taking place, that’s where user groups like ourselves come into their own. To help deliver the latest news and bring users and vendors together in one place.
This year I am very excited as BITUG will be hosting another eBITUG conference. The eBITUG 2019 NonStop Symposium will be the largest NonStop event held in Europe this year. It will be held in my (near) current home town, the city of Edinburgh in UK from May 13th to May 15th. A full 2-2.5-day agenda of presentations, networking, and latest HPE News, not to mention fun and frivolity Scottish-style is to be had by all. We expect upwards of 200+ users, vendors and HPE folks to attend and we hope that we see you there too. While our vendor sponsors cover most of the cost, as in case of eBITUG 2017 there will be a nominal attendee fee. We expect to keep attendee fee at same rate as in 2017. Registration, agenda, accommodation details etc., will be distributed shortly. Keep an eye out in your email inbox as well as on the BITUG website (www.bitug.com) under ’events’. Registration will be open soon.
We’ll also deliver a Little SIG, single-day event as usual in London in December. We’ll announce the date, agenda, location etc. in due course.
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you all that membership to BITUG is FREE for NonStop users and very reasonably priced for organisations and vendors. If you know someone involved in NonStop and not yet a member, please do get them to join by going to our website join link: https://www.bitug.com/join/.
We welcome members from all over the world and all members will receive at least 2 x Newsletters full of NonStop news from HPE and vendors each year, free attendance to BIG SIG and Little SIG’s as well as other announcements and freebies.
We also welcome any and all feedback, ideas, suggestions etc., anything which you think will benefit the NonStop community. Please feel free to drop me a line at collin.yates @ bitug.com at any time.
So without further ado, on behalf of myself and the committee, we hope to see as many of you as possible at our eBITUG NonStop Symposium in May.
Many thanks,
Collin Yates
BITUG Chairman 2019 and Technical Director, TCM
Email: collin.yates @ bitug.com
Chairman's Chat Q3 2018
It’s not coming home.. And what has happened to all the user groups.?
BITUG Chairman’s Chat Q3 2018
So it’s not coming home… but the team did us proud and what a wonderful early summer of football, sun and beer it’s been. Russia has done itself proud and despite all the hysteria and fake news circulating prior to the event, everything went according to plan and without incident. The teams and the fans had a great time, well done Russia on a tremendous World Cup.
After the World Cup my mind turned to BITUG’s own upcoming events. BITUG will be hosting the 2019 European NonStop Symposium in Edinburgh Scotland next year. This will be our first ever event in Edinburgh and we are all very excited. The event eBITUG or for short or #EBITUG on twitter; runs from the Evening of Monday May 13th to 17:00 on Wednesday May 15th 2019 and will be held and the world famous Sheraton Grand Hotel Edinburgh.
Mark your calendars now and keep an eye on our website for more details of what promises to be a fantastic event. But don’t forget we still have the BITUG little SIG to go this year. This will be held at the offices of Lloyd s Bank on December 4th, again check our website for agenda and the signup page very soon.
So, back to Russia or other countries in eastern Europe. Do we have any NonStop colleagues based in these countries.? Surly we must or is HPE NonStop is a sanctioned item.? Perhaps they are running old Cyclones and S series systems because of sanctions maybe not? Do these folks have a user group like BITUG.? I decided to try and find out. I also wondered which other European and Nordic user groups I should talk to about our event…
Following a period of brief searching (ok yes googling) I came across an article.. “I've always been a car nut.” By Glenn Garrahan, Director HPE Business. This was published recently as part of the NonStop insider series. As a fellow “car nut” the title grabbed me straight away. Here’s mine, a modified TVR S3 V6, born in Blackpool UK circa 1992 so she’s getting on a bit but every journey is an adventure, its not how fast they go… its how they go fast that matters.
I’m not sure this is normal, but when I get home from a drive my Gear S3 watch congratulates me on the great work out. lols…
I’d almost forgotten I was researching European NonStop user groups but towards the end of the article was a helpful list of all the international user groups. I couldn’t find any web site links but, hey that’s what Google is for. So, I set off on my internet journey in hope of making new NonStop friends and contacts within Europe, both West and East.
Ok, number one ITUG.. Hmm seems a bit weird, isn't that Connect now.? Best check Google and of course we come back to connect.. No surprise. let's move on. RTUG, Russian Tandem Users Group, ok now we are talking. Into Google she goes… No RTUG website but a useful link to an older Tandem World article with a list of NonStop user groups and this time with links to the web sites, this was just the thing I needed...
Huh.. ITUG again, 404 no surprise I guess. RTUG, 404 on the Connect website. Well what did I expect. must be sanctions. Try Google again, nothing. So they got to Google too. This is disappointing, but I can’t speak Russian anyway.
Onwards, FINTUG now this could be exciting, its is actually cheaper to fly from Finland (and most northern European / Nordic countries) to Edinburgh than it is to London so those folks may really like our location for eBITUG, but another 404 on the Connect Website, ok Google, but this only brought me some FIN TUG boat hats. I prefer “supreme”…
So, I digress, back to the list, VNUG, The Viking NonStop User Group from the Nordic region, again a Connect 404, this Tandem word article must be old and it is. I will need to rely on Google after all. http://www.vnug.biz/news.htm is there but has not been updated since 2017, the site is still advertising our eBITUG 2017 event. Thanks guys. More searching reveals a page on the Connect site advertising the VNUG 2018 event in September, I wonder if I could find an excuse to go. The VNUG events have always had a good reputation and this could be a good opportunity to promote eBITUG 2019 while enjoying Stockholm. More searching reveals that unfortunately this years VNUG event had to be cancelled due to lack of support. What a shame and what is happening here.? Ok onwards through the old names, ITALIATUG Italian NonStop Users Group, Connect 404… and this Italian Tug Boat picture.
Next GTUG, well I know our friends at GTUG are still going strong so no problems, this years European Symposium was hosted by GTUG in Leipzig, Germany.
FTUG, the French Tandem User Group, I know this has long since dissolved.
Next BITUG, this list is clearly not in alphabetical order, but we are still here and going strong.
This was a sobering exercise, it looks like currently only GTUG and BITUG remain in Europe from a list of what was once 7 strong, we sincerely hope VNUG recovers and is once again able to support a user event.
All and any NonStop Vikings, Russians, NonStop users, or vendors from all over Europe and indeed worldwide are welcome to eBITUG Edinburgh. At out last eBITUG in 2017 we even had visitors from New Zealand.
But as the above shows user groups are like pubs, muscles and brain cells, use them or one day find them gone.
I appreciate that for all of us travel expenses and days out of the office are a challenge especially when it comes to attending conference events like BITUG and we understand this, Personally, I was unable to secure the expense of GTUG attendance this year. This was a real shame as GTUG always put on a fantastic show and feedback from this year’s event showed 2018 was a strong event as expected. I consider these events “education” and required to keep my skills and contacts relevant. NonStop is moving fast folks.
For many European NonStop users Boot Camp in San Francisco is only a dream, this is where the regional user groups fit in. The European NonStop event, either hosted by BITUG or GTUG will be the only place left in Europe where NonStop users will be able to see and meet senior HPE product people and engineers who will present the HPE NonStop Road map and Performance updates in person. Real opportunity for question and answers exist in these smaller regional settings.
Of course, on years where we are not holding the European NonStop Symposium we will still hold Big and Little SIG events where we are supported by the great people at HPE UK and Europe. This events still represent a fantastic opportunity for dialogue direct with HPE. Following the upcoming Little SIG we will be hosting a free half day education session focused on Virtual NonStop at the HPE offices London and remember that attendance is free for Little SIG, Education Day and Big SIG events.
However, because of the scale and costs involved in the eBITUG event we do need to charge a small fee for attendance, but not in the same league as other international events, this will be £150 per attendee at the early bird rate and £250 thereafter.
There is one way to secure free attendance (and maybe more) for the upcoming European NonStop Symposium in Edinburgh, come and share a story with the NonStop community, tell us something, user stories are what truly unites the user community, what went right, what went wrong, how you averted disaster or performed a zero-downtime migration. If you have a story you think would be of interest to other NonStop users and perhaps HPE then let us know. We are a friendly bunch and who couldn’t do with working on their presentation skills. So, if you can present a story you will get free attendance at eBITUG.
Support your user groups by attending our events, the more end users we have attending the more vendors want to come, the more end users want to come. this is a cyclical thing. Vendors supporting community supporting the vendors. It is just like that pub we all used to like in the village that closed. when did we last go there and support it?
The next BITUG event in London will be our Little SIG on December the 4th kindly hosted by Lloyds Bank in London. Little SIG will feature, a short “Crypto Currency Update” by me (Damian) and additionally either a “Java for production OLTP” or perhaps “Build API web services in NodeJS in under an hour” presentation / demonstration again by me, session, let me know if you have a preference.
The Little SIG event will also feature a “UK Terrorism Update”” update session and a session featuring IBM MQ 8.
In addition to the above we will of course feature the HPE NonStop roadmap and post Bootcamp update sessions. This will a packed day and I hope to see many of you there in December.
On Wednesday December 5th we will host an vNonStop Education half day at the HPE Offices London.
One last thing list of European HPE NonStop user groups:
British Isles NonStop User Group, BITTUG, www.bitug.com
German NonStop User Group, GTUG, www.gtug.de
I will sign off this Chairman’s Chat by welcoming two new committee members to BITUG, one a name familiar to many John Bycroft of Comforte and another who is new to NonStop but eager to learn and I am sure will bring a great perspective to the BITUG committee, David Worral from HSBC
Thanks
Damian
Damian Ward - BITUG Chairman 2018 (chairman@bitug.com)
Spring 2018 Newsletter
Click the image to download a PDF of the Spring 2018 Newsletter
Chairman's Chat
Looking back; 2017 was a fantastic and landmark year for BITUG, we hosted the first European NonStop SIG in the UK since 2007 (Brighton). At this European SIG event held at the Doubletree Tower Bridge; we were fortunate enough to have the one and only Jimmy Trebig present the SIG keynote. This and the fantastic social event at the Shard (kindly sponsored by CSP) made our European SIG a resounding success and standout event for 2017 according to the membership.
We received so much great feedback from our users and vendors that we are already scheduled to host the 2019 European SIG. Hopefully the European SIG will now alternate between GTUG and BITUG hosting, we already have a very special location in mind for the 2019 BIG SIG event but I won’t spoil that surprise just yet.
Later in 2017 we held the Little SIG event. This event was kindly hosted for us by Barclays Bank in Canary Wharf London. As well as the usual HPE Roadmap and vendor presentations one that surprised me with the amount of feedback and discussion it generated was my own: Altcoins #101 a look at Crypto currency beyond Bitcoin, presentation that gained coverage in the NonStop Insider publication.
To anyone currently invested in crypto currencies.. “just HODL” (**does not constitute investment advice J )
Many thanks to Committee member Rob and the other staff at Barclays that worked so hard to make this event a success for BITUG and our membership.
Details of all our past events and copies of past presentations can be found on the BITUG presentation archives (page 1, page 2).
Looking forward; 2018 will be another busy year for the BITUG committee, the BIG SIG event will be held on Wednesday May 9th at our regular venue of Trinity House, near Tower Bridge. We are always on the lookout for interesting and informative “user” presentations / stories for these events so if you would like to practice your presentation skills in front of the ever friendly BITUG crowd then please let me or any other member of the committee know.
The 2018 European SIG will be held by GTUG in Leipsizg during May. The 2018 BITUG Big SIG date has been set for 9th May 2018 this “free” event is essential for all NonStop users unable to get a first-hand view of the upcoming HPE roadmap where questions can be asked directly of HPE staff. We will again hold a social event for BIG SIG and as ever a training day will accompany the BIG SIG event.
Best regards, and a belated Happy New Year to all our members. I hope to see catch up with as many of you as possible during the course of 2018 and don’t forget to contact us for exciting presentation opportunities at our events. Also if any of you want to volunteer(sorry no pay) to work for the BITUG committee, then again please let us know..
Damian Ward (BITUG Chairman 2018)
Little SIG Presentations
Presentations from the Little SIG held in December 2017 are now available: https://www.bitug.com/sig-presentation-archive/
Autumn 2017 Newletter
The Autumn 2017 Newsletter is now available for download: https://www.bitug.com/newsletter-archive/