Over four separate events across June and July the NonStop community got together to share successes, discuss new products, and just catch up with old friends. The new online format, put together by the Connect team, was widely considered a great success, and given the current constraints on travel and meeting in large groups, might be the way we meet for a while to come yet.
Session 1, on June 10, saw some excellent presentations from Paul Denzinger on the new HPE NonStop Data Analyzer, the NonStop Academy on vNonStop and IP CLIM, and XYPRO. Session 2, on June 17, saw Ozen from HPE covering Automatic TCP/IP Connection Failover, a great topic these days as we move to all IP networks. Phil Ly, from NuWave’s partner TIC Software, gave an entertaining and informative presentation on NonStop modernization. We then had two presentations on Shadowbase – Tom Schaper from Cass gave a user’s perspective on this excellent data replication tool, then Paden Holenstein from Gravic went into more detail on the products.
After a couple of weeks' break session 3 kicked off on July 1, with a user presentation from Srinivas at Raymond James, on their usage of Splunk for in depth analysis of their applications and systems. NuWave’s Andrew Price then presented, with Dave Shields of Insider Technologies, on the successful case study where Insider utilized LightWave Server to modernize their Reflex systems monitoring and management solution. Finally, Jack Di Giacomo from Tandsoft introduced us to a couple of new products with a hilarious presentation involving Ron La Pedis, and Mr Ed! In the last session, on July 8, we had Sheri Radomsky from Accenture discussing database management, Rich Greene from Ascert, Ed Adams from Comforte and Prathima Sidda from Ideli. A packed agenda, almost like being at one of our RUG meetings that we are more used to at this time of year!
Other than the excellent content, a highlight of the VirtuNUG session was the chatting in between presentations, at the vendor “booths” and in the general Q&A areas in Slack, the platform chosen for the event. At NuWave, we greatly enjoyed catching up with old (and new) friends at each session. As is tradition, we had a giveaway for the event, a Visa gift card which was won by Sanjay Soma of Paymark in NZ. This highlighted one major benefit of the online format – attendees can come from anywhere, and don’t need to travel to get there!
While we all deal with the various challenges thrown at us by Covid-19 in different ways, it’s great to know that some things can still take place. The fact that we can still get together with our friends and colleagues in the NonStop space, albeit virtually, has been a great comfort to a lot of us. Stay in touch with each other, look after yourselves, and stay safe.