Valverde

Computing

 The Open Source/ Systems Mainframe Solution

Once upon a time ...

... There was a magical system called Tandem Nonstop™.

Nonstop™ maintained precious data with peerless data integrity, allowing wide transactional distributed access, and supporting astonishing availability and solid transactional replication for disaster recovery.

It was half the priceTCO (at least) of the Big Blue alternative, and far easier to program and operate. It was literally the goose that laid the golden egg.

Major banks around the world lined up to attach their precious ATM networks through the magic of Nonstop™. The British banks made a law effectively requiring Nonstop™ throughout the realm.

Countries around the world rushed to deploy Nonstop™ for their stock exchanges, options, commodities and currency bourses. The Scandinavian and Asian countries all went Nonstop™ almost overnight! Bombay, Hong Kong, Banamex (Mexico), London, Paris, NYSE and Nasdaq, they all succumbed to Nonstop™ Fever.

Mighty Big Blue (IBM) and their cronies crushed Nonstop™ with the California DMV account, and at every opportunity attacked and undermined the upstart. Nonstop™ itself committed at least ten suicidal internal projects, any one of which would have destroyed a normal company, and yet they survived, because their software was golden.

Then, the Nonstop™ goose was sold to Compaq who appreciated but little understood the fundamentals supporting the value of the Nonstop™ golden goose. Finally, Nonstop™ was sold to HP, who neither understood, nor appreciated the value of Nonstop™. They proceeded to milk the goose to death.

Something wonderful was passing from the world, and being lost to an unaware humanity.

Databases sprung up, like monstrous fractured mirrors. “There never was such a thing as Nonstop™”, their purveyors cried, “ACID is dead, BASE is king, and the Jim Gray era has passed.”

And the people viewed their precious data in the fractured mirrors of the monster disordered databases (sharded and federated), and their reflection was as ugly as dying Quixote. “Your reflection is ugly, because you are ugly,” they were told by the professors, “there is no real consistency, only paraconsistency = inconsistency+incompleteness” [Even though Gödel's incompleteness (I&II) only correctly apply to formal mathematical logic systems, and only to the arithmetic statements therein - Torkel Franzen.]

And the people lost hope of having anything better, they settled for worse=better. And the fundamentals which undergirded the magic of Nonstop™ were forgotten, passing away like the fleeting details of a dream you wished you could remember, because it was so wonderful.

And then along came Valverde, explaining why those dreams were wonderful, and Valverde showed the people that they were really beautiful, and that the things they held precious were really beautiful when reflected in a single, unfractured and perfect mirror, like a Nonstop™, but based on free and open source software (FOSS) systems.

What happened next was the natural outcome of understanding and appreciating the “Fundamentals of Transaction Systems” ...