Skip to main content

Technology continues to evolve and DRNet is right there for the NonStop community!


With so much attention of late paid to the world of hybrid IT and the changes that go right along with it, for many of the NonStop community such attention as interesting as it is rarely escalates to anything more than a minor distraction. For the bulk of solutions running on NonStop systems today the focus remains on providing the level of service business requires of mission critical applications. That is providing true 24 x 7 x forever operations that extend well beyond a single system and a single application! For today’s enterprises it is pretty common to have two, three and oftentimes, many more data centers purely for the purpose of ensuring no natural or man-made disaster ever compromises the levels of service provided.

For the HPE NonStop community this has meant deploying data replication software and while there are a number of different products available to NonStop users NTI has been providing DRNet for several decades now and over the time has accumulated literally hundreds of years of experience in what it takes to ensure the fallout from any potential disaster is mitigated in a manner that allows operations to continue. DRNet has been right there for the NonStop community and has seen it all! But the changes taking place, while still little more than background noise for many NonStop users, cannot be completely ignored.

More often than not as the world moves on from client / server models to a service-oriented architecture and now a customer experience model supporting seamless transition between services NonStop applications are being integrated in new and important ways where, for many NonStop customers, it is all about the data and the files and databases that are home to data that is every bit as mission critical as the applications themselves. And it is in this environment where DRNet continues to excel.

"We have a lot of really good customers that many in the NonStop community know little about. But over the years we have built such a strong relationship with NonStop customers worldwide that it has prepared us well when it comes to accommodating all the changes coming from the HPE NonStop team and evolving technologies such as the Cloud and virtualized NonStop”, said Tim Dunne,  Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, NTI.  It really doesn’t matter ultimately how and where data is stored as long as it can be replicated to secondary and even tertiary backup sites. “Reliability and dependability are hallmarks of NonStop operations and with DRNet,” Dunne explained. “We ensure that at the most basic level, data will always be there when you need it no matter what may happen around you.”

Perhaps the biggest change taking place across the installed base of NonStop systems is the move to the Intel x86 architecture. The introduction of the L-Series operating system is a very important upgrade for most NonStop users as it not only allows these users to move to the much newer and more powerful NonStop X family of systems but also prepares them for the possibility of running as virtualized workloads on virtual machines. Migrating to the L-Series operating system means applications can be deployed either on physical systems or virtual systems without change and once again, DRNet is there to support NonStop applications running in both of these environments. “We already have customers running on the new NonStop X systems with the L-Series operating system for quite some time and we are looking forward to validating how straightforward it is to run both physical and virtual NonStop workloads. Like many members of the NonStop vendor community, we are only waiting for access to a virtualized NonStop system to complete such validation and we are hopeful that this will be wrapped up shortly.”

Of course, when there are migrations of this magnitude being contemplated it opens the door for consideration of new solutions and new middleware. "We have an exceptional engineering and development teams and have alternative offerings many NonStop users may find a better proposition when it comes to data replication,” added Dunne. “We have always been extremely flexible with our deployment models and it is really a great time for the NonStop user community to give renewed consideration to what they chose for data replication going forward.” The topic of migration and change and integration all come to the same point – how best to handle the data and how best to ensure no data is ever lost. “We are also looking at our pricing models as we look to provide a better TCO compared to other options in the marketplace ,” noted Dunne. “But more on that we will leave to a future post!”
NTI and DRNet have been with us for many decades and the company continues to make investments to protect NonStop users data, files and databases. Isn’t it time to take another look at DRNet as, after all, having options and being able to choose is one of the fundamental strengths of being part of the growing NonStop community!

And if you would like to know more about these options, then by all means, reach out to Tim Dunne at:
Tim.Dunne@network-tech.com


(Reprinted from LinkedIn blog, Pulse: January 26, 2018)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DRNet®/Unified for HPE Customers; On-Prem and “as a service,” NTI delivers!

HPE Discover 2021 may already be a distant memory for some but the messages that were coming out of the event will be resonating with the industry for quite some time. Looking beyond the “age of insight” and even HPE becoming “a world leading edge to cloud platform as a service company,” it is now very much a case of HPE bringing the cloud experience to the enterprise.   Not surprisingly, the byline for this story is the bigger message that the enterprise data center will be with us for a long time. This isn’t to say that cloud service providers will not be making their presence felt in these same data centers, one way or the other, but rather recent events have further reinforced the value proposition of being your own IT master.   With the cloud experience coming to a data center near you, enterprises can benefit from the best of both worlds. The security and robustness from on-prem computing together with all the flexibility that comes with cloud experiences. For th...

Data is King: What NonStop Mission-Critical Applications Can Learn from Formula 1

“Getting through the mountains of data generated in Formula 1 can be a ‘needle in a haystack’ process for teams searching for performance ... In a sporting series as technologically cutting-edge as Formula 1, data has become king.” For the NonStop community, this is throwing a spotlight on transaction processing in new ways. For every transaction initiated at a retailer, for instance, there is a need to know more about that end user (buying the product or service) in order to immediately up-sell something else. The time you have a customer in front of you can be very short, so retailers know the importance of leveraging those few minutes. This is leading to a greater demand for data integration; retailers are looking to integrate analytics with transaction processing in real time. Yes, data integration! And data integration is how meaningful information is created ... Of course we are all familiar with the need to ensure data is never lost or taken offline for any reason. W...

NTI continues to grow ecosystem of partners to better serve NonStop community

  It would be hard to miss the growth in the ecosystem of partners NTI has attracted. The NonStop community is familiar with the DR Net ® product suite but this hasn’t stopped NTI reaching out to product, service and consulting companies to ensure NTI’s coverage worldwide. The presence of these partners in an ecosystem does two things for the company; it reassures prospects that there have been others before them, so risks are greatly reduced and it reinforces the NonStop community at large that the company and its products provide a compelling reason for others to consider DR Net ® in the future.   A lot has changed within the NonStop community. HPE has invested in the NonStop product line and there are numerous options available to the community. NonStop continues to be sold along traditional lines as a converged system but it is also available as a virtual system on customer-supplied x86 servers. These options have become well known, but perhaps even more interesting is...