DRNet – THE fabric for hybrid IT

“Where does the true value lie in the data captured by NonStop applications?” asked Tim Dunne, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, NTI in a recent exchange with NonStop Insider. “NonStop systems are known for their fault tolerance and their suitability for processing the most mission-critical transactions of all, but increasingly today we are finding that the data captured as transactions are being processed is every bit as important to the enterprise as the successful completion of the transaction!” And with DR Net ® , NTI provides so much more than just support for disaster recovery and with as much talk as there is today of maximizing the value locked away in the data these financial institutions accumulate over time, the replication capabilities of DR Net ®  are being looked at again for DR Net ®  ability to integrate. What is often overlooked today is that NTI’s product, DR Ne t ® , is an abbreviation for Data Resource Network and “a product name that oftentime...

Early morning presentations after celebrating on a big night out oftentimes prove challenging, but even so, at this year’s GTUG event in Leipzig, the early morning start proved to be not a deterrent for many attendees and the presentation by NTI was well attended. For me, as the presenter the challenge was not so much the start time but rather, this was my “freshman appearance” having not been the front man for NTI before. And yes, sitting in the audience was the NTI CTO. Naturally enough, there were a couple of missteps, the most notable being the reference to there being “data avoidance” rather than making it clear that my intent was to highlight that with DR Net® , there was clearly “data loss avoidance.” Not sure any working system would fare all that well if data was avoided… Slipups like this aside, the key message was that experience with data replication is proving to be a valuable when it comes to data integration. The very same mechanisms used with Change Data Captu...

This weekend it’s off to Leipzig, Germany for the big pan-European NonStop GTUG event featuring all things NonStop. I am about to head off even as I begin winding down for the week – the weekend will be a time for travel and hopefully, I will see many of you in Leipzig as the event kicks off Monday afternoon. If you have as yet not checked the agenda, you may want to do so as it can be found at: http://www.gtug.de/HotSpot2018/download/Agenda.pdf With pre-conference workshops scheduled on Monday afternoon featuring blockchain, it certainly is going to attract considerable interest from the community – if you have missed any of my recent posts to other social media forums you will already know how bullish I am about the future for NonStop with its support for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. What it comes down to is that an important new technology from HPE, with almost no limits to how it can save business money, has hit the marketplace and not just with any produ...

NTI has been in business a very long time and has been providing support for NonStop users with its DR Net product set. Among its many customers there are numerous financial institutions relying on DR Net for data replication. When it comes to supporting payments solutions, these financial institutions cannot afford for their systems to be down for any reason and so historically, these institutions have depended upon DR Net to maximize their systems’ uptime, no matter what. However, DR Net offers so much more than just support for disaster recovery and with as much talk as there is today of maximizing the value locked away in the data these financial institutions accumulate over time, the replication capabilities of DR Net are being looked at again for DR Net applicability to integrate. In the post of April 2, 2018, reference is made to the recent article published in the March – April, 2018, issue of The Connection - Data is King: What NonStop Mission-Critical Applications ...

It continues to be a story about RUG events both large and small. In the coming weeks focus too will be shifting to Europe as BITUG and the GTUG events will be taking place. We will be attending both of these events with a presentation on NTI and DR Net planned for GTUG. While we are in Europe we are planning on visiting a number of DR Net  users so we will be catching up with many of you. It is always a pleasure meeting with customers so this will be an intense period for us where we look forward to hearing more about your plans for NonStop. In recent conversations with industry leaders it is very clear that the IT landscape continues to evolve. HPE likes to call what is happening a transformation, but for the NonStop community that we interact with the paths being taken by them are as varied as the applications they support. While financial institutions and telcos are the two big verticals where you will find NonStop applications, there is still a large percentage of NonSto...

“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...

Where HPE is taking NonStop today isn’t proving too surprising for the NonStop community. In fact, where NonStop is headed is a direction sorely needed by NonStop customers, big and small. The first step in the journey for NonStop came with the port of NonStop to x86, the migration of the interconnect from proprietary ServerNet to InfiniBand (IB) and more recently, to RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and then a second step that saw an even bigger shift for NonStop as HPE complemented current support for physical machines with support for NonStop of virtual machines. Yes, NonStop is on a journey and that journey is going to better align NonStop with the major initiatives within HPE to simplify a data center’s transformation to hybrid IT. Under newly-elevated HPE CEO, Antonio Neri’s, direction HPE has divided itself into three core businesses. The major business (and the most relevant for the NonStop community) is called Hybrid IT and it is comprised of the compute, storage, and d...