New Shadowbase White Paper, Case Studies, and Articles

Stock photo of an iceberg reflected on waterGravic recently published a white paper, Shadowbase Synchronous Replication – Product Overview. Shadowbase synchronous replication (Shadowbase Zero Data Loss, or Shadowbase ZDL) resolves a key issue of asynchronous replication: data loss on source system failure. By eliminating data loss and effectively setting the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), to zero, Shadowbase ZDL protects your valuable data from having to be recreated after catastrophic failure. This product removes the risk of loss and uncertainty of the status of your data after a failover/takeover. Shadowbase ZDL provides unique differentiating product capabilities for the HPE NonStop market, and is the only choice for mission-critical applications where even milliseconds of lost data or downtime is unacceptable.

Stock photo of doctor holding pills in one hand while typing on a laptop with the otherGravic recently published an HPE Shadowbase data integration case study on Prescription Drug Fraud Prevention. Prescription drug claims fraud is big business, costing billions of dollars each year. To help a country’s government healthcare agency stem the losses, a centralized claims fraud adjudication and prevention decision support system was implemented. The agency chose HPE Shadowbase data replication software to provide real-time replication from an HPE NonStop claims processing system to feed the new decision support environment. Shadowbase SOLV enabled the new system to load with no application downtime. This case study provides an excellent example of how new services can be rapidly implemented by using HPE Shadowbase Data and Application Integration facilities.

Stock photo depicting bird's eye view of farmer running machineGravic published a new case study, HPE Shadowbase Software Enables Operational Analytics for Commodity Big Data. HPE Shadowbase software plays a key role in a quality control system for a major U.S. commodity market by integrating applications to extract meaningful data from a mass of test and product quality data, or big data. The system grades and classifies samples from large batches of the commodity as it arrives from the field, to provide real-time analyses on various performance parameters, including moisture content, tensile strength, color, and quality. This information is also used to price the commodity in the spot markets. Extraction is efficient thanks to a series of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) utilities. The solution has dramatically improved the reporting of the quality metrics for the crop, immediately alarming the users when key parameters are not met, or if the testing equipment goes out of band. It provides for near real-time tactical reporting of crop metrics to the growers (for production analysis), manufacturers (for manufacturing analysis), and markets (for accurate pricing), and provides historical analysis for strategic analytic purposes.

Stock photo of server room with clouds in background and the text "Shadowbase" at topGravic published a technical article in the July/August issue of The Connection called Achieving Scalability for Mission-Critical Systems in the Cloud. The third pillar of mission-critical systems is scalability; reliability and availability are the other two, creating the acronym RAS. Applications often require additional capacity during critical times. Scalability is an inherent and important attribute of mission-critical systems, since both the servers and the database must meet increasing demands. Active/active systems can provide scalability to servers as well as to the database. However, adding physical servers and disk systems to achieve greater capacity is typically not feasible, especially for temporary additional capacity needs. Scalability can be achieved via the use of active-active systems and Pathway Domains that span multiple HPE NonStop systems. It can also be achieved by bursting applications to RAIC servers (inexpensive commodity hardware) deployed in one or more clouds, where it can be reused between applications, providing an economic cloud platform for scalability-on-demand. For NonStop users, maximizing the RAS for mission-critical systems can now be accomplished by leveraging the new Virtualized NonStop technology.

Stock photo of server room on fireGravic published a new article, Dramatically Reduce Outage Costs with Advanced Business Continuity Solutions in the May/June issue of The Connection. Whether it be fire, power failure, software error, malfeasance, or some other cause, events occur which can lead to unplanned outages of IT services. If your business is relying on an active/passive or asynchronous data replication solution for business continuity, then it is time to look at whether or not it really provides a sufficient guarantee of protection against the impacts and costs of downtime and data loss. Chances are that it does not, and you should consider moving to a higher level of business continuity solution – such as sizzling-hot-takeover (SZT) or active/active – which mitigate the issues with active/passive, resulting in a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). For those businesses that cannot tolerate any downtime or data loss, synchronous replication, HPE Shadowbase ZDL, should be utilized for the highest levels of availability with zero data loss.

Stock photo of three pillars holding a buildingGravic published a technical article, Improving Reliability via Redundant Processing, in the March/April issue of The Connection. One of the three pillars of mission-critical systems is data reliability – a significant concern in datacenters worldwide. Data reliability can be ensured via a special configuration that compares the operation of one sub-system to another sub-system running the same applications. Verification may be accomplished by comparing results generated by the two sub-systems at specific synchronization points. If the results agree, the sub-systems are operating properly, if not, corrective action can be taken. This article suggests that the comparison of transaction-processing output via a Transaction Indicia Matching (TIM) module is a significant improvement over the use of a Logical Synchronization Unit (LSU), which represent a single point of failure in a system. A version of a TIM can be implemented with HPE Shadowbase synchronous data replication.

To discuss your data replication, data integration, and application integration needs, please email us at [email protected], or call us at +1.610.647.6250.