Focus on Shadowbase Product Management

Keith B. Evans Shadowbase Product Management

Shadowbase asynchronous data replication provides excellent levels of business continuity protection, especially when deployed in sizzling-hot-takeover (SZT) or active/active architectures. But all asynchronous replication technologies suffer from the potential for data loss and not all applications are suitable for an active/active architecture. So what is the solution for business services where data collisions and/or loss of any data cannot be tolerated? The answer is synchronous replication!

With synchronous replication, application data updates are not committed (made visible and permanent) by either system unless the updated data has been replicated to the standby system. This replication guarantees that no data is lost in the event of an outage of the system performing the update (known as “zero data loss,” or ZDL). Hence, the costs arising from asynchronous replication’s data loss simply do not occur with synchronous replication.

Additionally, in an active/active environment, it is not possible for data collisions to occur because the updated data records are locked on both systems before any changes are committed on either system. The asynchronous simultaneous update situation that can occur in asynchronous replication is instead manifested as a transaction deadlock in synchronous replication (caused by a distributed lock collision), which is easily resolved by the data replication engine. There is never any visible data inconsistency.

So, for the highest levels of availability with no data collisions and zero data loss, synchronous replication should be utilized. And here’s the good news: a new release, Shadowbase ZDL, is now available which supports synchronous replication and zero data loss! Gravic is excited and proud to bring this new product to market, which was a long time in the making, and requires the implementation of many novel (patented) techniques. We believe that there are many customers out there who could benefit from this technology. To learn more, please contact us.

As you are all hopefully aware by now, HPE licenses and supports Shadowbase software under the HPE umbrella, which benefits our customers by putting the huge resources of HPE at their disposal, globally, 24x7x365. These resources include not only the HPE support organization, but also its sales, technical analyst, and professional services teams. Gravic has recently been engaged in several HPE Partner Technical Update (PTU) sessions to leverage this relationship to its fullest, and to bring the greatest benefit to our customers. At these sessions, HPE field personnel hear about the many ways in which HPE Shadowbase can be used, and to jointly develop ways in which we can work more effectively together. So far, PTU sessions have been held in the USA, but will shortly be taking place in Europe, Southeast Asia, and South America, with other locations to follow. The more that HPE personnel learn about HPE Shadowbase, the more our collective customers will benefit from the partnership.

Another benefit of this relationship is that we get to learn of HPE’s product plans out of the gate, which helps ensure that HPE Shadowbase is ready to take advantage of any new HPE features. One such recent update took place where we learned more about the just-announced HPE Virtualized NonStop product. This is a very exciting new direction for the HPE NonStop server; it is now a totally software-based solution, which can be deployed on any x86 platform that meets the guidelines of the HPE Virtualized NonStop hardware reference architecture. We were given early access to an HPE Virtualized NonStop environment for testing purposes, and there were no issues. We can happily announce that HPE Shadowbase is HPE Virtualized NonStop ready! For more about this product and other new Shadowbase product features, be sure to read Shadowbase Development News in this newsletter.

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