How HPE Shadowbase is Helping Customers Around the World

2024 was a great year for Gravic. We celebrated the 50th anniversary of NonStop, our 10^th year of partnership with HPE, and Gravic’s own 45^th anniversary in business. More importantly, customers around the world improved their businesses using HPE Shadowbase solutions. Along with HPE and our other partners, Gravic helped customers with a wide-range of challenges, such as zero downtime migrations during platform refreshes, upgrading to high availability architectures, and streaming NonStop data into other enterprise environments and platforms. In this article, we reflect on some of the year’s worldwide challenges, opportunities, and successes.

North America: Slashing Replication Latency and Data at Risk for Large U.S. Retailer

A large U.S. retailer was experiencing significant latency replicating its NonStop transactional data to its backup system, which could result in many hours of critical data being lost if a disaster happened to the production datacenter or system, a serious business risk.

HPE, Gravic, and the retailer’s NonStop System Integrator collaborated to ensure a seamless HPE Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration to new systems, replacing its existing replication, and reducing the replication latency to mere seconds.

The retailer gained dramatic improvements in business continuity protection since it migrated from an Active/Passive to an Active/Active architecture. The customer appreciated the project completing within its 45-day timeline, and was particularly impressed by the deep configurability of Shadowbase software, and said, “I love how tunable your product is. Online!”

Latin America: Validating Migration Data for Payments Provider’s System Upgrade

A large Latin American payments provider needed to upgrade its HPE NonStop systems for its BASE24™ environment. The provider had an existing non-Shadowbase replication engine and was concerned about data integrity between its current and new systems, but did not have an easy method available to verify the data integrity between both. Data corruption and a lengthy payment service outage were possible if the team faced any issues during the migration.

The provider turned to HPE and Gravic for help. It was able to quickly install and use HPE Shadowbase Compare to verify the data integrity between the existing and new systems. The customer appreciated how easy Compare could identify and remediate data discrepancies, and declared, “Compare is simple, but strong!”

Europe: 75% Improvement in Bank’s Business Continuity Recovery Time

A regional European bank that runs BASE24 ATM and POS services for its customers was using a non-Shadowbase replication engine in an Active/Passive architecture. However, the bank was unable to test its Disaster Recovery plans without interrupting ATM and POS services. The bank’s recovery sequence required many manual steps and was very time consuming and susceptible to human errors. The bank relied on an untested and unpracticed business continuity plan, which decreased the likelihood of fully recovering from a disaster.

The bank chose to upgrade to a HPE Shadowbase Sizzling Hot Takeover architecture and to automate most of its manual effort, greatly expediting the recovery process. The customer also took advantage of HPE Shadowbase SBMAP, an easy-to-use scripting tool for data mapping, to transform data in-flight, which further simplified the failover process and accelerated recovery time.

Asia: Major Government Agency Survives System Failure Using Triple Active/Active/Active

A major Asian government agency that manages immigration across several busy entry points using a home-grown application needed to strengthen its system resilience. Ensuring availability was particularly important during peak holiday seasons when the agency processes up to one million visitors per day. The agency replaced its old replication engine with HPE Shadowbase for Business Continuity between its NonStop systems and HPE Shadowbase for Data Integration for its back office and administrative systems.

Earlier this year, on the busiest day of the year, there was a catastrophic incident and the agency lost its largest datacenter. However, even with its largest NonStop datacenter unavailable, the agency immediately benefited from its Triple Active/Active/Active architecture: the remaining datacenters were fully in-sync and were able to pick up the transaction load. The busiest immigration day of the year proceeded smoothly with no disruption to service. In fact, the customer maintained full application processing and capacity, as well as full business continuity protection during the outage.

Australia: Enabling a Fully-Audited Payments Environment for a Large Australian Bank’s Active/Active CONNEX Application

At the beginning of the year, a large Australian bank that runs its unaudited CONNEX application in an Active/Active architecture faced a rapidly approaching deadline with an upcoming platform refresh, and it wanted to improve the protection of its business-critical files and replace its existing replication engine. This deadline required a migration sequence which involved sourcing and configuring new systems, planning and configuring verification environments before the migration, adding in full TMF protection to its database, and successfully replacing the hardware and current replication engine.

The bank chose HPE Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration to minimize risk while replacing its hardware and switching replication engines. Along the way, HPE and Gravic worked closely with the bank’s team to ensure success. The customer successfully completed its platform migration on time this summer, while maintaining full application service availability and business continuity protection during the migration.

Closing Out the Year

Yes, 2024 was a great year for HPE Shadowbase customers around the world. Anniversaries were celebrated, milestones were reached, and challenges overcome. We are looking forward to next year, and continuing to help customers achieve their Business Continuity, Data Integration, and Digital Resilience objectives.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise globally sells and supports Shadowbase solutions under the name HPE Shadowbase. For more information, please contact your local HPE Shadowbase representative or visit our website. For additional information, please view our Shadowbase solution videos: https://vimeo.com/shadowbasesoftware, or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

Specifications subject to change without notice. Trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © Gravic, Inc. 2024.