The timing is not great but then again, when is timing ever perfect. As this issue of The Connection goes to virtual print, the HPE Nonstop Technology & Business Conference 2025 (Nonstop TBC 2025) will have wrapped up with attendees long gone. Did this year’s event meet expectations? Was the content all that you hoped for and did you leave excited by the future prospects for Nonstop Compute in your enterprise? More importantly, did you leave with a renewed sense that the Nonstop Compute roadmaps are aligned with the needs of your enterprise.
Once again, NTI supported the event as a Diamond Sponsor. With the event being held in Texas it wasn’t hard to miss the many references to the cowboy culture and the heritage it espoused. Nor was it hard to ignore the presence too of a Gulf Shores, laid-back coastal theme as it made an appearance at the opening night’s beer bust.
For the last couple of years NTI has focused a major portion of its marketing budget on events in America, Europe, LATAM and Australia and there really isn’t any substitute to being among real-world users of Nonstop. The Nonstop customers continue to rely on Nonstop to run their mission-critical applications and even as there is a sense that perhaps other solutions are bridging the gap between what Nonstop delivers and what they can provide, that gap remains pretty large. Emulating fault tolerance through redundancy and replication may look good on paper but it has been the experience of NTI that the results from such pursuits represent a less-optimal solution than simply deploying applications on Nonstop.
The history of NTI dating back to its earliest times has centered on replication. The primary objective was to create a solution that best served the Nonstop community when it came to business continuity. Whether it was earthquakes in California, Hurricanes in Florida, Bushfires in Sydney, or Tsunami’s in Japan, nature had a way of intervening when it was least expected. And then there’s always the random occurrence of a state-sponsored intrusions than result in as much damage as nature could inflict.
Whatever the disaster and wherever it came from, enterprises owed it to their customers, employees and shareholders to have a Plan B in case of emergencies and as much as the prowess of the fault-tolerant Nonstop system could be championed, there was always going to be the necessity to back it up, somewhere.
As we focused on replication and given it remains central to all that NTI pursues today, as it will be covered in the session given the first day of Nonstop TBC 2025, NTI replication is dependent on Change Data Capture (CDC). We cannot stress enough the value CDC methodology continues to provide the core NTI product, DRNet®, and it would have been made clear to attendees of the NTI presentation that it is through CDC that data replication has been easily and rapidly augmented by data distribution, data integration and with that, data transformation. In fact, the timing of this year’s event was such that NTI was able to provide updates on how these extensions to data replication would be finding a place within a number of Nonstop customers installations.
The easiest of extensions was to provide BASE24 and BASE24-eps customers reliant on GoldenGate a way out from under the Oracle umbrella. Both GoldenGate and DRNet® are among the many data-focused solutions that rely on CDC methodologies so migrations from GoldenGate to DRNet® can be pursued knowing the value of immediacy (their desire for timely migration results), risk mitigation (their expectation of a better return on value), and competency (their appreciation that the team from NTI brought with them a depth of experience that could be leveraged in a meaningful manner).
This is good news for GoldenGate users looking for an alternate solution and who are quite prepared to do their due-diligence in manner that elevates the importance of there being independent Nonstop vendors willing and ready to help with such a migration.
What attendees will also have heard is how replication has proved to be the launchpad for some very exciting new developments. The growing acceptance that data created on Nonstop can be distributed to open database implementations, including Oracle, DB2, and more and that similarly, data created on Nonstop can be integrated with processes that in turn are engaging in greater and greater levels of analysis where AI performed on data created on Nonstop can be performed in real time. An eventuation arising from DRNet® working with its partner Infrasoft, to create a real time data streaming platform.
Infrasoft’s uLinga for Kafka and NTI’s DRNet® share strong industry pedigrees, modern architectures, and top-tier security,” said Andrew Price, Infrasoft Director, Business Operations. “Kafka acts as a powerful front-end to Nonstop applications, much like Nonstop once did for IBM Mainframes, enhancing rather than disrupting transactions. It enables seamless real-time data streaming while maintaining Nonstop’s reliability. With NTI’s expertise in replication, DRNet® and Kafka together establish a robust foundation for future innovation.” With the first customer deploying this solution, NTI now proudly introduces DRNet®/Kafka, powered by uLinga.
Having a new customer for a major product introduction is exactly why the Nonstop community turns up for major events, like the one in Houston that has come to an end. This comes after news broke a year ago of the first GoldenGate migration to DRNet® and is significant in that it shows momentum developing in support of the NTI product portfolio.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the only new product / customer update as, together, Infrasoft’s uLinga Gateway working together with DRNet®, now branded DRNet®/Gateway, has likewise gained it’s first customer. Both announcements and the use cases described in the presentation will be among the highlights of the NTI session at the event.
With these developments it is worthwhile to note how the introduction of the latest Nonstop servers, the HPE Nonstop Compute NS5 X5 and NS9 X5 converged systems are already making their presence felt within the Nonstop community. A number of early tech refreshes planned by NTI customers globally have been identified and the work is well under way to migrate the core DRNet® replication offerings to these new systems.
The arrival of these systems has proved timely in that transaction volumes continue to climb and having faster, more capable product offerings from the Nonstop Compute team brings a renewed sense among all Nonstop vendors that their commitment to Nonstop is not in vain – Nonstop is going places!
If you missed the NTI session and would like to know more about what was covered in the presentation, check your favorite social media channels for information as to where to go to download a pdf of the session. NTI is only too happy to share more good news just as it is only too happy to take your calls and answer your emails. With the end of year approaching rapidly, and the final quarter of 2025 in sight, there couldn’t be a better time for due diligence to be performed and the best solution for all your data replication needs is DRNet®. On case you missed it, then yes, NTI moves the data that moves your business!
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