Articles
This article gives a detailed account on recent features and enhancements made to the HP NonStop Synchronous Gateway including various processing models and the transaction process. The Coordinated Commits (future technology) process is also explained along with its benefits and the gains from using synchronous replication.
A major bank, located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, suffered a devastating earthquake causing it to lose much of its data. After the disaster, the bank decided to switch to active/active data replication to prevent this kind of problem in the future. This article discusses in detail the steps the bank took to achieve an active/active system.
- "Large Canadian Bank Adopts Converged Infrastructure" as seen in the Issue 5-Spring 2012 Connect publication Connect Converge, by Paul J. Holenstein
A large Canadian bank took a major step towards providing improved service to its customers by modernizing its active/backup data center architecture and reengineering it into an active/active network. The Shadowbase product suite was selected to provide the data replication and integration solutions. Planned outages for system upgrades were reduced from hours to minutes, and recovery from an unplanned outage resulting from a system failure or a data center disaster was reduced more than 95% from hours or even days to a few minutes. Most importantly, once an outage occurs, their ATM/POS application services (managed by ACI’s BASE24™ product running on HP NonStop servers) are restored to customers much faster, in many cases without the customer even realizing that an outage occurred.
- "Bank Finds that Active/Active is Better than the End of the Rainbow" as seen in the November/December 2011 Connect publication The Connection, by Paul J. Holenstein
This island bank is located on the Pacific Rim Ring of Fire and lost its data center for several hours during an earthquake. The bank initiated its disaster recovery plan, but could not bring its backup systems into operation and suffered a failover fault. The most critical outages were its online banking services and its ATM/POS network, which were further aggravated by the production system losing power and having the IT staff evacuated from the primary data center due to concerns about structural damage. The bank addressed these issues by implementing Shadowbase data replication, moving its architecture in a controlled fashion towards an active/active configuration and continuous availability.
- "Data Replication on Steroids" as seen in the July/August 2011 Connect publication The Connection, by Paul J. Holenstein
Concurrent replication has many efficiency advantages over serial replication. These advantages are described in this paper. The highly efficient technique of concurrent replication is commercially available only on NonStop systems because of the unique structure of and access to the TMF Audit Trail coupled with replication engine extensions that allow the replication engine to replay the target transaction mix concurrently with source transaction processing. It is the specialized nature of the NonStop Audit Trail that allows data replication to perform as if on steroids.
- Eliminating Planned Downtime with Zero Downtime Migrations (ZDM) (Part 1)
ZDM for Active/Backup Configurations (Part 2)
By Dr. Bill Highleyman, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, and Paul J. Holenstein
How active/backup systems can take advantage of zero downtime migrations by using a fast and reliable failover in order to eliminate planned downtime for upgrades and migrations, and how active/active systems, comprised of two or more nodes cooperating in a common application, achieve continuous availability and eliminate unplanned downtime with zero downtime migrations.
To view past articles, click here.
