Shadowbase Information - Advanced Case Studies, Reviews and Additional Case Study Summaries

Advanced Case Studies and Reviews

Two Merged Retailers Integrate HP NonStop SQL and Oracle RAC
A major U.S. retailer has thousands of stores, and wanted to integrate the point-of-sale processing for its existing ACI BASE24 application with a new AJB point-of-sale application as it rolled out new stores or upgraded existing stores. The BASE24 application runs on NonStop/SQL and the AJB application runs on Linux/Oracle RAC. This challenge required transforming NonStop SQL applications and Linux-based Oracle RAC applications so that the disparate databases could be integrated into a common framework. The retailer turned to Shadowbase Streams to integrate the distinctly different applications by mirroring key parts of the SQL and Oracle databases using bi-directional, active/active heterogeneous data replication. Each store now has local access to all sales, refund, and exchange activities so that any customer is easily serviced at any store. The retailer completed the integration without any downtime of the application services to its customers or stores.
One Bank's March Towards Active/Active and Bank Finds that Active/Active is Better than the End of the Rainbow
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.
Large International Tour Operator Uses HP NonStop to Optimize Look-to-Book Processing
This case study is an excellent example of HP’s move to a converged infrastructure. It demonstrates how one customer took advantage of facilities available to the HP community to integrate diverse systems into a common application while leveraging the inherent strengths of each system. By expanding its original NonStop system to a multinode, heterogeneous distributed system, the tour operator gained many advantages. The new system scales easily (and inexpensively), and provides continuous application availability across entire site failures.
Large Canadian Bank Dramatically Improves its ATM/POS Availability with Shadowbase Solutions - Executive Summary Click here for this case study as seen in Connect Converge/Issue 5-Spring 2012.
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.
Using Shadowbase Solutions for Application Modernization with Zero Downtime
By turning to today’s Service-Oriented Architecture technology, a major distributor was able to seamlessly modernize its 15-year-old standalone legacy NonStop order-processing application. Sales associates were given PCs and a familiar Windows environment, replacing their cumbersome green screen dumb terminals. Except for the gradual addition of new and modern functionality, the users were completely unaware of the in-place migration activity. The standalone application was integrated with other systems in the enterprise. Query functions were offloaded from the NonStop system onto an open system by using Shadowbase software to replicate and synchronize the NonStop database into a SQL Server database. Perhaps most importantly, the changes were made without incurring any downtime in the company’s 24/7 operation.
Real-Time Credit and Debit Card Fraud, a Shadowbase Real-Time Business Intelligence Solution
A major provider offers interbank transaction-switching services by capturing information during a point-of-sale (POS)—at a store terminal or website—or at an ATM. A complex suspicious or fraudulent activity determination is made and action taken while a transaction is in the process of being gathered, routed, authorized, and returned to the origination point, or shortly thereafter, typically far sooner than otherwise achievable. This real-time business intelligence (RTBI) solution is provided by the high-performance, low-latency, heterogeneous Shadowbase bi-directional data replication engine, which replicates data between a wide variety of databases and platforms, changing the data as it is replicated to meet the needs of the target application or of the target database’s schema, in tens to hundreds of milliseconds.
Cellular Provider Goes Active-Active for Prepaid Calls
One of the largest cellular telephone service providers in South Africa manages a cell network made up of thousands of cell sites, which provide coverage to over 20 million customers or 95% of the South African population. To ensure the continuous availability of its prepaid card service, its heterogeneous system implemented active/active technologies with high availability systems, connected by Shadowbase data replication solutions.
Shadowbase Helps a Major ISP Migrate from Sybase to NonStop with No Downtime
A major international Internet Service Provider (ISP) offers email services, internet access, and other functions to tens of millions of active global customers. Several million customer accounts were migrated to a new HP NonStop system with no impact on user service and a new active/active system was implemented via Shadowbase data replication solutions.
Payment Authorization – A Journey from DR to Active-Active
A major provider of merchant services to over four million small to medium-sized global merchants provides payment authorization at point-of-sale (POS) devices and ATMs to Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diner’s Club, Discover, and other credit and debit cards. For several years, the company expanded its use of data replication technology from disaster recovery to active/active systems to application integration by utilizing Shadowbase solutions to guarantee that its authorization services are continuously available.
Major Bank Uses Active/Active to Avoid Hurricane Disasters
A major U.S. bank serves much of the eastern and midwestern United States providing credit and debit card processing for its merchant customers. It uses HP NonStop servers in a two-node active/active configuration with geographical separation ensuring that no system failure or environmental or manmade disaster will take down both nodes. Database changes at each node are replicated to the other node via Shadowbase asynchronous bi-directional replication, ensuring that each node contains the entire database for the application network.
Telecom Italia's Active/Active Mobile Services
The Telecom Italia Group provides fixed-line and mobile telephone services to Italy and mobile services to subscribers in other countries. Two locations of HP NonStop active/active systems provide sufficient separation for disaster tolerance and offer an efficient network topology to support cell tower networking. Data replication for these services is provided by Shadowbase asynchronous data replication, configured to provide bi-directional replication.
The Availability Digest Reviews Shadowbase
The Shadowbase data replication engine replicates changes from one database to another in highly heterogeneous configurations and is an asynchronous replication engine, and is therefore transparent to application processing. It imposes no performance impact on application processing and is non-intrusive in that it requires no changes to be made to the applications themselves. The Shadowbase engine can be configured for uni-directional replication for applications such as hot-standby, query offloading or bi-directional replication to support active/active architectures.