News
2012
Shadowbase Newsletter Winter 2012 - Vice President's Letter, Gravic Wins HP and Intel 2011 Mission-Critical Innovation Award, Gravic Publishes New White Paper: Shadowbase for the HP Converged Infrastructure, Gravic Publishes New Case Study: Island Bank Finds that Active/Active is Better than the End of the Rainbow, and Gravic Labs News.
2011
December 27, 2011, Patent Release - On December 27, 2011, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, Gary E. Strickler, Eugene P. Jarema, and Paul J. Holenstein were awarded US Patent No. 8,086,661 entitled "
Method for resolving collisions in a database replication system by relaxing a constraint that contributes to collisions, or removing the cause of the constraint that contributes to the collisions."
BITUG BIG SIG (December 8, 2011) and FR-TUG (December 12, 2011) - Gravic recently attended and presented new Shadowbase features and how to solve various business problems at the annual BITUG BIG SIG in London, England and the French Speaking NonStop users forum in Les Ulis, France. Both forums were brilliantly managed by their boards, and we enjoyed speaking with the many customers and other attendees at the shows. If you missed our presentation and would like a copy, or have any questions about how Shadowbase can assist you in solving your business continuity, data replication, zero downtime migrations, or other real-time data integration needs, please
contact us.
Bill Holenstein, Sr. Manager of Shadowbase
Product Delivery, accepts the Mission-Critical
Award from Martin Fink, HP Business Critical
Systems SVP & GM, and Peter Gleissner,
Intel Sales Director EMEA.
- Gravic, Inc. was honored to learn that it had received the 2011 Mission-Critical Innovation Award at the Mission-Critical Awards Celebration event held at Hotel Imperial in Vienna, on the day prior to the start of HP Discover 2011. The award, announced by HP and Intel, named the Gravic Shadowbase® submission as the best in the Mission-Critical Data category. The Gravic submission was reviewed by an independent panel of judges and was awarded for Gravic’s ground-breaking work developing a solution for mission-critical computing. This category recognizes organizations’ successful delivery of implementing a database, data warehousing, or line-of-business solution that took advantage of the dependability and performance of Itanium-based platforms while producing impactful results. Please click
here for more information on the award.
A large Canadian bank selected the Shadowbase product suite from Gravic to provide its data replication and integration solutions. The 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. This improvement resulted in planned outages for system upgrades being reduced from hours to minutes, and recovery from an unplanned outage resulting from a system failure or a data center disaster being reduced by more than 95%, from hours or even days to a few minutes.
Please click
here to see a short video interview with Bill Holenstein.
To read the LockerGnome blog written by Jake Ludington, please click here.
Shadowbase Newsletter Fall 2011 - Vice President's Letter, Sales and Marketing Highlights, Development Highlights, Support Tips and Employee Spotlight.
CTUG Fall 2011 Conference, October 26, 2011 - Gravic was pleased to attend and present at the CTUG Fall 2011 Conference at the HP offices in the Toronto area. As usual this was a great conference, well attended, and very professionally run. The attendees were very positive about the new product introductions and NonStop market status presented by HP as well as spending time reviewing the various software vendor solutions. Rob Lesan’s presentation on how AOL migrated the 40-Sybase-instance AIM application onto the NonStop with no application downtime was particularly interesting. Please contact us if you would like more information on how Rob leveraged Shadowbase technology to make this migration happen. We met many companies interested in migrating from their existing replication infrastructure to Shadowbase, and we look forward to further discussions with all of you. We appreciate the efforts of the folks at CTUG for making this a very worthwhile conference.
ACE Asia-Pacific Conference, October 17-20, 2011 - Gravic participated in and presented at the ACE Asia-Pacific regional trade show at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Casino in Singapore. The event was attended by over 290 ACI BASE24™ customers and delegates and provided the latest updates on the trends facing the global payments industry. The emphasis going forward is certainly on "mobile banking" and how companies can position themselves to manage business in this evolving industry. Many customer testimonials were given from regional front runners in the industry, including Steve Saltwick of HP, who spoke about HP’s continued commitment to the enterprise banking industry, and HP’s position with SQL/MX and the new blade technology to meet customer needs. To understand the significance of this evolving marketplace, simply ask oneself, "If I had to be stranded without either my credit card or my cell phone, which would I choose?" Throughout the conference, ACI illustrated its commitment to new technology and the mobile banking environment. Shadowbase solutions are well-positioned to assist these customers with their business continuity, data integration, and data synchronization needs. Please
contact us to discuss how our solutions can satisfy your business challenges in these areas.
October 19, 2011 - Gravic Publishes New Case Study: "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.
October 17, 2011 - Gravic Publishes New White Paper: "Shadowbase for the HP Converged Infrastructure" - Converged Infrastructure (CI) is the heart of HP’s move to what it calls the Instant-On Enterprise. HP partner products that support CI are of paramount importance to achieving Instant-On. Critical to the success of this initiative is the participation of third party solution providers to create products that interoperate to offer virtualized assignment of resources, superior availability for mission-critical services, modernization of applications via application integration, and common management. Vendors whose solutions qualify as "CI-Ready" are certified by HP. The Shadowbase data replication engine has earned CI-Ready certification. Shadowbase solutions provide mission-critical applications with high and continuous availability with recovery from faults in seconds, and supply the mechanisms that effectively and efficiently integrate applications to rapidly build new capabilities for an enterprise.
VNUG attendees in front of the Lejondals Castle,
the conference location, Northwest of Stockholm.
September 5-7, 2011 - VNUG Conference
Gravic was pleased to attend and present at the recent VNUG Conference in Sweden. This event is one of the best organized and most productive shows we attend and we appreciate the efforts expended by the VNUG board as well as the attendees. The vendors were pleased and impressed that all of the local countries were able to attend: Norway, Denmark, Finland, and of course the host country Sweden…and we look forward to another 10 great years with the Vikings at the helm!
August 8, 2011 - Gravic Receives Great Feedback from Annual Shadowbase Customer Survey - The Shadowbase Products Group recently conducted its annual customer survey to help us better understand our customers’ future data replication needs and to align our development efforts to produce the products and services important to them. We thank all of our customers for their continued support, and want to congratulate two of the survey respondents for their timely submissions: Rich Stephansen and Danny Houee – each won an Amazon Kindle.
August 3, 2011 - Gravic Announces Shadowbase Release 4.092 - Shadowbase Release 4.092 incorporates an extensive mix of features and enhancements in response to our customers’ needs. For details, please click
here.
July 22, 2011 - "Data Replication on Steroids" - Only on NonStop article as seen in the July/August 2011 Connect publication The Connection by John Hoffmann, Manager of NonStop Development, Shadowbase Product Group - 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.
July 22, 2011 - "Large International Tour Operator Uses HP NonStop to Optimize Look-to-Book Processing" - case study as seen in the July/August 2011 Connect publication The Connection by Paul J. Holenstein, Executive Vice President, Shadowbase Product Group
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.
July 15, 2011 - Gravic Adds HP Converged Infrastructure Ready Partner Insignia to ProductsGravic, Inc., the HP AllianceONE Partner of the Year for Converged Infrastructure, adds the “HP Converged Infrastructure Ready Partner” insignia to its website and marketing materials. Gravic’s efforts demonstrate its expertise in delivering solutions that are CI compliant, making it easy for customers to deploy its Shadowbase solutions with confidence. The CI Ready testing and validation procedures leverage HP’s best practices and extensive experience in delivering secure, best-in-class applications and solutions. Click
here for more information.
June 14, 2011-Patent Release: On June 14, 2011, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, Paul J. Holenstein, John R. Hoffmann, Dr. Bill Highleyman and Gary Strickler were awarded US Patent No. 7,962,458 entitled
Method for replicating explicit locks in a data replication engine.
HP Discover 2011, Las Vegas, June 6-10, 2011 The Gravic team was very impressed by the attendance and venue at HP Discover 2011. There were many informative HP NonStop presentations and a reasonable number of HP NonStop customers. The excitement was high for "Cloud Computing" and it seems as if HP is positioning the NonStop server as a vital component of that architecture. Other major topics were the continuing discussion of various success stories in the Converged Infrastructure area as well as much interest in the HP NonStop Blades products with many recent migrations to it. Gravic delivered two educational sessions, one targeted to the HP Japan/customers and another as a general session. Both were based on high and continuous availability NonStop-based business continuity architectures, with the first being more C-class executive level and the second focusing on the technical details. If you or your team are interested in hearing either presentation, please
contact us and we’ll arrange for a presentation to meet your needs.
June 3, 2011 - Gravic Wins 2011 HP AllianceONE Partner of the Year Award: The HP AllianceONE program team is pleased to announce that Gravic, Inc. was selected for the 2011 AllianceONE Partner of the Year Award in the category of:
Innovative Award Winner: Converged Infrastructure Solutions. The HP AllianceONE Partner of the Year Awards are presented to an exclusive set of HP alliance partners in recognition of their outstanding accomplishments in the development and delivery of innovative solutions that achieve standard-setting levels for business excellence and client satisfaction. Gravic based its application on how it dramatically improved the large Canadians banks availability by deploying a Shadowbase architecture, and HP agreed that it was an award-deserving caliber project. Click
here for a case study on a large Canadian bank. HP states, "The superb quality of the award entries and the challenge in selecting the winners serve to highlight the commitment Gravic has made to our mutual goal of delivering innovative, high-quality solutions that drive meaningful business results for our shared customers. We congratulate the Gravic team for your excellent achievement."
Shadowbase Newsletter Spring 2011 - Vice President's Letter, Sales and Marketing Highlights, Development Highlights for NonStop, and Open Server, Support Tips and Employee Spotlight.
May 24, 2011-Patent Release: On May 24, 2011, Paul J. Holenstein, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, and Dr. Bill Highleyman were awarded US Patent No. 7,949,640 entitled
Referential integrity, consistency, and completeness loading of databases.
May 2, 2011 - Gravic Announces Itanium-Platform Continuing Support Plan: Gravic, Inc., makers of the popular Shadowbase line of data integration software and tools, announces continuing support of the Itanium-processor systems produced by Hewlett Packard. Paul Holenstein, Gravic Executive Vice President and head of the Shadowbase Products Group, states "Oracle’s announcement that they are planning to end support for Itanium-based systems made by HP will likely strand tens of thousands of customers on older versions of Oracle. We want to assure HP’s customers that our Shadowbase product line will continue to run on HP’s Itanium-based systems. If any customer wants to migrate off an older version of Oracle to another database, a fast and efficient way to perform the migration is using Shadowbase’s
Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) technology."
Shadowbase’s Zero Downtime Migration technology moves change data to a new platform or database shortly after it has been modified on the source database. This form of real-time updating means that the latency delay for a change on the source system to be applied on the target system is very small, often seconds to sub-seconds, so that once the new target database is built, all operations has to do is switch over the users to the new system or database to complete the upgrade. An example of this type of live, in-place migration may be seen in America Online’s migration of user accounts from 32 Sybase servers to a single four-node NonStop cluster running SQL/MP. Read more about AOL’s ZDM migration by clicking
here.
Centricity Healthcare User Group (CHUG), April 29-30, 2011 After landing our first GE Centricity replication customer earlier this year (click
here for more information), we attended our first GE Centricity Healthcare meeting, held in San Diego. The show broke an attendance record, with over 700 medical-field personnel, all users of mainline GE applications. We discussed the need for products to build warehouses and for business continuity solutions in the areas of electronic records, mandatory sharing of records between participants (patients, primary care physicians, specialists, hospitals, among others). Since the government mandated that all records are to be electronic records in a standard format, and these systems cannot go down and the data cannot be lost, and the data must be easily shared between a variety of applications, all capabilities inherent in Shadowbase.
ACI Customer Exchange (ACE) Annual Meeting of EMEA BASE24 User Group (EBUG), April 12-15, 2011 We attended and sponsored a booth for the second time at the EBUG meeting held in Berlin, Germany. To date, we have BASE24 customers running Shadowbase data replication software in production. We are adding functionality to our products, specifically in Z-series DB2 source replication and SQL/MX source replication, as the BASE24 proof of concepts with current ACI customers has deemed this a strong market opportunity for us. Please click
here for more information on Shadowbase BASE24 Support and
here for a case study using Shadowbase data replication with BASE24.
Connect Florida 2011 Sunshine Summit (SunTUG),
March 11, 2011 We attended and presented “Shadowbase Data Replication and Synchronization Solutions” in Tampa. The attendance for the event was quite good as usual and the membership was enthusiastic about the HP NonStop Blades discussions as well as the overall direction of the product line.
February 1, 2011-Patent Release: On February 1, 2011, Paul J. Holenstein, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, and Gary Strickler were awarded US Patent No. 7,882,062 entitled
Synchronization of plural databases in a database replication system when replication is slower than the synchronization process.
To view past news entries by year, please click: 2010 | 2009 | 2008
