2010
September 1, 2010-Part 24: Is It Worth the Effort to Move to Active/Active? "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
Determining whether moving to an active/active architecture is worth it, whether the savings to your company in current downtime costs will provide an attractive return on investment.
July 1, 2010-Part 23: Fast Failover with Active/Active Systems (2 of 2) "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
How to rapidly recover from a node failure in an active/active network using server redirection, in which the nodes themselves monitor faults and control network reconfiguration.
Click here for a pdf of report. June 15, 2010 - Roadmap to the Megaplex
The “Roadmap to the Megaplex” report comprises six steps to NonStop modernization and to the Megaplex. (A collection of server blades acting together as a single system using multiple types of operating systems, databases, and other computer resources.) Each step includes: an introduction, a profile of a major vendor and the technologies that help implement the step, a modernization case study, a simulated return on investment example, a benefit checklist, and alternative vendor product. Step 4: Availability Modernization: The process of changing from the traditional availability and disaster recovery methods to a continuous-readiness program. The vendor/product profiled is Gravic’s Shadowbase, which provides for active/active processing and zero-downtime migration and upgrades.
June 15, 2010-Patent Release: On June 15, 2010, Dr. Bruce Holenstein and Paul Holenstein were awarded US Patent No. 7,739,237 entitled Data input routing after failure.
Gravic was pleased to attend the Mid-Atlantic Tandem User Group (MATUG) Meeting held June 2 at the AOL corporate offices in Sterling, Virginia. The keynote presentation was delivered by Jim Johnson, Chairman of The Standish Group, covering the new Megaplex II paper entitled "Road to the Megaplex." This report will soon be distributed to the IT community. It covers the practical implementation approaches to architecting a Megaplex infrastructure. The Megaplex dovetails with HP’s new converged infrastructure architecture, and Jim’s presentation describes at least six customer success stories depicting how customers are evolving their IT environments to mesh with the new paradigm. In addition to the excellent vendor presentations, Rob Lesan of AOL presented a great overview of AOL’s NonStop systems and applications. The event was well attended by customers from the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC areas. The next MATUG Meeting will be held in the Philadelphia area to make the event more accessible to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware customers. These events are an excellent way for customers to learn about new HP products and services as well as interact with fellow HP NonStop users.
May 26-27 2010-VNUG Conference
Gravic was pleased to attend and make two presentations at the Viking NonStop User Group (VNUG) Conference held from May 25-27 in Stockholm, Sweden. On the first day, a wonderful golf outing was held that allowed both vendors and customers to join in a fun event. The following two days were very intensive and Gravic made a Shadowbase-focused product presentation as well as a more in-depth customer experience presentation that reviewed various approaches now being implemented to increase system availability. (This second presentation is vendor-agnostic. Please contact us if you are interested in having it presented at your local RUG show.) We were pleased that both presentations were well received. The VNUG event is unique and a truly great experience. The location, facilities, attendees, and hosts make this one of the best regional user group events. 2011 will mark the 10th anniversary of VNUG and Gravic will certainly be participating. Our congratulations and appreciation goes out to all the VNUG committee members and HP staff that supported this event. WELL DONE!!!
Speaker: Paul Holenstein, Executive Vice President
Title: State-of-the-Art Asynchronous and Synchronous Replication: Advances in High and Continuous Availability Business Architectures
Abstract: As businesses' needs have driven higher and higher application availability requirements, various high and continuous availability architectures have evolved to meet those needs. We describe the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) model businesses use to quantify their needs, discuss the factors (and trade-offs) that affect each objective, and review various architectures in use today to attain these stringent goals. We also look out over the horizon at the next wave of technological advances in the development pipeline to understand how (hopefully) the technology is evolving to eventually deliver true continuous application availability with zero data loss in the event of a disaster.
April 27-30, 2010-EBUG 2010 Annual Conference
Gravic recently attended the EBUG (EMEA BASE24 User Group) Annual Conference in Madrid, Spain. The theme was "Beyond the Sunset" and assisted delegates in choosing their best future strategy in light of the announcement from ACI over the "sunsetting" of some of its products. ACI offered a full set of updates, roadmaps, and opportunities for discussion with senior ACI executives. We were most impressed by the quality and quantity of attendees as well as the super reception we received discussing our implementation of Shadowbase® at Royal Bank of Canada for continuous availability BASE24™ replication. Our overall lasting impression is that HP NonStop is a very viable and vibrant platform for both BASE24 and BASE24-eps, and the introduction of the HP NonStop Blades platform greatly enhances this marketplace.
May 1, 2010-Part 22: Fast Failover with Active/Active Systems (1 of 2) "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
How to rapidly recover from a node failure in an active/active network using client redirection and network redirection; failover using these techniques can be automatic and very rapid.
April 15, 2010-NENUG Spring Meeting
Speakers: Paul Holenstein, Executive Vice President and Richard Davis, Shadowbase Product Group Sales Manager
Title: Shadowbase Solutions for Application Modernization and an Update on New Shadowbase Enhancements
Abstract: Many of you are familiar with the Shadowbase data replication and integration solutions for providing high and continuous availability for business continuity projects, real-time data warehouse and business intelligence feeds, and heterogeneous application integration capabilities. This talk will highlight Shadowbase solutions for performing application modernization. Examples include the Shadowbase ability to modernize access to your legacy data by replicating it to open and readily accessible standard SQL environments, the Shadowbase ability to dramatically improve your availability profile by upgrading tape-based or active/passive disaster recovery architectures into active/active disaster tolerant architectures, and the Shadowbase ability to provide continuous access to your application services while the modernization project is implemented. Several case studies of successful application modernization projects are presented, along with an update on the new and exciting enhancements now available with Shadowbase solutions.
Speaker: Dick Davis, Shadowbase Product Group Sales Manager
Title: Shadowbase Data Replication and Synchronization Solutions
Abstract: Shadowbase, Gravic's real-time data integration and synchronization product, is used in homogeneous and heterogeneous replication projects including: ODS's, Data Marts, Data Warehouses, Real-Time Business Intelligence, and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery. We present Shadowbase solutions for common business problems, and new extensions to the Shadowbase On-line Loading and Real-Time Business Intelligence capabilities.
March 15, 2010-Press Release: Gravic, Inc., the makers of the Shadowbase® data replication product line announces an availability modernization success story for the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).
Speaker: William Holenstein, Shadowbase Product Group Senior Manager, Delivery
Title: Shadowbase Solutions for Application Modernization and an Update on New Shadowbase Enhancements
Abstract: Many of you are familiar with the Shadowbase data replication and integration solutions for providing high and continuous availability for business continuity projects, real-time data warehouse and business intelligence feeds, and heterogeneous application integration capabilities. This talk will highlight Shadowbase solutions for performing application modernization, for example the Shadowbase ability to modernize access to your legacy data by replicating it to open and readily accessible standard SQL environments, the Shadowbase ability to dramatically improve your availability profile by upgrading tape-based or active/passive disaster recovery architectures into active/active disaster tolerant architectures, or the Shadowbase ability to provide continuous access to your application services while the modernization project is implemented. Several case studies of successful application modernization projects will be presented, along with an update on the new and exciting enhancements now available with Shadowbase solutions.
March 1, 2010-Part 21: Active/Active NonStop Blades "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
A review of the increased computing density of NonStop Blade Systems, and how active/active systems can be implemented to provide even higher availability, greater capacity, and lower cost of ownership.
January 18, 2010-Press Release: Gravic, Inc., the makers of the award-winning Shadowbase® data replication product line, announces affordable solutions for active/active replication of BASE24™ environments.
January 5th, 2010-Part 20: Is Your Application Active/Active Ready? "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
A review of the problems that can result when active/active systems achieve their scalability and continuous availability by distributing application and database copies across an application network.
2009
Shadowbase Newsletter Fall 2009 - Vice President's Letter, Sales and Marketing Highlights, Support Tips, Case Study, and Employee Spotlight.
November 3, 2009-Patent Release: On November 3, 2009, Paul Holenstein, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, Gary Strickler, and Gene Jarema were awarded US Patent No. 7,613,740 entitled Control of a data replication engine using attributes associated with a transaction.
November 1, 2009-Part 19: Reviewing Three Years of The Availability Corner "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
A three-year-anniversary review of the past 18 articles published continuously in The Connection column,. "The Availability Corner: Achieving Century Uptimes."
October 13, 2009-Patent Release: On October 13, 2009, Dr. Bruce Holenstein, Paul Holenstein, Gary Strickler, Bill Grimm, and Dr. Bill Highleyman were awarded US Patent No. 7,603,389 entitled Optimized statement caching for transaction replay.
September 29, 2009-Webcast
Title: Advances in Active/Active - Asynchronous and Synchronous Replication State-of-the-Art
Presenters: Paul Holenstein, Gravic Executive Vice President and Dick Davis, Shadowbase Sales Manager
Abstract: Today's companies are demanding higher application availability solutions beyond what traditional active/passive business continuity architectures provide. We explain how active/active replication dramatically increases your application availability and provides a myriad of other benefits (using all nodal capacity for productive work, masking failures from your users, providing disaster tolerance “for free,” and eliminating the all-or-nothing leap of faith that classic active/passive DR architectures have at failover time). We use Shadowbase solutions to present real world asynchronous active/active architectures and describe the advances being made in the synchronous replication area for eliminating data loss and avoiding data collisions in active/active architectures.
Type: WMV File, Size: 58.7MB, Length: 1:24:07
September 1, 2009-Part 18: Recovering from Synchronous Replication Failures "Achieving Century Uptimes" as seen in The Connection, published by Connect, by Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein
A discussion of the procedures that allow transaction processing to continue in the face of a target database failure and for reinstating the target database as a participant in transactions upon its recovery.
Shadowbase Newsletter Summer 2009 - Vice President's Letter, Sales Highlights, Marketing Highlights, Product Management Update, Support Tips, Case Study, Employee Spotlight, and Gravic Labs.
May 31, 2009-Patent Release: On May 31, 2009, Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein, and Dr. Bruce Holenstein were awarded US Patent No. 7,539,898 entitled Method of increasing system availability by assigning process pairs to processor pairs.
April 27, 2009-Patent Release: On April 27, 2009, Paul J. Holenstein, Gary E. Strickler, Eugene P. Jarema, and Dr. Bruce Holenstein were awarded US Patent No. 7,523,110 entitled High availability designated winner data replication.
February 24, 2009-Webcast
Title: AOL's Live Migration from 16 Sybase Servers to a Single NonStop Database - With No Application Downtime
Presenters: Rob Lesan, Principal DBA, AOL
Abstract:Learn how AOL migrated its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) authentication service from a partitioned 16-node Sybase database into a single NonStop SQL/MP database (with copies simultaneously hosted on three additional NonStop nodes in an active/active Shadowbase data replication configuration). Understand the reasons for the migration, goals AOL needed to achieve both during and after the migration completion, the reasons the company selected NonStop SQL/MP as the target environment, as well as the unforeseen challenges AOL encountered and had to overcome during the effort. Topics covered include:
- Roadmap Steps to Achieve Parallel Database
- Bulk Migration
- Synchronization
- Migration
- Instrumentation
- AOL/ICQ Instant Messaging Migration
- Authentication Event Triggering & Publish/Subscribe
2008
Shadowbase Newsletter Fall 2008 - Vice President's Letter, Sales and Marketing, Support Tips, Case Study, Product Development Update, and Employee Spotlight.
Shadowbase Newsletter Spring 2008 - Vice President's Letter, Gravic Labs, Sales and Marketing, Case Study, Development Update, Tradeshows, and Employee Spotlight.
Source and Target: Find out about the history of the Source and Target dogs.