Real-Time Business Information Solutions from Gravic

The Shadowbase® suite of products, from Gravic, Inc. (http://www.gravic.com/), provides the replication and online copying facilities needed for effective real-time business information systems. Shadowbase software solutions also provide the infrastructure to implement extreme-availability architectures. These solutions include the Shadowbase, real-time data replication engine, and SOLV, a powerful online copy utility.

Shadowbase Real-Time Replication

The Shadowbase data replication engine provides high-speed data replication among a variety of databases and platforms. With a history in the decades and hundreds of mission-critical, enterprise-class installations worldwide, Shadowbase technology is a proven performer.

Shadowbase software is an ideal solution for interconnecting enterprise systems with an RTBI system. The Shadowbase data replication engine:

  • Provides bi-directional asynchronous data replication.
  • Is totally transparent to the applications. It requires no application modifications because it gets database changes from a transaction log if one is available. Otherwise, it obtains data changes from database triggers or intercept libraries.
  • Runs on a wide variety of platforms against several databases. Source platforms include HP NonStop®, Linux, Unix, and Windows. Target platforms include all source platforms plus OpenVMS and AS400. Shadowbase technology replicates from NonStop SQL, Enscribe, Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server databases to these same databases as well as to DB2 and MySQL databases. (See www.gravic.com for the current list of supported databases.)
  • Has no disk-queuing points, thus, replication is very rapid. Replication latency is measured in the tens of milliseconds on many systems. The Shadowbase performance is enhanced by its multithreading capability.
  • Runs as check pointed process pairs and persistent processes. It runs on NonStop systems so that it survives hardware and software failures. On other systems, it runs a persistent processes under a monitor.
  • Guarantees the integrity and consistency of the target database even when running with multiple threads. Alternatively, Shadowbase software is configured to break source transactions into subtractions to enhance replay parallelism and performance.
  • Has extensive built-in transformation rules. These rules are augmented by user-supplied specialized rules.
  • Provides complete data collision detection and resolution facilities for active/active environments. Users extend the Shadowbase collision-resolution rules with additional business rules tailored to their application’s business logic.
  • Is heterogeneous. Any supported platform and any supported database may serve as a source system or as a target system in any mix.
  • Is easy to manage. It is easy to manage with its AUDMON process monitor, its AUDCOM command interface, and its Shadowbase Enterprise Manager (SEM), a Windows GUI that provides integrated command and monitoring support for Shadowbase components running in a heterogeneous environment.
  • Is bidirectional. It is suitable for complex active/active architectures.

Extreme Availability with Shadowbase Active/Active Support

Many of the Shadowbase’s installations around the world are active/active, geographically distributed systems. These systems achieve availabilities in excess of six 9s (less than thirty seconds per year of downtime).

Shadowbase technology provides two functions in an RTBI environment:

  • Shadowbase synchronizes the operational systems with the RTBI system.
  • Shadowbase synchronizes multiple RTBI systems in a redundant active/active configuration.

Running an RTBI system as an active/active system simply requires that Shadowbase software replicates database changes between the two geographically separated RTBI systems. If one system fails, the other system is immediately ready to take over the real-time business-information services. With an active/active RTBI system, it is fair to say that the uptime of real-time business information services is measured in centuries.

Online Copying – SOLV

The critical online copying function needed to bring an RTBI system into service is provided by the Shadowbase’s SOLV utility. (Shadowbase Online Loading, Verification, and Validation utility) SOLV is a unique copy utility.

  • SOLV moves data from a source database to the target database without interrupting source database activity.
  • SOLV maintains target data that was already copied in a current state by applying changes to it as other portions of the database are copied. There is no large queue of source database changes that need to be applied following the copy.
  • SOLV maintains currency of those parts of the database that were already copied so that they are used by applications at the target system while the copy is in progress.

Another powerful feature of SOLV is inherent in its architecture. SOLV is not a utility separate from the Shadowbase replication engine. Rather, it uses the Shadowbase replicator to move data from the source database to the target database. As a consequence, SOLV uses the same data transformation rules during the copy function that Shadowbase database replication uses later in the replication process. This function avoids the problem of trying to conform the copy transformation rules with the replicator transformation rules so that both perform exactly the same. Rules are implemented only once. The same code is then used by both the load engine and the replication engine.

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