Focus on Shadowbase Product Management

Keith B. Evans Shadowbase Product Management

The Business Continuity Product Suite for HP Integrity NonStop Servers

Modern business continuity solutions keep business applications and customer services available, day and night, by design. Any application down time, whether planned or unplanned, must be minimal and invisible to customers – without loss of service or data.

The HP NonStop business continuity solution suite comprises seven key software products which work together to create and protect copies of critical databases and other essential application files across multiple systems, ensuring continued service availability in the event of planned or unplanned system outage:

• HP NonStop Transaction Management Facility (TMF)
• HP NonStop Remote Database Facility (RDF)
• HP NonStop Shadowbase
• HP NonStop AutoTMF
• HP NonStop AutoSYNC
• HP NonStop SQL Data Definition Language Replicator (SDR)
• HP NonStop TS/MP (Pathway domains; not required)

HP NonStop TMF software is the core of fault- and disaster-tolerant computing on HP NonStop servers, enabling instant and transparent takeover within a single system in the event of a hardware or software component failure.

• Robust two-phase commit protocol for transaction protection and database integrity
• Parallel, high-performance transaction management
• Recovery from accidental or intentional database modification or deletion

HP NonStop RDF software allows you to create a disaster recovery environment across multiple NonStop systems or physical sites, using Expand system interconnect, where the database on each system is identical in structure.

• High throughput for near instantaneous replication
• Granular specification of primary and backup databases
• Zero lost transactions (optional)

The HP NonStop Shadowbase product suite comprises several products addressing business continuity, data replication, data and application integration, zero downtime migration, and other utilities to deliver a true 24×7 “nonstop” enterprise. Shadowbase solutions complements RDF by providing additional capabilities such as support for TCP/IP interconnect and replication between both homogeneous and heterogeneous platforms and databases.:

• Business Continuity, Data and Application Availability
  • Uni-directional active/passive disaster recovery for high availability
  • Bi-directional active/almost-active sizzling-hot-takeover (SZT) for higher availability
  • Bi-directional active/active hot-hot disaster tolerant architecture for continuous availability
• Data Integration and Data Synchronization
  • Replicate data between homogeneous and heterogeneous environments
  • Built-in data transformation, scrubbing, filtering, and cleansing
  • Extend replication capabilities with embedded application logic
• Application Integration
  • Build real-time (streaming) event-driven architectures
  • Process events as they occur; no more working with “stale” data
  • Integrate disparate applications with no code changes
• Utilities for Data Management and Audit Compliance
  • Online database loading
  • Create searchable archive of transactional database activity
  • Analyze and display the TMF audit trail
  • Correct corrupted databases
  • Verify source and target database consistency

HP NonStop AutoTMF software enables applications not currently invoking TMF protection to do so automatically. Not only do you get better transaction protection through the use of audited database files, but also your application actually performs better because TMF merges multiple transactions into one disk write.

• Allows applications to transparently invoke NonStop TMF protection
• Improves system and application performance
• Enables the use of RDF and Shadowbase software

Whereas RDF and Shadowbase software stream transactional database file changes to one or more systems, HP NonStop AutoSYNC software uses whole file replication to automatically synchronize any kind of file across multiple systems.

• Automates multisystem software distribution
• Facilitates system migration and upgrades
• Complements database replication software

Working in cooperation with RDF or (in the near future) Shadowbase software, HP NonStop SDR software makes sure that when performing NonStop SQL/MP Data Definition Language (DDL) operations, such as creating a table, adding a column or moving a partition, these changes will be automatically replicated and implemented at the correct point in the data replication stream on the backup database.

• Transparently replicates DDL changes across systems
• Designed for total user control, with minimal setup and operator intervention
• Optionally replicates DDL operations on non-TMF-audited tables

It is of no use having data available on alternate systems if the applications required to provide the business services are not also available. This requirement is partly addressed by Pathway domains across nodes (a feature of the HP NonStop TS/MP product), which allows Pathway serverclasses to be distributed across multiple NonStop server systems. In the event of planned or unplanned system outages, Pathway user requests are automatically routed to the serverclasses running on remaining systems, thereby preserving application availability. In addition, by configuring applications within a Pathway domain across multiple HP NonStop nodes, application scalability is increased by automatic workload distribution across those systems.

• Maintain Pathway application availability during planned and unplanned system outages
• Upgrade Pathway versions and applications with no downtime
• Reduce takeover times
• Better utilize backup system capacity
• Increase Pathway application scalabilityWhen it comes to business continuity, your business data, configuration scripts, application objects, DDL definitions and more must be kept consistent between your primary and backup systems, otherwise you’ll find out the hard way that your backup system doesn’t really have your back after all. The HP NonStop Business Continuity Product Suite provides a range of capabilities to help ensure that everything you need to maintain system availability will be there when you need it. More information about these products can be found at https://h22204.www2.hpe.com/NEP/. A recent article on this subject that was published in The Connection is also available here.
  

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