Zero Downtime Migration for Large Pharmaceutical Chain
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Situation
A large U.S. pharmaceutical chain serving more than 100 million customers operated a critical HPE Nonstop environment consisting of three Nonstop systems running multiple NS applications, including payment processing.
The organization’s infrastructure was built around an Active/Passive Disaster Recovery architecture, making high availability and data integrity essential to maintaining uninterrupted service at scale across its pharmacy and retail operations.
Problem
- The existing replication solution posed a significant risk of massive data loss, undermining confidence in the organization’s ability to protect critical customer and transaction data
- Substantial replication lag and network delays made failover impractical, meaning that in the event of a system failure, the organization could not reliably switch to its Disaster Recovery environment without significant disruption
- The incumbent replication vendor required a long-term contractual commitment accompanied by steep license fee increases upon renewal, creating both financial pressure and strategic inflexibility
- The organization had already experienced a significant outage in July, making the urgency to find a more resilient and cost-effective replication solution immediate and business-critical
Solutions
- Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration for HPE Nonstop software
- Shadowbase Active / Almost-active (Sizzling-Hot-Takeover, SZT) for HPE Nonstop software
Outcomes
- The entire migration project was completed in under 45 days, allowing the organization to quickly move past the instability and risk associated with its legacy environment
- Systems and replication were fully migrated overnight with minimal application downtime and no risk to data integrity, ensuring uninterrupted service throughout the transition
- Data latency was minimized and replication lag was massively reduced through the adoption of a superior replication architecture, directly resolving the failover vulnerabilities of the previous solution
- Replication data was successfully preserved on the Disaster Recovery node, ensuring complete and consistent data across all systems from the moment migration was complete
- The organization gained meaningful online replication scalability and configurability through Shadowbase Q Files and replication threads, giving the infrastructure team far greater operational control going forward
- RPO was reduced from approximately 18 hours under the legacy solution to under one minute with Shadowbase, representing a transformational improvement in the organization’s Disaster Recovery posture
Shadowbase Products of Interest
Contact us or your Shadowbase representative for HPE Nonstop software, and learn how Shadowbase software will benefit you.
