Fall 2023: Shadowbase ITL & Deployment News

Peter Schvarcz
ITL Senior Project Manager

Andrew J. Bauernschmidt
Product Analyst

The ITL & Deployment Teams are Still Keeping Busy!

The Constant Juggling Act of New Customers and Prospective New Customers

Busy, busy, even more busy — seems this has become the new normal here at Gravic.

This is especially true for our Development and QA organizations that just released a new major version of our NSB (NonStop Shadowbase), version 6.801.

We also just released a version of OSB (Shadowbase for Other Servers) for Windows and will soon release another version of OSB. Subscribe to receive email updates.

We mention this because our ITL (Integration Team Lead) group provides Professional Services to assist customers with these upgrades.

Contact Us for upgrade assistance and more information.

Many Customers are Migrating to New Hardware and Operating Systems

These migration projects typically involve upgrading Shadowbase software to the latest and greatest version. We always recommend customers using Shadowbase User Exits involve our Delivery team to assist with the upgrade procedure, and to ensure existing features and functions remain in-place after the upgrade.

Several New Large HPE NonStop Customer Migrations

Completed Migrations

• The ITL Implementation Team is in the final phases of a Major UK Bank Migrating its BASE24™ Application to Active/Active for Continuous Availability.
  • If you attended eBITUG in the Spring, or TBC2023, we hope that you took advantage of the opportunity to see the user presentation given by Yogesh Teli, who was involved in the project.
  • We have now embarked on an additional project at the same major U.K. bank, which, like the first project, involves a number of unique and complex requirements and a phased migration approach.
    • The bank plans on leveraging new SBMAP features to enable a true Active/Active replication environment with collision avoidance.
• We completed helping a European bank migrate from RDF to HPE Shadowbase software.
  • Although the original objective was to have a comparable capability of uni-directional replication (Disaster Recovery) using Shadowbase, the customer decided to enhance its capability and significantly improve its failover time by implementing Shadowbase bi-directional replication.
  • Not only did the bank accomplish that with little extra effort and time, but it also successfully completed its DR site failover testing and operation with active/active continuous availability.
• We also completed the NonStop SQL/MP to MS SQL Server Data Integration project for a Caribbean customer that we reported on in the Spring Newsletter.
• We are wrapping up a project at a large hardware department store. This project involves integrating the store’s application from its current NonStop systems with a new cloud-based database system.

Ongoing Migrations

If all that was not enough, we are in the middle of several national and international projects, including:

• Two major U.S. and global payment processors
• An Australian bank

New Migrations

But wait, there’s more! We started new projects assisting customers perform Platform Refreshes and upgrade Shadowbase software:

• An existing U.S. Shadowbase customer, a West Coast credit union, is migrating its current hardware to a new set of NonStop systems. We continuously provide the team with procedures and guidance to help with the migration project to ensure that there is no data lost during the migration phase. (This project also includes upgrading the customer to the latest version that you can read about in the Delivery section. 
• A large pharmacy/drug store chain is migrating from an existing replication solution to a Shadowbase Sizzling-Hot-Takeover “SZT” (Active / Almost-active) solution. It will eventually transition Shadowbase software from an SZT architecture to a fully Active/Active replication environment. The chain contacted us after experiencing long-lasting lag that put large amounts of data at risk. This new Shadowbase solution includes features that will dramatically reduce replication latency and the risk of data loss, thereby giving the customer peace of mind.
• A European railway company is migrating its hardware to new NonStop systems.

New Opportunities and Future Projects Worldwide

We also are getting busier with new global opportunities, including:

• New initiatives in Latin America
• Several projects that we expect to accomplish within the next few months include banks in Australia, Taiwan, U.K. and the U.S., as well as some large card processors around the globe.
• Working closely with other customer deployment teams to help them get more familiar with implementing Shadowbase migration software and features, such as ones to load data (SOLV) and to validate data (Shadowbase Compare) on the new systems.

Gravic’s TBC Booth

The Recent HPE NonStop TBC 2023 in Denver

We would like to thank everyone who attended the HPE NonStop TBC in Denver, CO earlier this Fall and stopped by Gravic’s booth to discuss your data replication, integration, and validation needs.

We are also proud and honored that Drew Bauernschmidt won the title of the 2023 NonStop TBC Design Challenge Champion!

Future Outlook

Keep an eye out for announcements regarding the MATUG and NYTUG Meetings (with Gravic helping organize them) for next spring, which should be forthcoming in the next few weeks.

We look forward to another successful six months and providing you with more exciting news in our next newsletter!

As always, please contact us if you have a question related to Shadowbase support or deployments.

Please reference our Newsletter Disclaimer.