A new year; a revised playbook!

A new year; a revised playbook!

The heroics of the recent US National Football Association (NFL) Superbowl are now behind us. Who would have guessed that it was a punter (of the football) who played for the Seattle Seahawks would attract so much attention? After all, the lad runs onto the playing field only a couple of times a game; surely not a football player, is he? And yet, with his performance, he turned the tide for the Seahawks with perfectly aimed kicks that kept the opposing team camped out barely in front of their own goal line.

When the playing field is crowded, it often takes the performance of just one player to make a difference. When it comes to IT, the playing field is extremely crowded and yet, for Nonstop, a perennial “first team” selection, based on its unmatched levels of availability, it remains the vendor to watch. Competition has come and gone but Nonstop continues to support mission-critical transaction processing for the most demanding of enterprises. Nonstop keeps the opposition struggling to make it onto the playing field as any kind of competitive threat.

For five decades, Nonstop has performed the role of foundation anchor for many enterprises. And for almost as many decades, having passed our fourth decade celebration, NTI has ensured these enterprise users that the fault tolerant deployments can be elevated to being disaster tolerant. Data replication lies at the foundation of all that NTI provides and the DRNet® product portfolio has allowed multiple site deployments of Nonstop to survive all manner of disasters wherever and whenever they occur.

For NTI, data replication success has allowed Nonstop customers to move data, migrate middleware, modernize their participation in hybrid IT deployments and in general, embrace media with messaging that resonates well with the Nonstop community. As a global participant in all things Nonstop related, NTI demonstrates a degree of business resilience that is welcomed by the Nonstop community.

However, longevity by itself, may be a testament to astute technology judgment calls – having the right product at the right time – but for NTI it is more than that; in a well-defined industry marketplace, Nonstop customers are looking to rationalize the number of vendors that they support preferring those who bring more than just one product to the industry.  The call today, even among the most diligent of Nonstop customers, is to test the Nonstop vendor community as to the breadth of their partner ecosystem. There is still value in having just one call to make whenever there are questions that need to be answered.

For NTI, this has led to an appreciation of the value of upselling into the Nonstop marketplace. Well-entrenched in data replication for business continuity, it’s been a simple progression to add support for data distribution to third-party databases as well as processes. At a time when the prospect of needing to support adjacent servers is becoming real, NTI has built on its foundation of replication and is embracing providing Nonstop customers with an onboard data streaming platform. All done with the participation of select Nonstop vendors who are now an integral part of NTI’s thriving partner ecosystem.

No single partner amplifies this message more than Infrasoft and what is occurring between NTI and Infrasoft. From the initial talks that lead to a relationship that brought, the first and only, bidirectional support of DRNet®/Kafka to Nonstop – again, no external servers required, all supported onboard Nonstop as Nonstop processes. DRNet®/Kafka, powered by uLinga has met with considerable interest that has led to successful production deployments.

“We have always been at the forefront of replication and our history speaks for itself,” said Cody Newton, CEO of NTI: “Today, we are hearing from our customers that moving data has become a starting point and there is a lot more that they want to do and we have stepped up to provide exactly that through a combination of internal and partner developments. You could say, AI has not only become the biggest talking point of late even as it has become an all-important driver behind our business of moving data in the modern world of IT we inhabit.”

Looking at the start of a new year it was time to review our playbook. IT is an industry where simply standing still is not an option – change is endemic to our industry. NTI has established strength in moving data and today, this play has become simply one option. Many more customer requirements have arisen that demand even more from NTI. The old playbook simply has to be revised. This has been evident as first we added support for JDBC connection to relational databases and JSON for time-series databases so DRNet® could move data to third-party databases and processes. Whether the need was to replicate data to PostgreSQL, Oracle etc or send to Splunk, NTI delivered.

Looking at the requirements that have emerged of late including the acceleration of interest in all things related to AI, NTI moved quickly to provide enhancements to DRNet® to provide a better data streaming platform. The partnership with Infrasoft that led to the release of DRNet®/Kafka, proved immediately successful. Most recently, Infrasoft released uLinga Nexus the first and only MCP on Nonstop.

uLinga Nexus provided and supported by NTI, has joined NTI’s product portfolio. It is a monumental development allowing AI implementations to access Nonstop data.

What Nexus adds to the NTI playbook is support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), whereby Nexus acts as an MCP server, running entirely on Nonstop systems. It translates between MCP requests from AI clients and the protocols and interfaces already used on Nonstop. This is not the same old story for NTI but rather, Nexus is a key differentiator for NTI as it is not just new but it’s the delivery of true modernization for Nonstop.

Nexus is not just a series of pipes and connectors but rather builds on an impressive transformation engine developed exclusively by the Infrasoft team. Take a typical interaction common enough today where ChatGPT, a general-purpose AI chatbot / AI client developed by OpenAI, or an Internal ChatBot is engaged. It is a conversational interface a person interacts with; it is not the intelligence itself – it is simply a user-friendly messaging layer.

“The chatbot receives text from the user, maintains conversational context, and forwards structures prompts to an AI model,” said Alphonse R.M. Hoge, CTO of NTI. “LLM (Large Language Model) is the reasoning engine behind the chatbot and there is a rapidly expanding list of LLMs, many of them already trained for industry verticals, including financial services. LLMs predict text, based on patterns learned during training, and any additional data supplied at runtime.

The LLM does not inherently know your company’s data — it only knows what it was trained on plus whatever it is given during a conversation. MCP (Model Context Provider) is a connector that retrieves information for the LLM. It acts like a controlled data adapter. MCPs may retrieve internal company documents, databases, or APIs, or they may retrieve external public information. The LLM never directly accesses systems — MCPs do that on its behalf.”

“MCP defines how capabilities are described, how requests are made, and how results are returned. It is designed to be extensible and secure and does not impose requirements on how the underlying system is implemented,” said Andrew Price, Director of Business Operations, Infrasoft. “The challenge in a Nonstop environment is not the protocol itself, but providing a clean and reliable bridge between MCP and native Nonstop interfaces.”

The above is a simplified diagram
inclusive of Nonstop with Nexus.

The significance of such support of the MCP protocol is that now chatbots can query Nonstop applications, retrieve relevant data and then apply standard analytical techniques – looking for duplicate transactions, clusters of rapid withdrawals, and repeated behaviors that may warrant closer review. “The value here is not in any single observation, but in the ability to explore the data interactively and through an iterative process, follow up on emerging questions,” said Andrew Price.

According to Andrew Price, as covered in an article included in this issue of Nonstop Insider, “When queried, the AI client retrieves the data and applies standard analytical techniques to identify patterns of interest. These include duplicate transactions, clusters of rapid withdrawals, and repeated behaviors that may warrant closer review.” The value here is not in any single observation, but in the ability to explore the data interactively and follow up on emerging questions. “Operational teams can query logs or performance metrics. Support staff can investigate recent errors without navigating multiple tools. Compliance reporting can be driven by direct questions rather than predefined extracts. In each case, the emphasis is on access and analysis, not automation or control.”

Looking into your playbook and determining that additional products are needed to meet the ever-changing requirements of Nonstop customers is never a once-off. For NTI this happens on a regular basis – hence the support for Oracle databases, Splunk process, Kafka and transformations in general. The NTI playbook has always called for NTI to track customer requirements and respond accordingly. Nexus represents a continuation of rising to the occasion in this regard, meeting customer requirements, and in doing so, it is progressing the modernization of Nonstop to where its participation, indeed acceptance in a world of modern, hybrid IT, can no longer be ignored.

Look for more for how best NTI will meet requirements of your enterprise at upcoming Nonstop events including E-GTUG where, once again, NTI will be a Platinum Sponsor and hard to miss. If you have an immediate need to know more about the DRNet® product portfolio in its entirety, then contact us via – https://network-tech.com/contact-us