For NTI it is all about M&Ms – Migration and Modernization

For NTI it is all about M&Ms – Migration and Modernization

Whenever there is a gathering of the Nonstop community for a major event, there is always an expectation that good news will anchor many conversations. In her opening address of HPE Nonstop Technical and Business Conference 2025 (Nonstop TBC 2025), Casey Taylor, HPE VP & GM HPE Nonstop Compute, made it very clear that from her experience, “the Nonstop Compute business, gaining a seat at the HPE executive table had been priority number one” and this goal had been achieved in 2025. With this observation, Casey set the stage for numerous positive outcomes not the last being the successful introduction of the latest Nonstop Compute converged systems – the Nonstop NS5 X5 and NS9 X5.

Product introductions always take center stage and given this latest advancement of the Nonstop Compute product line, following as has been doing of late the HPE ProLiant roadmap, it brought a level of consistency to a global market segment always looking for what is new for Nonstop Compute. For NTI, such new product introductions are always welcomed. The tech refreshes such an upgrade requires always falls on the ears of a receptive audience. While Nonstop TBC2025 was the forum where NTI introduced its new tag line, “We move the data that moves your business,” it was just as appropriate a venue to promote our M&Ms strategy. No, not a chocolate treat give-away but rather, a strategy very much tied to Migrations and Modernization. As a community Nonstop may find chocolate an attractive option, but more realistically, finding a vendor focused on the business needs of the day holds a lot more attraction.

NTI has now been in business for more than forty years and during this time, it has refined its practices when it comes to migrating from one Disaster / Recovery (D/R) solution to another. Taking Nonstop customers from home-grown solutions as well as from RDF, to the NTI flagship product suite, DRNet®/Unified, our practice has been further strengthened with the migration away from GoldenGate to DRNet®/Unified with the availability of DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Customers. It is at venues like Nonstop TBC 2025 that the Nonstop community hears about such successes and it’s become quickly apparent to NTI management those Nonstop customers engaged in due diligence over which D/R solution best meets their needs and that maintaining a strong vendor presence attracts a wider audience.

A well-architected replication solution, based on Change Data Capture (CDC) is at the heart of DRNet®/Unified, is at the heart of NTI’s business continuity solutions. It was NTI who helped pioneer active-active deployment of D/R for Nonstop customers just as it was NTI who lessened the requirement for TMF protection as it supports TMF and Non-TMF deployments – a priority for current Nonstop customers relying on BASE24 and BASE24-eps where the presence of TMF protection is never an assumption that can be made. But with DRNet®/Unified, Nonstop customers can proceed with migrations safe in the knowledge that any such perceived migration risks can be mitigated with the knowledge that there have been other Nonstop customers who have gone and continue to go down this path.

However, NTI is more than just building a strategy around migrations as increasingly the Nonstop customer is looking to modernize the presence of Nonstop within their IT organization. No longer prepared to operate Nonstop in isolation, behind protective screens, but rather to be better equipped to participate in the modern world of Hybrid IT. As such, it is the replication based on CDC that is fueling the latest round of modernization being undertaken by these Nonstop customers. When it comes to the business of analytics and AI, where solutions are more likely to be found on adjacent systems, moving data becomes imperative. Isolation may have once served the goal of protection of mission-critical applications but more importantly today, the data created on Nonstop is now deemed to be significant to businesses operating AI to better meet their customer expectations.

With its introduction, followed by an immediate success, DRNet®/Kafka powered by uLinga, an Infrasoft Pty Limited product, NTI has delivered the first data-centered solution for integrating solutions on Nonstop with any adjacent server via its data streaming platform. Utilizing the capabilities of Kafka to the fullest extent and doing so natively with no additional servers involved, data can be rapidly delivered anywhere and everywhere it is needed. This is the level of modernization that delivers results and for those Nonstop customers looking to become a bigger player in their IT organization’s world of Hybrid IT there can be no better way to go about such a pursuit.

“DRNet®/Kafka powered by uLinga for Kafka supports a wide range
of access points to enable Nonstop users to leverage the resultant,
powerful, data streaming platform.

“What is provided included IPC, Pathsend, HTTP/REST together with
a number of file-oriented approaches.”

More good news coming out of Nonstop TBC 2025: With DRNet®/Kafka NTI has executed the first product license for uLinga for Kafka, delivering TLF and PTLF data from BASE24 to an EMEA financial institution’s customers using mobile banking apps where there is already a Kafka broker present. “We see this as a significant win as it provides NTI with a use-case scenario that will be commonplace across the financial services industry. Streaming TLF and PTLF data to Kafka involved taking advantage of the powerful data transformation capabilities within uLinga Kafka, delivering the data into Kafka either in JSON or Avro according to the customer’s needs,” said Infrasoft’s Andrew Price, Director, Business Operations. Having a real-world Nonstop customer to talk about at Nonstop TBC 2025 was certainly a highlight of the event but there was even more news from NTI.

NTI has also generated new business for DRNet®/Gateway, powered by uLinga, a premier application integration and modernization technology, again, powered by uLinga. While it might be described as a Swiss Army Knife or even a modern-day equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, DRNet®/Gateway bridges legacy and modern systems (as the Nonstop community bears witness to), in ways few other Nonstop vendors can provide. This first Nonstop customer of DRNet^® /Gateway, an AP/J financial institution uses the product to provide TLS protection of TCP/IP connections to Visa, without any necessity to change the application.

Nonstop customers in EMEA and AP/J modernizing with DRNet®/Unified together with DRNet®/Kafka and DRNet®/Gateway (both powered by uLinga), join the many Nonstop customers in the Americas where after celebrating forty years in business, NTI continues to grow its M&Ms. Not surprisingly, the Nonstop customers have become more open to tech refreshes that extend to inclusion of the NTI product suite and for good reason. They may not taste as satisfying as those chocolaty treats but in terms of providing better support, Nonstop customers are finding the results of migrating and modernizing with DRNet®/Unified every bit as delightful!