NTI Attends E-BITUG

Prizes! E-BITUG proved rewarding for the Nonstop Compute community.

The journey to Dublin, Ireland, for E-BITUG European NonStop Symposium might have been long, with moments of discomfort but the opportunity to network with the Nonstop Compute community was well worth the time and distance. Whenever there is a gathering of this community there is always something to celebrate. However, it wasn’t without surprises, too, as this year, as a community, we welcomed the renaming of NonStop as it was rebranded as Nonstop Compute. The alignment with the bigger HPE was clear and as part of the overall Compute business unit, it reinforces the notion that, as a result, Nonstop is gaining greater prominence within the HPE organization.

Clearly, this was the message from Casey Taylor, HPE Nonstop VP & GM. However, it takes more than a simple name re-do to curry favor with this community but even so, it was a surprise all the same. Anything that elevates the posture of Nonstop within HPE is viewed as an encouraging plus. The Nonstop community may not be a club, but nevertheless, the culture evident throughout the community suggests that there is considerable support for this premier line of fault tolerant systems and as the world continues to gravitate to 24 x 7 operation where almost all applications are becoming mission-critical, the Nonstop Compute product family represents a beacon of hope to even the most IT-jaded professionals.
For the NTI attendees present this year at E-BITUG, the opportunity to participate in the first morning’s keynote and plenary sessions gave the company a better opportunity to address a much larger audience than has been afforded the company in the past. For this, NTI is appreciative of the support it is receiving from the BITUG committee along with the Connect team. There’s always benefits coming from giving company, customer and prospect product updates to an audience that is very much awake and looking forward to all that followed that week.

Among the key deliverables in this regard – and theses were highlights in the delivery of this plenary session – was the testament of NTI customers, the inclusion of references to Nonstop customers moving to DRNet® of which two new customers proved newsworthy coming from regions as far apart as LATAM and AsiaPac. There was also coverage of an expanded product portfolio coming about as a result of Nonstop customers response to previous announcements made last year in Monterey, at the annual Nonstop TBC event. Building upon an active partnership with TANDsoft, the Nonstop community was introduced to a new partnership with Infrasoft.

Perhaps the most important announcements continue to include DRNet®/Unified for GoldenGate Conversion now include DRNet®/Kafka and DRNet®/Gateway courtesy of Infrasoft. DRNet® is unique in its ability to roll-in as a full replacement for GoldenGate, without requiring any additional products or tools, or billable services.

One important distinction? Whereas some vendors maybe talking about how they can help, it is NTI that has helped.

“The special sauce in this case that makes DRNet® a destination of choice for BASE24 GoldenGate users seeking less complicated and faster conversions is directly attributed to NTI building critical file and feature support for BASE24 into DRNet® as standard product while substantially reducing current and future expenses for arguably equivalent capabilities” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Global Director, Worldwide Sales.

It is a very similar close working relationship that NTI now has with Infrasoft. The Infrasoft development team is well-known to NTI and the quality of the work goes unquestioned. The uLinga product suite has been subject to more than a decade of development and enhancement across multiple network and services protocols and when the subject of tighter integration with Kafka arose, the uLinga product proved to be the most comprehensive offering available to the Nonstop community.

This relationship led to a very tight integration of DRNet® replication with uLinga/Kafka where the native APIs of uLinga Kafka became central to DRNet®’s ability to tap the capabilities of Kafka data streaming in a manner that eliminated any requirement for external accessibility servers. The philosophy of NTI to ensure simplicity together with superior performance made deeper cooperation between the companies a natural extension of the way both Nonstop vendors prefer to pursue joint developments.
The big news? The first Nonstop customer to sign an agreement for DRNet®/Kafka is on its way with the prospect of more to follow as a result of the presentations and discussions that followed this week at E-BITUG. As for DRNet®/Gateway powered by uLinga, while this is a brand-new cooperative development for both Nonstop vendors, it is the expectation of both NTI and Infrasoft that follow-on presentations on deployment activities will be a much-anticipated highlight of this year’s TBC in Houston.

Kafka and indeed GoldenGate conversions were topics addressed by multiple vendors but the evidence from migrations already completed, as is the case with GoldenGate migrations, is without peer. Zero data loss? All replication products available today for NonStop come with proven reliability with none reporting any loss of transactional data. Likewise, there is growing requirement for modernization and this is where NTI leads with DRNet® as other competing offerings still linger in the past highlighting legacy protocols.

“It was encouraging to see the response that came from Nonstop Compute customers over the reliability of DRNet® when combined with uLinga Kafka,” said Tim Dunne, “we are witnessing the preference shifting from legacy synchronous web services to modern asynchronous event streaming services – a situation that DRNet® together with Infrasoft are addressing.”

Wherever there is a gathering of the Nonstop Compute community, there is always plenty of news to discuss. Partnerships, messaging, branding, customers and prospects as well as new products, all take center stage. It is doubly encouraging to see such commitments from a Nonstop Compute community operating independently of HPE and yet prepared to spend their own nickels and dimes on much needed solutions being so well-received by those in attendance.

It is a sign of a healthy NonStop Compute community and no matter the distances that may separate us, when we come together and have the opportunity to see what these invested nickel and dimes are producing is all the encouragement we need, as the effort for even broader support of mission critical computers continues to expand unabated.

All eyes now are being directed towards Houston, Texas, as the big event of the year, the Nonstop TBC is looming large. Prizes and gifts may still play an important role at these major Nonstop events, but perhaps an even bigger prize is how all event attendees get to leave with– an enthusiastic Nonstop Compute ecosystem dedicated to supporting the global IT community. NTI will be in attendance and we look forward to seeing you and be prepared, there will be more good news of customer commitments to NTI yet to come.