2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
ETI-NET – helping a diversified financial services holding company migrate to NonStop X
ETI-NET
DanAs we anticipate all that might transpire in 2019, we can’t help but observe that NonStop has diversified in ways many of us simply couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. The writing was very much on the wall following the spin-mergers that saw non-core products spun out to other entities, but not NonStop. NonStop had to evolve or it too would be less important to HPE. At the time, the interpretation of these spin-merge moves by HPE was that yes, NonStop was strategic but then that begged the question, how so? What was in stall for the NonStop product line and where was the NonStop roadmap headed? Just as importantly, how will this be received by the NonStop community at large?
In 2018 more pieces of the puzzle came into view. NonStop was not only going to be virtualized, with virtualized NonStop (vNS) opening the doors to those enterprise committed to virtualized everything, but a reference system, the NS2, was introduced providing a simple entry point into how best to configure an entry-level vNS. With the introduction of the NS2, HPE and ETI-NET have also introduced the support of NS2 by both the BackBox and vBackBox.
For ETI-NET, we were pleased with what took place in 2018. It proved to be a time when the work put into BackBox to ensure it performs well with NonStop X as well as the work we did to ensure vBackBox provides value in the virtualized NonStop world has begun to pay dividends. Already there are members of the NonStop user community now up and running with BackBox on NonStop X (NS7) systems with perhaps the best use case coming from Raymond James, a diversified financial services holding company with subsidiaries engaged in investment and financial planning, investment banking and asset management.
In a case study that we were pleased to be able to publish a short time ago, a Raymond James senior engineer talks about the migration from multiple Itanium-based NonStop i systems to multiple x86 NonStop System X systems. “Stepping up from the two-dual core NB54016 systems and the one dual core NB54008 and bringing in to Raymond James two 10 CPU NS7 and two 4 CPU NS7 systems was a significant increase in performance,” noted (Raymond James’ Senior NonStop System Engineer John) Trizis.
The promotion of this case study featuring Raymond James has appeared in a number of publications with additional information provided in the post of December 25, 2018, What did you do in this season of joy? to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View. In this post it was reported that, at the time of the PoC, back in 2008, Raymond James was running five NS16000 systems and ETI-NET BackBox came into the picture to meet all Raymond James’ requirements fully leveraging the existing Raymond James infrastructure. The transition to virtual tape went as smoothly and fast as possible. And so it began the long collaboration with ETI-NET that Raymond James continues to enjoy up to this day.
As with all of the work we do here at ETI-NET in support of our customers over the long term and oftentimes, across multiple generations of NonStop systems, it is about the partnership that forms between ETI-NET and the NonStop user. This results in a level of trust between the parties that then leads to an early exposure to the user’s plans for the future that in turn, better prepares the vendor for what to implement next.
Or, as the above post reported, when approached about the upcoming migration, ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault, said, “Having built the relationship with Raymond James over the course of a decade, we were in a strong position to help them with the virtual tapes; we knew just how much data was going to be involved and we built our strategy based on the capacity to handle large amount of data. That’s why, for us, it was very important to continually improve the performance of the BackBox in order to be prepared to meet our customers’ increasing backup volume. We have tested and validated BackBox with NonStop X and Raymond James saw no change in the way their applications run after the upgrade to NonStop X.” Raymond James just completed the migration and it was a great success due to careful planning and due to a product with high performance.
As for how Raymond James viewed the relationship, “There wasn’t any hesitation on the part of ETI-NET to support us. Unlike other NonStop vendors we had worked in the past with who were slow to move their products to NonStop X, ETI-NET did the upgrade fast and efficiently. So we had no concerns whatsoever about the ability of ETI-NET to support us,” added Trizis. “Yes, we did look at other vendors in the NonStop space, but given our history with ETI-NET, we felt confident that staying with them was our best course of action.”
ETI-NET will be participating in the upcoming SunTUG “2019 Sunshine Summit” that will run from March 1 through to March 2 (at the Double Tree by Hilton in Tampa, Florida), where you can find out more of all that transpired during the migration to NonStop X at Raymond James. And if you would like to receive a copy of the Case Study, then feel free to reach out to either myself or Sylvain Tétreault. We will ensure you receive a copy and of course, if you happen to be attending SunTUG in March, by all means approach us as we would be only too happy to discuss this with you as we would be to discuss your own migration requirements.