Major UK Bank Migrates its BASE24™ Application to Active/Active for Continuous Availability

Gravic recently published the use case article, Major UK Bank Migrates its BASE24™ Application to Active/Active for Continuous Availability in the November/December issue of The Connection. A large bank in the U.K. provides lending, wealth management, card processing, and many other services for over 48 million customers worldwide. The bank’s original Disaster Recovery solution reached Mature product status, and did not support automated failover and recovery, nor continuous availability via a more advanced active/active business continuity architecture. The bank decided to explore alternative options and chose HPE Shadowbase as their replacement solution. It also rearchitected the new solution so that its BASE24™ classic ATM application could leverage the new solution’s dual-site active/active capability. With careful planning, best practices, and extensive testing, the bank migrated to the new solution with only a few minor difficulties during the process. Learn about the bank’s journey to Continuous Availability, what went well, what could have gone better, and how the bank successfully completed the project with no application downtime.

Gravic Presents on HPE Shadowbase Digital Resilience at BITUG Little SIG

This month, Gravic presented on HPE Shadowbase Digital Resilience and Data Recovery at the BITUG Little SIG held in London. Data is a key aspect of digital resilience, and ensuring its continuous availability has never been more important. This is especially true as new government regulations, such as the European Union’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA), impose stringent technical requirements on businesses to protect, detect, and recover from information technology incidents. We discussed exciting and innovative HPE Shadowbase solutions that are helping NonStop customers maximize digital resilience and address emerging business needs, like Ransomware data recovery, Cloud Integration, Streaming Data Analytics, and Virtualization. Please contact us if you would like us to present this topic to you or if you would like more information.

BITUG Little SIG provided an update for regional attendees who had not attended the Connect HPE TBC. Neil Davis (HPE) provided a business update on the recent HPE Discover held in Barcelona, mentioning that HPE NonStop had a strong performance in Northwestern Europe, that there were advancements in HPE GreenLake adoption, and how high interest rates affect the overall NS business. Neil also stressed that BASE24™ can be “run without risk on HPE NonStop,” since it is a tried and true application and platform combination.

Sean Bicknell (4TechSoftware) explained how he “went down the Ransomware wormhole on Google,” and looked at various Ransomware groups such as Black Cat. Graham Rogers (HPE) reminded everyone to be cautious, because these hackers track the visitors who search for this information. Sean highlighted that MGM Casino recently paid a whopping $55M Ransomware payment.

Iain Liston-Brown (HPE) provided an update on the next generation of NS systems. Shiva Subramanian (TCM) presented an overview of the various tools that are freely available today on NS (but that most customers do not know exist or even think about). David Lock (comforte) demonstrated H20 Flow, a Machine Learning program that does not require any programming.

The SIG wrapped up with an update from the BITUG AGM (Kevin Poultney, BrightStrand) and a fun Beer Bust held at a local Brew Dog.

Gravic Announces the General Availability of HPE NonStop Shadowbase Version 6.801

HPE NonStop Shadowbase Version 6.801 (T1122^ABF) is a full release that includes a large number of new and improved features:

• SQL/MP Exact SYSKEY Replication
  • This feature is supported without the need for using ODBC or OSS (however, the existing method of using OSS and ODBC/MX remains supported).
  • For more information, see the HPE Shadowbase SBMXSERV portion of the Softdoc.
• Entry-sequenced SQL/MP Tables
  • These tables can be replicated via a unique index by using the KEYSPECIFIER DBS parameter, which allows exact and correct UPDATE and DELETE WHERE clause processing as the source to target “primary key” may not be the same under certain replication scenarios.
• STATS Command Enhancements
  • These enhancements include additionally displaying the maximum value for certain lag statistics and applies to STATS COLL, QMGR, and CONS.
• ESTATS Command Enhancements
  • This command is updated to include new options (“BRIEF” & “LISTCOUNT” & “SORT”) for formatting and sorting output and limiting how many entries get printed.
  • These options can be used with ESTATS AUD and ESTATS DBS.
• Entry-Sequenced Enscribe Files
  • Replication of Enscribe Entry-sequenced files can be configured to use a non-unique alternate key, instead of just unique alternate keys. Please refer to the manual section describing this feature to understand exactly how positioning works when there are multiple records in the target file with the same non-unique alternate key values.
• Consumers
  • Consumers now support user-specified timers in user exit code. The functions SBTIMERSTART and SBTIMERSTOP should be used to start and stop user exit timers. When the timer started by SBTIMERSTART elapses, the entry point USRXTIMEOUT will be called, supplying the same tag that was used when the timer was created.
  • New FILTEREMPTYTX parameter (for TCPIP architectures) will not replicate begin, commit, and abort events for transactions where all events have been ignored (dropped) through SBMAP or a user exit.
• SBMAP
  • When replicating events using SBMAP, if an SBWHERE clause resolves to false, the event will no longer immediately be ignored (dropped). Instead, SBMAP will continue attempting to match to a map block where the SBWHERE clause resolves to true. The order of checking remains the same (the physical order of the mapping blocks in the SBMAP file).
• DDL Command Replication (DCR)
  • DCR supports replicating events for Enscribe files using a new SBFUP utility. The DDL events are sequenced and applied in the replication stream, meaning the user no longer needs to manually apply the events to both systems.
  • See the HPE Shadowbase FUP DCR section for more details, and the HPE NonStop Shadowbase DDL Command Replication manual for more in-depth information on how to configure and use this new feature. FUP DCR-related parameters are listed in the “New and Modified SET CONS Parameters” section of the SOFTDOC.
  • Note: This feature is similar to the same feature that is already available for SQL/MP DDL command replication.
• SBCOLL
  • SBCOLL now supports automated replication traffic assignments for avoiding replication “hot-spots.” SBCOLL can now be configured to split the replication of events from the same source table between multiple replication threads with the DBS parameters HASHBUCKETCOUNT and HASHBUCKETID. This feature aids Shadowbase in splitting replication traffic for “heavy hitter” files and tables across many replication threads to avoid “hot spot” areas that commonly occur during large application batch-processing windows.
• FETCHSOURCE DBS Parameter
  • When replicating compressed updates and this parameter is enabled, the consumer will only fetch the source record/row if required, instead of fetching the missing field/column values for every compressed update.
• Shadowbase Configuration Macros
  • SBBIDIR, SBBIDROS, SBUNIDIR, and SBUNDROS macros have new command input validation logic for easier configuration and cross-checking of the parameter values.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise globally sells and supports Shadowbase solutions under the name HPE Shadowbase. For more information on this release, please contact your local HPE Shadowbase representative or visit our website

Gravic Wishes You a Joyous Holiday Season and a Peaceful New Year!

For additional information, please view our Shadowbase solution videos: https://vimeo.com/shadowbasesoftware, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Specifications subject to change without notice. Trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © Gravic, Inc. 2023.