News from Gartner and news from Striim; one objective – (bi-directional) movement to the cloud!

“Impact Sponsor” Striim at Strata NT 2019 Data Conference

Striim’s presence at major industry events continues and 2019 has proved to be the best year ever for the company. Best in terms of the type of events and best too in terms of the quality of questions and issues brought to the Striim’s team wherever we had presence around the world. In today’s marketplace where almost every conversation turns to cloud deployments it’s not so much a question of “when we do this” or “as we make plans for that” but rather, “now we have embarked on the journey to clouds, we need to know more” about better integration of data among critical solutions. And yes, all in real time, too!

The business driver motivating enterprises to raise questions like this is the growing awareness that data created in real time by today’s mission critical applications is being considered gold when it comes to its impact on data already stored on data bases supporting these enterprises business analytics. Moving away from simply being focused on what has happened, today it’s all about ensuring focus isn’t missing out on what’s happening right now. Even for the NonStop community where HPE executives have begun to actively promote mission critical applications, running on fault tolerant NonStop systems, as the systems where “data is created,” it’s value diminishes with any delays in making it available to databases, data warehouses and data lakes set up to support business analytics.

Striim at GoogleNext 19

When it comes to looking at how best to integrate data with these different models for collecting data, or if you are wondering whether there is a cloud reference involved that you may have overlooked, you should visit the Striim web site for information concerning the many options you may have going forward and the ways Striim can help you out. If you just happened to have missed recent promotional posts and tweets, Striim and Google Cloud platform are offering all interested parties a free download of the Gartner Report “The Future of the DBMS Market is Cloud.” Should you have problems with this link then you should contact the marketing team at Striim as they will be able to assist you in locating this report.

What is important to note are the recommendations to analytics leaders “involved in data management solution decisions” that Gartner promotes and these include the following:

Create a data management strategy that leads with cloud DBMS services, including a multicloud strategy where appropriate. This strategy can include private cloud and/or cloud hosting as a first step to full cloud services for existing applications.

Plan to migrate on-premises DBMS installations into suitable cloud offerings. This will include an assessment of DBMS migration cost and effort, analysis of appropriate DBMS type, as well as identification of surrounding applications that are likely to move as a cohesive unit.

Evaluate remaining on-premises systems for sunsetting, replacement with SaaS, or migration to private cloud — where they can be managed similar to the public cloud.

Hands-on lab with Striim at AIDC, 2018

With as much talk as there is coming from the HPE team concerning NonStop SQL and the company’s success in deploying NonStop SQL as a DBaaS offering at HPE’s own IT organization’s NonStop-based private cloud, the data arriving at NonStop SQL needs to be delivered to other systems just as it would be required to do so running on a NonStop system. Whether your plans include modernization efforts as part of deploying on traditional NonStop X systems or on virtualized NonStop – whether deployed across HPE Proliant server farms or on private clouds across any vendor’s x86 servers, Striim is a proven solutions for integrating data on NonStop with any other database.

In articles already published in NonStop Insider, Striim has highlighted the benefits that come with the availability of the Striim Release 3.9.7.  We have written about Striim features that not only support enterprises that want to move quickly to cloud environments but require a fallback and indeed a contingency plan should their migration to the cloud involve many steps. In this article, Striim Introduces Bi-Directional Server for Data Modernization in Hybrid Cloud Deployments, reference is made to the new enhancements in Striim Release 3.9.7 to better accommodate Google Spanner, Azure Synapse, Azure Cosmos DB, MySQL and MariaDB.

We have even quoted Alok Pareek, Co-Founder and EVP of Product at Striim, when he said, “Responding to requests from marquee customers who use Striim to enable their hybrid cloud infrastructure, our engineering team has delivered a robust bi-directional data replication offering. These enterprise customers finally have a next-generation, zero-downtime, zero-data-loss solution for online phased database migrations, allowing them to seamlessly run their new cloud environments in parallel with the legacy systems for a gradual transition for their end users.”

An update provided in the November 13, 2019, issue of the StreetInsider.com publication, this latest Striim release was the subject of the report: Striim Introduces Bi-Directional Server for Data Modernization in Hybrid Cloud Deployments; New Enhancements in Release 3.9.7 for Google Spanner, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Cosmos DB, MySQL, Maria This report not only quoted the above observations by Pareek but wrote about the all-important feature of bi-directional support – traditional to / from cloud – but highlighted all the new features that included –

Support for Azure Synapse Analytics

Support for the Cassandra API for real-time data delivery to Azure Cosmos DB to enable more options for connecting Cosmos DB with other services

Certification for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance

The ability to capture low-latency data from Google Cloud Spanner incrementally

Enhanced security configurations for Azure Event Hubs Writer and Amazon S3 Writer

Enhancement of Google Cloud Pub/Sub Writer’s throttling capabilities to support extreme data volumes

The ability to read change data from, and write to MariaDB Galera cluster environments in real time

The news about Striim Release 3.9.7 was also captured in the BusinessWire.com update of November 13, 2019, that can be found at https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191113005300/en/ Of importance to the NonStop community however is that Striim is still canvassing the NonStop community members for further feedback about their own use-case potential as Striim is to prioritize support of bidirectional NonStop SQL to / from Cloud based solely on these NonStop users requirements. As BusinessWire noted and where NonStop users would agree, “These enterprise customers finally have a next generation zero-downtime, zero-data-loss solution for online phased database migrations, allowing them to seamlessly run their new cloud environments in parallel with the legacy systems for a gradual transition for their end users.”

2019 was a significant year for Striim as interest in Striim continued to grow. Striim participated in major data-focused events worldwide and the number of production deployments added in 2019 reflects the importance enterprises place on ensuring data created on mission critical systems doesn’t escape integration with databases set up to support analytics – whether on server farms or within clouds. For now, should the functionality of this latest release of Striim be of interest to you and you would like to know more about the capabilities on offer with Striim Release 3.9.7 please email us or give us a call and make sure you check out our web site for all the news as it breaks at https://www.striim.com/ and of course, follow all the posts to our Striim blog at https://www.striim.com/blog/