NonStop users rely on Striim to connect to the outside world. Azure cloud services? Yes! Kafka messaging? Yes!

In today’s world where uncertainty is common place and predictability no longer being assumed, it’s even more important to be able to integrate data no matter where from it comes. For the NonStop community, NonStop systems are renowned for being right there where data is created. Today’s mission critical systems are nearly always customer facing and as such, witness change in real time. End users react in times of uncertainty in ways that reflect what’s happening around them.

Striim now gives NonStop users many ways to connect to the world outside of NonStop. From its earliest days as more or less an intelligent front-end supporting networks of devices including ATMs, POSs, mobile phones and even manufacturing robots, enterprises have relied on NonStop to connect to other systems and to forward information to these systems as the enterprise mandated. Little has changed over the years other than today, enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud service providers to support ever-increasing volumes of data as well as to perform complex processing that otherwise would be very expensive to support in-house.

Two recent posts to the Striim blog have highlighted just how important it is to work with a data integration partner. Walking up to a whiteboard and drawing boxes, circles, lines and even cloud representations isn’t what it takes to take the complexity out of modern systems deployments. There are far too many moving parts and it simply isn’t telling the whole story. The layers overlaying layers begin to tell the real story but even so, experience counts for so much these days. To deliver on whiteboard schematics takes a partner knowledgeable in the connections required for true data integration and with the experience necessary to leave nothing out when connecting all the dots. How many times have we heard that with just a configuration change, the updating of an IP address, everything will work perfectly? You will be connected to the world at large and your applications will seamlessly integrate with everything around you.

Complexity has always been in the connectivity and this is especially true when it comes to integrating data created on NonStop with everything else. Connectivity may just be a couple of lines drawn on that whiteboard but these lines hold the key to successful deployments. These lines we see on whiteboard presentations, stretching between components, are important to the NonStop community because when it comes to connecting NonStop with other targets be they data bases, tables or files, when data is needed in volume and on time (all the time), it is Striim that is the technology partner primed to make all those lines meaningful and workable.

What Striim provides is a real time streaming platform designed to ingest data from any number of sources including NonStop and connecting them to other compute and messaging environments. For many enterprises the most important decision that they have made is to build their modern applications around Kafka, a high-performance, continuously available messaging system. Striim will now connect your NonStop system to the Kafka message system and in so doing, provide one of the means to better integration with the rest of the enterprise.

In her post New Quick Start Tutorial for Streaming Kafka Integration, Striim’s head of product marketing, Irem Radzik writes about a tutorial for streaking Kafka integration:

“Striim has offered SQL-query-based processing and analytics for Kafka since 2015. Drag-and-drop UI, pre-built applications and wizards for configuring Kafka integration, and custom utilities make Striim the easiest solution to build streaming integration pipelines with built-in analytics applications.”

Best of all for the NonStop community is that when it comes to making that line, drawn on the whiteboard connecting NonStop to Kafka, actually a reality enterprises can rely on Striim to:

“Ingest data to Kafka in a streaming fashion from enterprise databases, such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and HPE NonStop using low-impact change data capture. Other data sources, such as system logs, sensors, Hadoop, and cloud data stores, are also discussed in this section.

“Use SQL-based stream processing to put Kafka data in the consumable format before delivery in sub-seconds. Data formatting and the use of in-memory data cache for in-flight data enrichment are explained too.”

It matters little as to where messages formatted on Kafka end up, the importance here for the NonStop user is that now there is a simple approach that can be entertained for better integration of NonStop with the rest of the world. And you can read more about the integration existing between NonStop and Kafka (that has already been implemented by NonStop users) in Radzik’s post by following the hyperlink referenced above. However, when it comes to where data is destined is important as the target environment could very well be residing in a public cloud.

For NonStop users looking to integrate data created on NonStop with Azure Postgres or Azure DataBricks, for instance, this too is the topic of post, Getting Started with Real-Time ETL to Azure SQL Database by Radzik as she lays out how best to get started with such a pursuit along with the reasons to do so:

“Building continuous, streaming data pipelines from on-premises databases to production cloud databases for critical workloads requires a secure, scalable, and reliable integration solution. Especially if you have enterprise database sources that cannot tolerate performance degradation, traditional batch ETL will not suffice.

“You can run Striim in the Azure Cloud to simplify real-time ETL to Azure SQL Database and other Azure targets, such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Cosmos DB, Event Hubs, ADLS, and more. 

“What users love about Striim is that it offers a non-intrusive, quick-to-deploy, and easy-to-iterate solution for streaming data integration into Azure.” 

And you can read more about the streaming data into public clouds in Radzik’s post by, again, following the hyperlink referenced above.

NonStop can capitalize on the presence of Striim either on an adjacent on-prem server or inside the cloud running on the basis of a PaaS and there are already NonStop users doing this. Stepping back and looking at the options available to NonStop users looking to connect to the outside world, whether directly to cloud offerings or via a continuously available messaging system, Striim has the knowledge and experience to make this happen for you.

After you have checked out the posts to the Striim blog referenced above, should you have additional questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Striim team. We would be only too happy to hear from you.