NTI addressing the needs to deploy a “spread offense” to better cover new business opportunities.

This past month it seems as if IT has come under considerable pressure as many installations have been subject to unexpectedly high transaction volumes. References to IT “brownouts” as distinct from outages have begun to appear in numerous publications. This is a kind way of saying that the systems deployed couldn’t handle dynamic scale-out in an organized fashion – adding resources to a then-running system has been overlooked for far too long. Enterprises know how to scale up but for many, simply being able to scale out wasn’t in their play book.

At a time when there has been an almost total absence of sport on television – it was just a short time ago those Indy cars began circling the oval outside Ft Worth, Texas, – perhaps an image taken from an NFL teams playbook should satisfy the need for football among our NonStop community. While I am no expert on NFL plays, I am told that this depicts a spread offense. While pundits explain that it doesn’t always work in the real world of football, the intentions nevertheless warrant exploitation on occasions.

Designed in order to “spread” an opponent’s defense horizontally using three, four, and even five fleet-of-foot offensive receivers the objective is to spread the defense across the field so as to provide the quarterback with more options. This is simply football jargon noting that it is the quarterback’s responsibility to find weaknesses that can be exploited. On the other hand, continuity of field presence is the same whether it’s sport or industry.

In IT, there are numerous times when spreading the transactions as wide as possible: three, four, five and oftentimes many more CPUs help thin out the load whereby any pressure coming from the marketplace can be quickly recognized and responded to without outages or brownouts. But there’s more to this analogy as well and it harkens back to the massively parallel processing architecture of NonStop.

From its first time out on the field, NonStop systems have been designed to better accommodate spikes and in bringing its own spread offense into play provides capabilities unique to the NonStop world. Nowhere has this been more evident than with the mishandling of societies needs when government agencies around the world have pursued handing our cash in order to prime consumer’s interest in spending it!

For NTI, this image resonates with the NTI product team as its premier product offering, DRNet®, sits lightly on the NonStop operating system. “For as long as we have been delivering DRNet® for the purpose of ensuring business continuity at times of crises,” said Tim Dunne, NTI’s Senior Vice President Worldwide Sales, “our focus has been very much on ensuring resources assigned to processing transactions aren’t compromised in any way when running DRNet®. It’s important to all of us here at NTI to make sure our products don’t ‘force a fumble’ particularly at a time when reverting to a backup system, integral to an IT organizations business continuity plan, is needed to step in to take up the load.”

“Images taken from the playing field don’t always translate well to an international audience,” said Dunne. “But the picture of intensity of competition exists for any IT organization. Here again, NonStop simplifies the task of ‘staying on the field’ given its ability to survive single points of failure. As the global preeminent fault tolerant system, it is at the heat of mission critical solutions in many industries and it is being relied upon even as the global pandemic has brought with it exceptional trading anomalies. One day, there are no transactions at all and then the very next day, there’s an unheard of twenty times increase in transaction volume.”

The focus for NTI has broadened of late beyond simply supporting business continuity to where all aspects of data are addressed with DRNet® and with more transactions comes more data and with more data, there is greater need for not just compute but storage resources as well. NTI is now seeing that NonStop users who acquired their NonStop X systems well before 2020 are moving forward with system upgrades together with technology refreshes. More bandwidth, more compute power and more storage is good news for all members of the NonStop community as with each upgrade and refresh it’s powerful evidence of further commitment to NonStop by these organizations.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the early success we are seeing with FS Compare and FS Repair. Our ability to offer these is a product of our strong partnership with TANDsoft, it has attracted the attention of those looking for a way to ensure that the data on NonStop system in one location is correctly mirrored in a separate NonStop system in a different location.

“It has always been a concern of IT operations managers,” said Dunne “as to whether they could indeed switch to the different site with the knowledge that as you replicate data, the data hadn’t been lost and with FS Compare NTI can now satisfy that need, Furthermore, there is strong interest in this latest offering from NTI as sourced from TANDsoft and already we have our first ten early-adopter Proof of Concepts (PoCs) under way.”

NonStop is fault tolerant. NonStop systems anchoring a business continuity plan provide the best option when surrounded by crisis. NTI delivers the solutions, tools and utilities that ease the potential pain from the unknown and together, as they spread the loads to better support business offensive programs supporting new business opportunities IT can outlast the competition, no matter the crisis. Sporting terms may not always work in all markets but the concept of spread isn’t new to the NonStop community. And with the NTI product set as it exists today, the spread addresses many critical aspects surrounding data – DRNet® remains the go-to choice for IT operations everywhere.

Should NTI’s addition of FS Compare and FS Repair to their product portfolio be of interest to you call or email us at any time – at NTI we would be only too happy to provide further explanation of our strategy, products, customer support and yes, all that NTI does in these difficult time to ensure you get to “stay on the field!”.
635 Park Meadow Road, Suite 209Network Technologies International, Inc.

Westerville, Ohio 43081-2877

Phone: +1 (614) 794-6000

N.T.I. Limited

Ard Mhuire

Camp Street

Oughterard

Co. Galway

H91 K5PE

Ireland

Phone: +353 (91) 463086