NTI – leveraging CDC to aid NonStop inclusion in Data Warehouses and Data Analytics

It is almost as if IT professionals went back to school only to come away speaking an entirely new language. The words peppering their conversations include everything from Hadoop to Splunk to Cloudera to Azure Cosmos and even Snowflakes! For those who are feeling comfortable openly discussing the ins and outs of SQL it is as if a spaceship landed and everyone rushed to embrace the latest trend – dance to the latest tunes, if you like. Fundamentally it’s all a reflection on the growing importance of data, data warehouses and data lakes and on just how data transitions from a source through to where it becomes input to analytics before populating dashboards and even influencing subsequent processing. All the while the data may find its way into clouds and yes, whether the choice is a private or public cloud, utilities and tools being popularized by cloud providers. Once again, it comes back to being all about data, data manipulation and the best technology that produces results!

When it comes to the NonStop community the one word that is finding its way into the conversation of data is Splunk. “You got data. Splunk has answers!” So, the Splunk evangelists promote, as Splunk becomes one of the products that is at home whether deployed inside the enterprise or is accessed from a cloud. The biggest observable outcomes from wanting to store and manipulate data is that the amount of storage required grows almost exponentially in order to be able to handle all the data being generated today and “Splunk delivers massive scale and speed to give you the real-time insights needed to boost productivity, security, profitability and competitiveness.” Hard to argue about the merits of that claim by Splunk, but in reality, Splunk is approaching a time when it is recognized as an enterprise standard with every solution generating data having to ensure there is a way for their data to be ingested by Splunk.

“The beauty of Splunk arises from the work Splunk has done to understand literally thousands of record types from all manner of files and databases as well as supporting numerous popular APIs,” said Tim Dunne, NTI Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, at a recent gathering of NonStop users. “There is almost immediate value gained in using Splunk to analyze data particularly when that data is being created by mission critical applications running on NonStop. And right now, we are taking advantage of Splunk’s support for any JDBC compliant database even as we are adding JSON support in the near future.” As was noted in the article published in the March issue of NonStop Insider, when speaking at the SunTUG RUG event, Dunne also said that “DRNet® VISION for Splunk is just the beginning as NTI has every intention to capitalize on JSON in coming months to replicate to Hadoop, Kafka, Search Engines, AWS, etc. Again, talking to the user community at the SunTUG RUG event, interest in this solution seems to be keen as well.”

During the interim, NonStop users deploying DRNet® VISION will be able to leverage industry-leading Change Data Capture (CDC) methodology pioneered by NTI with DRNet® to push data to a staging Data Base that can be anything that accepts XML / XLTS. “DRNet® VISION inserts into this staging database via JDBC,” added Dunne, “but of course, with future releases supporting JSON, it will be a lot simpler and offer greater performance.” Irrespective of JDBC or JSON, current and future releases both have the ability to select and format the data that is desired by Splunk.

NTI is pursuing a strategy that is centered on data where its CDC knowledge can be leveraged to the benefit of all NonStop users. This strategy involves DRNet® supporting replication, distribution, integration and transformation of data to meet whatever new language and technology becomes de rigueur, be that Splunk or anything else NonStop users need to support for their enterprise. HPE has been extolling the virtue of partnerships that has seen the NonStop team announce partnerships with NonStop vendors in support of products and services the latest having to do with support for modernization and migrations. “As HPE pushes ahead with plans to accelerate migration to NonStop X and virtualized NonStop, NTI is encouraged by these actions and in turn is actively engaged with other partners to help build out the capabilities within DRNet® to better meet the demands of customers,” added Dunne.

Expect to hear a lot more about DRNet® and make sure you attend the presentations that are planned for upcoming RUG events – NTI will be present and participating at this year’s European (NonStop) Technical Boot Camp (ETBC) being held in Edinburgh, Scotland. However, if you missed our presentations at RUG events already held, and would like to know more about the latest features of DRNet® just call or email us as we would be only too happy to listen to your business requirements and to work with you to ensure NonStop continues as a vital platform within your data center.

Network Technologies International, Inc.

635 Park Meadow Road, Suite 209

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