NTI Presentation at Little SIG London, 8th December 2022

NTI presented their new approach to Data distribution and synchronization with the introduction of DRNet®/Unified.

DRNet®/Unified had been introduced to the market over 2022 and featured at last month’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp (NonStopTBC22). However this was the first introduction to those attending this UK Little SIG event.

It was interesting to see attendees from both the UK and Germany.  I terms of end-user clients there were 4 to 5 end-users that I counted.  Barclays, Nationwide, Lloyds, Bank of England, plus one contractor from BT (Chris Elliott of BrightStrand).  Peter Watt of iongroup (ex-wall st systems) was also there, although I’d classify them more as an application partner, still proud of their code written in original TAL.

Going back to DRNet®/Unified, NTI presented the history of Change Data Capture, the fact that NTI effectively invented it to relieve application providers from having to code their own advice messages at the application level ( as NatWest Bank did back in the ‘90s). 

Developing this topic we illustrated how both heritage non-TMF applications like Base24 and Connex are both supported together with any modern application that may have been coded with TMF, or for which AutoTMF has later been retrofitted.

With the pervasive nature of data existing very much from end user devices, IOT sensors like temperature gauges and pressure sensors, increased local processing at the Edge, Data distribution from the Edge to the Cloud is even more important. 

Many industries require the distribution of key data, including manufacturing where robot devices also need constant management. 

From a commercial standpoint, NTI pointed out how the DRNet®/Unified package is aimed very much at ensuring users have all the software licenses they need to both synchronize their NonStops for Active/Active and Active/Passive for Backup with Recovery, plus all the ability to distribute to 3rd party systems, whether they be databases requiring the mapping of data or data feeds into Machine Learning engines.

The focus on Machine Learning and AI is key in that these systems consume data streams from all parts of the organization and must do so quickly and efficiently.  Automated Management is also a key requirement for organizations as they seek to be aware of the interactions of all their various systems.

DRNet®/Core was explained as the function providing NonStop to NonStop data synchronization.  The commercial key messages received by the audience were based on “Co-existence”

1. DRNet®/Core will co-exist with any other existing data distribution or replication tool. Take DRNet/Unified, put it on your system and DRNet®/Unified will work alongside your existing infrastructure.
   
2. At the same time, the component of DRNet®/Unified on your DR/Business Contingency system can remain mute.  It does not have to be activated.  DRNet®/Unified on your source Tandem system serves to pump data to as many off-Tandem systems as your like, using either DRNet®/Open for databases or DRNet®/Vision for JSON-based Consumers like Splunk / Kafka / Elastic that require JSON feeds.  The Target Tandem can effectively be bypassed.

NTI also introduced the partnerships and ecosystems that they are developing. starting with the product partnership with Tandsoft’s FileSync, plus the 2 Xpress modules XPbr for backup/restore and XPcr for compare/repair, badged under DRNet® to enable clients a one-stop shop for licensing capability.

The  ecosystem story also includes so many companies who collectively want to reinforce the power of software companies over historic hardware providers, so security providers, application services providers, plus marketing providers which all orbit the NTI world were also illustrated.

Finally described the global reach of their customer base and highlighted PayMark’s broad usage of the DRNet® product portfolio, with New Zealand’s Paymark recently acquired by Worldline, itself a $12bn company listed on the Paris stock exchange.

Craig Lawrance
Dec 12 , 2022