NTI together with TANDsoft brings to market a better way to ensure your replicated data is in sync!

Across the globe, data is taking center stage. With the coronavirus pandemic in full swing, relegating many of us to working remotely, there is scarcely a television broadcast that doesn’t reference data. Without exception, populations are looking at the data for reassurance that situations will brighten and that expectations of a return to normalcy will be realized. As a society few if any of us expected to be practicing home isolation and it is our expressed desire here at NTI that we all stay healthy at this time.

There has been considerable discussion about the currency of our Business Continuity Plans (BCP) as this pandemic has triggered many enterprises to activate some aspects of these plans. Consider the potential issues that might arise as networks designed to support business partners and customers takes on the additional load of supporting staff. There have already been reports that such infrastructure has been left wanting and for some, this has led to spreading workloads across multiple systems. But in spreading the workloads how can enterprises operating across multiple locations be certain that data is accurate?

For NTI, data replication remains the major product in its growing product portfolio. With the emphasis given to data and a strategy that has given rise to PROVisioning: Excellence in Data as an overarching umbrella in support of data integration, transformation and distribution it is still data replication that attracts most of the attention. Data Replication has always been about protecting data whereby any single system outage can be circumvented in a manner such that the application isn’t interrupted and any user experience compromised. At a minimum, two data centers can be populated with systems in a way that switching between the two can be achieved without the loss of data and this can equally apply to when workloads are spread between the two. But then, how can you be assured that data being replicated between the systems in these separate data centers will be the same?

For many years, NTI has relied upon TANDsoft for its FileSync product to complement its data replication products by addressing non-database files that need to be replicated. In so doing, this allows NTI to provide an optimal solution for all files to be replicated and in so doing, provide complete business continuity for NonStop applications. And now, NTI is building on the relationship with TANDsoft to bring to NonStop users the latest product of TANDsoft – FS Compare – and it can be purchased from NTI.

As the name suggests, FS Compare is a highly efficient way to quickly check to see if data present on two different NonStop systems is in sync – within the next couple of months a complementary DB Repair utility from TANDsoft will then augment FS Compare. According to Tim Dunne, NTI’s Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, “the partnership we enjoy with TANDsoft means that current and future users of DRNet®, NTI’s popular data replication solution, will have the option to deploy FS Compare to quickly identify potential synchronization concerns.”

What differentiates FS Compare from other products and what has helped it outperform them in the real world is its accessing of data at the block level, regardless of size. For those products that rely upon record or row access, there is considerable built-in delay that makes it difficult to provide enterprises with results in a meaningful timeframe. “In a customer trial now underway,” said TANDsoft’s Principal, Jack Di Giacomo, “FS Compare reduced data validation from 1 hour, 12 minutes to 4 minutes.”

To make deployment across data centers where NonStop is present, FS Compare has been implemented in a manner that requires no changes to NonStop applications; none whatsoever! As for what FS Compare supports and the benefits that come from deploying it, these can be summarized as below –

• Compares live and offline databases
• Analyzes data at the block level, regardless of block size
• Supports Guardian files, SQL/MP tables and OSS files (SQL/MX and DB Repair in Version 1.1)
• Incorporates TANDsoft’s data deduplication technology for high-speed discrepancy reporting
• Provides partition-, index-, and block-level statistics
• High-speed capabilities due to data deduplication, block-level analyses, and parallel processing
• Requires zero application modifications
• Incorporates HPE NonStop server fundamentals: parallel processing, file selection by wildcarding & qualified expressions
• Certified on all HPE NonStop servers

With the addition of FS Compare and soon, DB Repair, to the NTI product portfolio it satisfies a sorely needed requirement to better track the synchronization of data. Making it simple to detect differences between databases and files, “FS Compare can drill down into the row / record to determine the column/field that is out of sync and report these differences to operations,” said Di Giacomo

Should the addition of FS Compare to the NTI product portfolio be of interest to you we encourage you to call or email us at any time – we will be happy to tell you more about our strategy, products and yes, all that NTI does to bring a better data replication solution to your enterprise.
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