Striim and NonStop in the Virtual World!

Have you made it a habit to check out the Striim web site? If you are an ardent fan of all things NonStop then you already well versed on pretty much everything related to transaction processing, seeing how the NonStop platform is optimized to handle huge volumes of transactions, but how familiar are you with analytics? And how familiar is your organization with the steps being taken to integrate analytics with real time transaction processing?

For quite a while now the developers of Striim have been putting to one side plans to support applications running on NonStop. The simple reason being that few enterprises would be prepared to compromise the performance of NonStop processing transactions in real time to add an analytics engine. Furthermore, the cost to add sufficient NonStop compute and storage to adequately support the types of databases along with the analytics processing that goes hand-in-hand with the data pouring into these databases may not make financial sense compared to the cost to support it on other, much cheaper platforms like Linux and Windows. And yet, the requirement remains and the worlds of analytics and transaction processing are on a collision course when it comes to NonStop.

However, we now see some light at the end of this particular tunnel and it is beginning to generate further discussions here at Striim. The origins of Striim saw a number of NonStop developers coming to the company with expertise grounded in GoldenGate, whose very origins were in NonStop, so there shouldn’t be any surprises here that such discussions about the future of NonStop and Striim are being held. What has changed to stimulate these discussions has been the move by NonStop development to support virtualization even as the rest of HPE is aggressively promoting the transformation to hybrid IT. We couldn’t agree more with both of these messages as we see that this will likely have a huge impact on the NonStop community. Perhaps not right now but as data center technical staff come to terms with running NonStop on a virtual machine, then the possibility of running analytics with transaction processing, all in real time looks more likely.

Returning to the observations about checking the Striim web site of late, displayed on the Striim home page you will see our primary positioning message, Act Smartly on Fast and Vast Data. The subtext simply relates how Striim has become a real-time data integration and streaming analytics software platform that enables smart decisions by analyzing all of your data in-flight, while it is still relevant. In so doing, entperises running the biggest transaction processing environments can “Outsmart risk factors and seize time-sensitive opportunities with Striim!” Furthermore, you will also find updated statements regarding data integration made smart and easy.

“Having access to timely data regardless of where it resides is a must-have to run your business operations smoothly. Striim offers the foundation for a modern, streaming data architecture, and easily integrates your structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, on-premises or in the cloud, with sub-second latency. With Striim, you can easily migrate to a next generation infrastructure by integrating and analyzing data across cloud, Big Data, and IoT devices without getting locked in to a single topology.” But nowhere will you find any references to NonStop systems and that is simply because Striim doesn’t run on NonStop nor is it likely to support such a capability any time soon. And the real news is that it doesn’t have to!

That’s right – in the world of virtual machines enterprises can provision one virtual machine to run NonStop transaction processing applications with an adjacent virtual machine running analytics with yet other virtual machines supporting various database models. The connection between these virtual machines can be almost anything you would like – web services featuring http, ODBC / JDBC, messaging and enterprise buses. The point is that the HPE NonStop team has opened the door for much that can be done to bring the worlds of analytics and transaction processing together and this is what in the coming months Striim will be taking a good long look at and that should prove beneficial for many NonStop users. Should you be unable to wait and would like to have an inkling as to where we are headed don’t hesitate in reaching out to us. As always, feel free to call Katherine Rincon directly or simply send her an email at any time.

Katherine Rincon | Senior Vice President, Marketing
d 650.241.0680 x215 | katherine@striim.com
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