Striim; ensuring Lakes are fed by fresh data streams!

The year has opened with a rash of events focused on Big Data, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Lakes and Streams. Strata, the name O’Reilly Media gives conferences and events related to Big Data, has just held their major event in San Jose – Strata + Hadoop World and already the landscape is changing. Perhaps more rapidly than organizations like O’Reilly Media can keep up with and yet, following the most recent event, its name is changing to Strata Data Conference to better reflect the world of Big Data is far more than Hadoop.

According to Striim Cofounder and CTO, Steve Wilkes, in his latest post to the Striim blog, “It’s also amazing to see just how much attention real-time and streaming data architectures are getting. Maybe O’Reilly (Media) should have cut to the chase and renamed the event, “Strata+Streaming World.” In a presentation given by Wilkes, he suggested that part of the solution was moving to streaming data ingestion, and preparing your data as it moves before landing it in your lake. Importantly, Wilkes specified only doing this on a use-case by use-case basis:

“A Data Lake can be a powerful ally if it is built in the correct way. By utilizing streaming data collection and processing, you can feed your Lake with data designed to answer your questions, and ensure it is current and relevant. After all, what is better for a lake than a supply of good, healthy streams?”

For more on what Wilkes had to say following this event make sure to visit the Striim web site blog. The most important observation from Wilkes, and highly relevant for the NonStop community, came with his closing observation about “Striim’s ability to continuously collect data from files and databases (through change data capture), as well as message queues like Kafka, and sensors, enables companies to focus on what they want to move and what processing or enrichment that data needs. Since Striim takes care of the collection and plumbing, and also enables them to target their existing investments like cloud or on-premise data stores, the speed of development and ROI is much easier to understand.”

NonStop systems have been the platforms many in finance and telecommunications have relied upon for decades to support their most important mission critical applications. When it comes to transaction processing with loss or interruption, few can argue against the value proposition of NonStop. However, what really works in the transaction processing world may not be as effective when it comes to the computer-intensive “heavy lifting” that is required when enriching data streaming into a system. And yet, within this streaming data will be information relevant to any mission critical transaction processing. It may just be a credit card transaction but the cardholder may be ready to buy something else – wouldn’t any retailer like to be aware of that potential second transaction?

For quite a while now HPE has been placing big bets on its strategic pursuit of hybrid IT. Much of this strategy is in response to enterprises moving to a mix of traditional systems with private clouds. However, it is equally as important when it comes to coupling disparate systems to form hybrids in a box – a forerunner for what many in the organization view as a very important transitional phase. With the latest NonStop X systems the NonStop team has developed new APIs and services to make the creation of a hybrid in a box a reality and these new APIs are what the HPE NonStop team is calling the NonStop Application Direct Interface (NSADI).

Here at Striim we have been aware of this new capability and have been intrigued by its potential. One likely use is to support transaction processing on NonStop with a more computer intense platform based on Linux. Potentially, the best of both worlds, and with such a hybrid, Striim could readily offer advantages to both the finance and telco markets. In a future post to the Striim web site blog, this is covered in more detail but it was Striim Cofounder and EVP, Sami Akbay, who summed it up best when he said, “With NSADI now available, there’s a distinct possibility that for the NonStop community looking to tap into the value Striim provides when it comes to performing analytics on data streams generated from the log files residing on NonStop – and in real time where outcomes can be affected by Striim – we will be working with HPE to better leverage the API.”

Access to healthy data streams in a way that they can be readily consumed by transaction processing, in real time, holds significant benefits for the NonStop community and already there are a number of early adopters with Striim deployed in support of NonStop. For more about these latest developments among the NonStop community, please feel free to contact us directly and make sure you do take a look at the Striim web site. You may be surprised to see just how far Striim has come in providing more value to the transactions NonStop processes today!

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