With Striim, HPE NonStop data isn’t left on the shelf; integration with Cloud platforms has become a reality!

HPE has made its position on Clouds very clear – it isn’t in the business of creating a public cloud nor is it going to be a supplier of servers and storage to Cloud providers. Its earlier baby-steps into this market with Helion taught HPE enough to know that going down this path was neither in its strategic interest nor it capable of providing the revenue stream HPE was expecting. As HPE CEO Antonio Neri has reiterated at every conference since taking the helm at HPE, what is strategic is value and not volume. Following the release of the Q2 financial year results, “We’re focusing on solving customer problems by either lowering expenses or increasing customer revenues, and we’re bringing HPE innovation to the table to get it done,” said Neri. “HPE’s value products are solving customer problems.”

And yet, industry discussions are all skewed towards the revolution Cloud services has started. What business doesn’t want to be able to articulate a Cloud strategy? What enterprise wants to be sidelined due to lack of competitiveness with its data processing and collection? Even the biggest and most conservative companies are looking over their collective shoulders as new entrants into the markets embrace Cloud computing and not without cause. The Cloud platforms we have today are not just processing and storage but a source of an immense catalogue of programs, routines and utilities – in the right hands, solutions can effectively be created almost overnight. And still, the enterprises exercise caution and no more so that is evident today among the HPE NonStop community. It’s not out of fear of the unknown particularly, but rather, can any Cloud service provider match the availability, security, data integrity and manageability existing today for these NonStop users.

Cloud platforms may remind some veteran IT managers of Time Sharing offerings of the past. Universities took to time sharing with relish – they could satisfy the needs of staff and students alike, based on just what they need. Cloud platforms remind slightly younger IT professionals of Service Bureaus that followed – many credit unions, building societies and savings and loan companies likewise flocked to the ease of deployment that came with service bureaus. However, Cloud computing is a vastly different model and one where the provisioning of resources passes from the time sharing and service bureaus teams to the end users. It is the user that now clicks on icons and fills in menus to provision all the resources they need in a matter of minutes, not days or weeks. Traditional systems cannot match the cloud for speed of provisioning and ultimate deployment. This isn’t lost on the NonStop community at all, as many members have already noted the potential for Cloud utilization when it comes to supporting their development and testing groups.

At Striim we have covered Change Data Capture models in previous articles to this publication – the July, 2019, issue in particular pulled together information recently published in posts to the Striim blog. It is important to start with CDC as this triggers much of what Striim then can provide. It was Irem Radzik of Striim Product Marketing who posted Log-Based Change Data Capture: the Best Method for CDC that, “Change data capture, and in particular log-based change data capture, has become popular in the last two decades as organizations have discovered that sharing real-time transactional data from OLTP databases enables a wide variety of use-cases … The fast adoption of cloud solutions requires building real-time data pipelines from in-house databases, in order to ensure the Cloud systems are continually up to date.”

Expect to read more about CDC and Striim in upcoming articles in other publications as it is an important foundation for Striim. When it comes to streaming integration for Cloud, “The Striim platform makes it easy to ingest, process, and deliver real-time data across diverse environments in the Cloud (public or private, on-premise), helping you rapidly adopt a modern data architecture.  With Striim you can build streaming data pipelines to cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud Platform—as well as Kafka, Hadoop, NoSQL and relational databases (on-premises or in the cloud) with reliability, security, and scalability, reliability, security, and scalability.” In other words, for the NonStop community look no further than to Striim should your enterprise be looking to ingest data created by mission critical applications running on NonStop and save in the major Cloud platforms including Azure, AWS and Google – and anything else you care to name that Striim supports today. The list is now very long …

More importantly perhaps for the NonStop community is the non-disruptive way Striim goes about the process of ingestion utilizing CDC – Striim comes with so many widgets and tools that setting up the connections and turning on the flow has become relatively simple to do. It is not going unnoticed today that the experience Striim has gained over almost a decade translates into knowledge of how best to address any integration to Clouds a NonStop user may require. On one hand, NonStop has made it very easy for vendors like Striim to capitalize on CDC, providing logs and audit trails suitable for exploitation via CDC, but Striim has done the heavy-lifting through the years to ensure it is correctly and timely provided to Cloud platforms. Even HPE IT capitalized on Striim as part of their integration and migration from Oracle to NonStop SQL/MX – a not entirely unexpected requirement of today’s HPE.

There is more to the Striim value proposition than just ensuring data is correctly and timely delivered to Cloud platforms. As Striim notes on its product web site, it “performs in-flight data processing such as filtering, transformations, aggregations, masking, and enrichment of streaming data with reference data before delivering with sub-second latency to diverse environments, in the cloud or on-premise.” This means the NonStop user has the opportunity to have data captured on NonStop undergo transformations in ways that enable subsequent processes performed anywhere IT has a presence without any wastage of time sorting through unwanted information – what Dr. Tim Chou once referred to at a NonStop user event as “digital exhaust”. “Striim also offers built-in pipeline monitoring and validation capabilities to trace and confirm the ingestion, processing, and delivery of streaming data,” just to provide additional comfort that everything established linking the real time world of NonStop to Cloud platforms is working as required

With the availability of Striim and its support for NonStop, isn’t it time you looked more closely at Striim for use on your NonStop system? Striim supports SQL/MX, SQL/MP and Enscribe as source databases on NonStop systems including NonStop X and vNonStop. Shouldn’t you be reading more about CDC and Striim and talking to the Striim team at NonStop events? If you have missed any recent opportunities to do so then don’t hesitate in reaching to anyone of us at Striim or simply call or email me directly. I would be only too happy to take your call.

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