Over the course of decades, a global technology firm grew to become one of the world’s leading suppliers of personal computers, servers, storage environments, and more. Throughout that time, the company continued to be highly reliant upon its HPE NonStop environments. As their environment continued to grow, it took increasingly lengthy cycles to ensure their production and disaster recovery environments were in synch. In this article, I’ll outline how they were able to meet their demands for scalable, high-performance synchronization—with FS Compare and Repair from TANDsoft.

The Challenge

Within this global technology firm, the IT infrastructure team is responsible for supporting the organization’s NonStop infrastructure and systems. These systems were relied upon for many of the company’s most critical business services.

As part of this ongoing support, it was vital to compare all production database objects, and ensure they were in synch with their disaster recovery environments. As their deployments grew, the team began to find that it took significant cycle times to do these comparisons and these efforts also consumed a lot of staff time.

These issues became more acute when the infrastructure team started to prepare for a platform migration. They were planning to move applications and associated data of their NonStop platform from a J-Series physical architecture to a virtualized NonStop architecture on L-Series. To execute this migration without having to incur downtime, the team wanted to leverage their disaster recovery system. However, with their prior tool, this wasn’t practical.

Initially, they used an enterprise software vendor’s data-comparison and repair tool. While the solution is billed as being high performance, the reality was that it was taking 12 weeks to complete a full comparison cycle of all their production data. This meant that data could be out of synch and it may take up to 12 weeks to discover that there was an issue. Most critically, this meant that if a failover to their disaster recovery system occurred, they may encounter data integrity issues. In addition, the tool’s limited support for the NonStop platform made it difficult for the team to start automating their comparison processes.

To combat these obstacles, the team set out to leverage a new solution, one that met the following criteria:

• Deliver high performance and throughput, so they could ensure their disaster recovery data remained in synch with their production data.
• Enable the team to more quickly execute comparisons of all their NonStop database objects, including SQL/MP and Enscribe files.
• Support complete automation of their comparison processes.

The Solution

After a survey of the solutions available, the team selected FS Compare and Repair. The TANDsoft solution offered the high scalability and performance that they required.

FS Compare and Repair is architected and optimized for running on NonStop systems, and it offers block-level comparison functionality that yields optimized performance and throughput. In fact, the solution offered 12 times better performance than the team’s prior tool.

Instead of 12 weeks, this meant they were able to complete entire comparison cycles in about a week. Now, if out-of-synch instances are discovered, repairs are done immediately. As a result, if any failover requirements arise, the team can have complete confidence that their disaster recovery instances will be in synch with their production environment.

In addition, the solution offered these key advantages:

• Automation enablement. Previously, the team had to run all their comparisons on a manual basis. In contrast, FS Compare and Repair has facilitated the team’s ability to fully automate comparison execution within Netbatch. This enabled the team to realize significant time savings. Now, all comparisons are done using Netbatch TACL jobs, significantly streamlining ongoing administration.
• Flexible configuration. FS Compare and Repair features a configuration file option that delivers a great deal of flexibility, giving the team an array of options for how to conduct comparisons for various groups of database files.
• Alerting support. The IT infrastructure team also implemented a custom TACL routine that supplements the EMS reporting facility available within FS Compare and Repair. The custom routine calls the FSCOMP utility and reports any issues to the NonStop event log, where events can be captured and reported.

Now, they can ensure they’re alerted if any issues arise with their comparison workloads.

“The team at TANDsoft features brilliant NonStop developers, and their intercept technologies are highly differentiated,” said the company’s IT infrastructure consultant. “With the FS Compare and Repair solution, we’ve been able to achieve high performance in our comparisons. The solution has helped put us in an optimal position to ensure that our disaster recovery environments are always ready if needed. In addition, when we requested a specific resource throttling capability to support our environment, the team at TANDsoft responded quickly and delivered the capabilities we required.”

Conclusion

By employing FS Compare and Repair, this global technology company realized significant benefits. The IT infrastructure team has been able to dramatically reduce cycle times for database object comparisons, so they can better ensure their disaster recovery environments remain in synch. Further, they’ve been able to establish complete automation of their comparison workloads, freeing up staff time to focus on more strategic efforts.

FS Compare and Repair: Part of Our Family of Products

FS Compare and Repair is just one of the solutions TANDsoft provides. Here’s an introduction to some of our other offerings:

• FileSync. To meet their continuity objectives, many organizations rely on FileSync, our pioneering replication and synchronization solution. FileSync employs a block-level approach that offers speed and scalability. FileSync automatically monitors, replicates, and synchronizes all files across all nodes.
• FS Backup and Restore. Most OLTP payment environments suffer considerable delay and network overhead from backups that drag on for hours. With FS Backup and Restore, teams can reduce those times to minutes.  This solution detects file data block modifications and saves them to disk or archives them to the HPE backup utility. The solution can quickly retrieve saved modifications from disk and apply them to recreate the original file contents. Additionally, the solution provides continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities that enable rapid recovery from a ransomware attack.
• OPTA2000. OPTA2000 provides date, time, and time zone simulation for all NonStop applications and databases. The solution makes it easy to test all your date- and time-sensitive logic—without having to change system clocks or modify your applications. In addition, with OPTA2000 you can have applications executing in multiple time zones, while running on a single server.  

Learn More

To find out more, be sure to visit the FS Compare and Repair page. If you’d like to get a free license of FS Compare and Repair, please reach me at the following email: jack.digiacomo@tandsoft.com