Company: Gravic, Inc.
Company Description: Gravic, Inc. is a world leader in providing innovative data collection, replication, integration, and distribution solutions. For almost 35 years, our Shadowbase and Remark software product groups have produced technologically advanced solutions that improve enterprise businesses and the personal lives of our over 50,000 customers and tens of thousands of OEM end-user licensees.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - International Data Protection Solution

Nomination Title: Gravic Shadowbase

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

An earthquake struck a bank located on the Pacific Rim Ring of Fire causing the production systems and networks to fail. The bank initiated its disaster recovery plan but could not bring its backup system into operation. With no ATM or POS services working, most retail activity came to a halt (at a critical time since people needed to buy supplies and take other actions to survive the earthquake). The problem was aggravated when the production system lost power and the IT staff were evacuated from the primary data center. Hours passed before the bank’s staff re-entered the production data center and restored the primary system and ATM and POS services to the community.

Due to the bank’s choice of data replication products, applications could not actively run on the backup system, which limited the bank to an active/passive configuration. Failover testing was a lengthy process: the production system had to be stopped, the backup database brought into a consistent state, and the reverse replication configured. Backup applications then had to be started, the network switched, and the system tested before it could be put into service.

This process typically required several hours, during which time all production application services were unavailable. Configuration errors or missing programs/data could not be detected until the backup applications were up and running and had to be corrected, or the test was terminated. The bank’s testing window had a hard “stop time,” a time after which the test was terminated and production services restored on the primary system, regardless of the actual success of the testing. This is a common practice with active/passive architectures,  and ended up being a critical reason why the bank’s failover failed; they were missing key software and data, and were unable to connect external connections.

The bank declared “Never Again!” and decided that to avoid planned and unplanned application downtime, it had to move from disaster recovery (a reactive approach) to disaster tolerance (a proactive approach). The bank replaced its original replication engine with the Shadowbase product.

Shadowbase replication was installed in an active/passive configuration to keep the backup database synchronized with the production database. Shadowbase architecture also supports bidirectional replication; applications can run on both systems and simultaneously update the database. The product also supports low replication latency times and can replicate between heterogeneous systems, so maintaining identical system configurations is not a requirement.

The bank then improved availability by deploying a Shadowbase “Sizzling-Hot-Takeover” architecture, with applications running on both nodes and bidirectional replication. Application requests are only sent to one node, avoiding the potential for data collisions that can otherwise occur when running active/active. This architecture dramatically improves the failover time as the target application is already running, allowing failover to a known-working system as the backup. Its external connections can be verified with test transactions at any time, allowing the bank to have full confidence in the ‘backup’ system, eliminating failover faults. Testing the backup no longer requires a production outage. The staff can become fully versed in failover execution as it is a best practice to change nodal polarity periodically to ensure both nodes are fully functional at all times.

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Mr. Paul J. Holenstein, EVP, Gravic, Inc. has direct responsibility for the Shadowbase Products Group and is a Senior Fellow at Gravic Labs, the company’s IP group. He has previously held various positions as a software engineer through technical management to business development, beginning his career as a Tandem (HP NonStop) developer in 1980. His technical areas of expertise include high availability designs and architectures, data replication technologies, heterogeneous application and data integration, and communications and performance analysis. He holds many patents in data replication and synchronization, writes extensively on high and continuous availability topics, and co-authored Breaking the Availability Barrier, a three-volume book series. He received his BSCE from Bucknell University, MSCS from Villanova University, and is an HP Master Accredited Systems Engineer (MASE)..

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