NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs

Introduction

NonStop Systems Introduction for H-Series RVUs—540083-001

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The Real-Time Enterprise

A real-time enterprise is a company that has removed latency from its operations so

that business events that occur anywhere in the organization can immediately trigger

appropriate actions across all other parts of the company; that is, the responses to the

events occur in real time. In the business sense, latency can be defined as the time

required for a transaction to complete and for the results of that transaction to be

propagated to all systems and applications where it is needed. In a real-time

enterprise, that delay is reduced to very nearly zero because current information is

available immediately to all points in the company where it is needed.

Real-time enterprise solutions employ a zero latency enterprise framework to reduce

latency to zero. Zero latency enterprise framework refers to a technology that

integrates a company’s diverse application systems to: (a) provide near-instantaneous

awareness throughout the company of events and data tracked by any one of the

applications and (b) enable intelligent organizational responses in real time.

Throughout this manual, the term “zero latency enterprise (or ZLE) framework” is used

to describe the computer architecture that enables a business to function as a real-time

enterprise.

Why is the level of latency important in a business system? In today’s business

environment, customers expect all information presented to them to be current

throughout the entire business. If a customer places an order, the customer expects to

see that order reflected, in real time, everywhere he or she has access to that

information: the business’s Web site, the customer service center, the customer loyalty

program. Both internal and external users of business systems are increasingly

intolerant of businesses where they see transactions suffering because of information

latency.

Consider the predicament of a customer who has the following experience. Needing to

be in another city for a business meeting, the customer connects to the Web site of the

airline he uses frequently and books a flight, taking advantage of the airline’s

eBusiness facility by paying online with a credit card. However, immediately thereafter,

the meeting timetable is changed, and the customer logs back into the Web site to

change the booking. But he can find no details of the booking: the eBusiness booking

has not yet propagated to the Web server’s database. The customer then calls the

airline’s customer service center to arrange a different flight in person. But the service

representative is unable to assist because as far as he can tell, no such booking exists:

it hasn’t shown up on the Customer Service computer yet. The result: a frustrated and

unhappy customer.

In a true real-time environment, the results of a transaction are immediately available

wherever they are needed. If a zero latency system were implemented in the previous

example, the results of the original booking transaction would be immediately available

at all the customer contact points and could readily be changed to accommodate the

customer.

For another example, consider a customer who purchases an item from a retail store

and pays with a credit card. Suppose this customer has a long history of many large