NonStop Systems Introduction

Requirements of ZLE Systems
NonStop Systems Introduction—527825-001
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Current View of all Data
customer touchpoints (Web site, wireless device, ATM, point-of-sale device) as they
interact with customers, and in response, make recommendation as to what kinds of
offers those particular customers are most likely to accept. The recommendations
would take into account not just historical data, but data summarizing the customer’s
most recent interactions with enterprise systems.
Current View of all Data
A ZLE system provides immediate access to consolidated information from all over the
business. That is, it brings data together in real time, and it provides real-time access
to it. This means that the results of a transaction must be available immediately to all
systems that need it.
For example, suppose a customer is browsing a corporate Web site and decides to
phone the call center for more information on a particular product. The service
representative at the call center will have access to information about what the
customer was just looking at and what the customer has purchased on all touchpoints
regardless of where they occurred. ZLE applications could be used to formulate a
special, personalized offer based on the customer’s past history and interests. This will
all happen in real time so that the service representative can immediately make an
offer while the customer is still on the line. The offer is based on current data, and not
on data that is days (or weeks) old. In the ZLE system, the results of each transaction
are available to all other systems that need it.
In order to keep its data current, the data store must be able to handle constant
updating to remain current with each operational system, in addition to handling the
myriad of other transactions that occur against the data store. The NonStop software
and servers at the heart of the ZLE system makes this immediate (real time) access to
current data possible.
Availability of Data
In a conventional network of business systems such as the one shown in Figure 1-1 on
page 1-5, continuous availability of data cannot be guaranteed. This lack of availability
can contribute to increased latency within the enterprise. For example, if application A
requires data from application B, but application B is down for some reason, A must
wait for B to return to operation before it can access the data. In a ZLE framework,
data required by multiple applications can be cached in the data store, which is
designed for continuous availability; the data is always available to any application that
requires it.
As you will see in subsequent sections, the SQL/MX database and NonStop server are
designed to provide the high levels of performance and availability required by the data
store.