Support for Interoperability of TMF and RDF With HP NonStop OS Versions

Some customers have recently inquired as to the intention of HP’s NonStop Enterprise Division regarding support for cross-OS compatibility of our key data integrity and business continuity products: HP NonStop Transaction Management Facility (TMF) and HP NonStop Remote Database Facility (RDF). We offer this statement of assurance as a response.

At the start, HP encourages customers to use the most current versions of NonStop hardware and software available, as we only focus major improvements on our most recent platforms. That said, we know that our customers are proud of their NonStop investment and want to extend that investment for a reasonably long time. To support these customers, we have always provided guidance on how to get the best results with older products. However, we also publish a list of products that we are no longer able to fully support, see HP.com > NonStopComputing > Servers & Support

Cross-OS compatibility between H-series and J-series

Regarding TMF’s capability to do its own disaster recovery (back up and restore), and RDF’s cross-OS compatibility, customers can rest assured that versions of TMF and RDF on H06xx.xx and J06.xx.xx use a common source code thread and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Were there to be a change from this policy, we would give customers appropriate notice.

In testing TMF and RDF between different OS versions, we know of the following single caveat. With the release of H06.19/J06.08 OS, audit records can be >28 KB. RDF uses TMF’s shared recovery to apply audit and thus can cause a problem if the audit records are >28 KB, unless the customer also uses the latest version of RDF, which expects larger TMF audit records: RDF 1.9, for H and J series NonStop OS versions, or the SPR for G series.

In addition, we provide a cross reference on compatibility for RDF primary and target system environments (see the end of this document).

Migration guidelines from K Series to Integrity NonStop (tested)

Over the past number of years, we have strongly encouraged remaining K-Series customers to upgrade and we have tested techniques to assist their migration to Integrity NonStop and Integrity BladeSystems, using RDF, in particular, and also HP NonStop AutoSYNC. We have also tested RDF and AutoSYNC to assist in migration efforts from all currently available NonStop servers.

These are the minimum (older) SPR versions that we have successfully tested:

Status of RDF Compatibility Testing Across NonStop OS versions

NOTE: We strongly advise that cross-version use for business continuity be limited to a short term solution with the more recent system used as the target. However, we have tested the following in our lab with no known problems. Also, customers should do periodic switchovers to check that their environment will perform as expected.

For more information see www.hp.com/go/nonstopcontinuity.