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Ban Bottlenecks®

Quality of Service Consulting

In our industry Quality of Service (QOS) is the mandatory mantra everyone’s reciting.  However, in practice many organizations don’t have time to figure out:

• What Quality of Service are they receiving from their partners and/or supporting SOA services?
• What Quality of Service are they providing to their clients?
• Is it stable and consistent over time?
• Is their computing complex adequate to handle the expected demand?

Quality of Service Process

We will put a Quality of Service process into place which will answer these questions and ensure that you are providing excellent QOS now, and in the future. One system or hundreds; NonStop and other architectures.

Contact Us For A Free System Audit

Can we help you understand your system, and show you how to fix problems before they hurt? Absolutely!  Call us. 

assist@banbottlenecks.com

1.415.256.8369

www.banbottlenecks.com

Visit us at the NonStop Conference in San Jose in September!

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Availability Digest Examines VocaLink’s Faster Payment Service

The Faster Payment Service (FPS) is a major application of the VocaLink Real-Time Payments Platform.  Operating round-the-clock, FPS provides near real-time interbank transfers for Internet and telephone-banking payments in the U.K.  In “Faster Payments – Bringing Payment Processing into the 21^st Century,” Availability Digest guest author Damian Ward summarizes FPS’ development and implementation and also describes how FPS operates at 100% service availability. 

Also in the Digest’s June issue:

-  The U.S. Air Force’s inadequate testing procedures disabled 10,000 military GPS receivers following a major software upgrade. 

- “What is Reliability,” an overview of the very active discussion on the Digest’s Continuous Availability Forum at www.linkedin.com, suggests a simple method to quantify system reliability by focusing on recovery. 

- Neverfail counts on data replication and automated failover procedures to ensure continuity of services for users of Microsoft Windows applications.  

Digest editor Bill Highleyman will present a pre-conference seminar at HPTF on June 21^st in Las Vegas.  “Achieving Continuous Availability with Active/Active Networks” will cover a range of topics, including “how active/active networks compare to other fault-tolerant technologies,” “Never Again horror stories from those who ignore disaster tolerance,” and “why continuous availability and disaster tolerance are different than high availability and disaster recovery.”  Register for Bill’s seminar at http://www.connect-community.org/?page=HPTF2010.  

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com.  Our new “Useful Links” page is a great resource for use in the online research of products and services focused on high- and continuous availability and mission-critical systems. 

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Preview - the comForte Lounge !!

Social media is everywhere reaching from blogs to LinkedIn to Twitter and its importance as a communication channel is rising. Now, comForte created the comForte Lounge and we are developing our first blog postings as we speak.

We are very pleased that Richard Buckle agreed to exclusively write blogs for the comForte Lounge. Richard has been very active and successful in creating numerous blogs reflecting on the NonStop market place. Richard will be our 'master blogger' but needless to say that key comForte folks will add their contributions to the comForte Lounge too.

So, the comForte  Lounge is the place to look for news on anything 'comForte' and 'NonStop'. Sit back and make yourself comForte'able!! Come and visit the comForte Lounge at www.comfortelounge.blogspot.com. The first blogs will be posted shortly.

 

The new comForte Lounge blogs will be complemented by a new group in LinkedIn called 'comForte Lounge'. Visit www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3129511&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr and join the group.

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Computer Security Products announces

Intelligent Log Management for Nonstop Servers

To meet the growing need to consolidate Audit information on centralized data warehouses, CSP has released “Nonstop Log Manager” for Nonstop servers. With Nonstop Log Manager  you can extract all, or a pre-selection of Audit information from Safeguard and other sources so that data can be forwarded to a centralized warehouse such as Sensage, Netcool, RSA Envision, Tivoli, HP’s Compliance Warehouse or any other data warehousing product. 

Beyond its capabilities to forward any type of event messages from Nonstop servers to central log management systems in real time, comprehensive filtering and alerting capabilities are available to detect and react to unwanted or unauthorized activities on the system.

Nonstop Log Manager runs in real time on your Nonstop server so that information can be instantaneously processed and forwarded to the data warehouse for batch reporting.  Currently Nonstop Log Manager can be used in conjunction with SAFEGUARD, CSP PassPort, CSP’s Compliance Reporting Module or File Integrity Checker as well as any EMS messages so all important system events can be handled.    Further plug-in adapters for other data sources are planned for the product.  With Nonstop Log Manager, your Nonstop servers can easily integrate with any enterprise wide compliance reporting tool.

For more information please contact us at: sales@cspsecurity.com

 

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The importance of starting with a SQL database when modernizing your NonStop applications…

By Harry Scott, Co-founder – Carr Scott Software Incorporated

We are asked frequently in our business of modernizing NonStop customers, ‘Why does it matter that we start the project with getting the database into SQL?’

Like many complex questions, the answer is simple but not always obvious.

The answer is that in order to do more and save costs, you need to have less code after your modernization than you do today and this is a natural result, if you start with the database.

Let me explain.

Today, if you have an Enscribe application you really do not have any opportunities to leverage 3^rd party tools, technologies or system features – everything you need to do, you have to design, build, test and maintain yourself. This is extremely expensive and ultimately cost prohibitive for most organizations. It is also one of the major factors in some people’s perceptions that NonStop is expensive. But it’s not NonStop’s fault. HP has worked hard and done a great job of moving the NonStop platform to industry standard components and technologies – the problem is that if your application is Enscribe based, you really can’t take advantage of these new technologies.

Let’s define a ‘typical’ application to see the effects of moving to SQL instead of Enscribe and the possibilities for saving this offers. Our ‘typical’ application we’ll say has:

·        1000 Core Enscribe based applications programs equaling 1 million lines of code

·        300 Reports built in a combination of COBOL/other 3^rd generation language and ENFORM, which would be at least another 150,000 lines of code

·        100 ‘data transformation’ programs used for converting Enscribe data for other system/platform use, another 100,000 lines of code

·        100 Enscribe ‘database’ files

·        We’ll use a conservative cost estimate for maintenance of 50 cents per line of code or $625,000 per year (1.25MM x $0.50) to maintain this application.

If you were to modernize the above but not start with conversion to SQL, say instead you attack the GUI first, there is virtually no opportunity to reduce the application footprint (i.e., the number of programs/objects you have to maintain), in fact you may end up building even more Enscribe code to link applications data such as your NonStop data and data from another platform that you now want to combine on a screen.

If instead you do convert from Enscribe to SQL as the first step in the modernization, you can immediately start benefiting from having an industry standard database and start shedding code. No longer will you need most, if not all, of the 100 ‘data transformation’ programs. Once the data is in SQL, +90% of all systems out there will know how to natively understand SQL data without you building and maintaining these types of translation programs. Savings of $50,000 per year minimum.

Once the data is in SQL, you no longer have to hard code reports or be limited to ENFORM. You can jettison all this legacy code, and instead bring in an off-the-shelf report-writer like Crystal Reports or an open source tool (see a small list of them here). Savings of another $75,000 per year.

We’ve already saved 20% of your budget and we haven’t even touched your main application yet!

So, now let’s look at modernizing your core application.

First, now that you are SQL based, you can start using the Eclipse SDK for NonStop. We run into many people still today who don’t realize that there is no, zero, nada, support for Enscribe in Eclipse. If you have an Enscribe database, you’re left out of using not only Eclipse but virtually every other 3^rd party development, report or business function products written in the last 15 years. Net-net is that everything on the market whether they are commercial or open source products support SQL databases, only two, ENFORM and ENABLE, support Enscribe. If your management and shareholders are fine with you building everything by hand or using only ENFORM and ENABLE for the next 10 or 15 years, you are in the tiniest of minorities. For everyone else it’s time to modernize and moving from Enscribe to SQL is the obvious first step.

If you are ready to take that first step, clearly we think you should look at our Escort SQL forward database gateway technology[i]. In a soon to be released whitepaper entitled ‘The Road to the Megaplex’ by The Standish Group, they too suggest that moving off Enscribe and to a SQL based database should be the first step in modernizing your legacy NonStop applications.

While at first it may seem paradoxical, you can save more by doing less. In the context of modernizing your NonStop applications, that’s exactly what converting from Enscribe to SQL as your first step allows you to do. The Standish Group calls the realization of ending up with less code to maintain as a result of your modernization ‘an asymmetrical modernization’, the two do the same thing or maybe more but with less cost and who wouldn’t be in favor of that!

 

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When A Global Bank Migrated to Blades, So Did OPTA2000

 One system clock, multiple current times, multiple time zones – on all HP NonStop Platforms!

 A major U.S. East Coast bank runs global NetBatch environments from its central data center. The bank's NetBatch jobs are responsible for preparing market-closing reports that must represent the local time with which reports are associated. Because the NetBatch environments are production environments, the system clock cannot be changed without dire consequences. Therefore, the bank uses TANDsoft's OPTA2000 to run each NetBatch environment in its own virtual time zone. Thus, a systems operator working on the U.S. East Coast at 10am EST (Eastern Standard Time) can monitor the market reports generated by his systems for the 4pm CET (Central European Time) market close in Paris.

When the bank decided on a major migrations from NonStop S-Series to Baldes (NonStop NB-Series), a major concern was how the migration would impact not only critical applications but also the in-house and third-party software needed to enhance those applications. OPTA2000 supports all HP NonStop platforms; therefore, migration of this virtual clock and time-zone simulator was effortless.

OPTA2000 allows multiple applications operating in a consolidated environment to each have their own virtual system clock or function in their own virtual time zone with date/time specifications that are different than that of the system clock. All this is made possible by TANDsoft's innovative intercept technology. Thousands of time-sensitive, time-different applications on a single server can be accommodated. OPTA2000's free trial copies install easily without the need for application modifications.

TANDsoft's "best of breed, best in price" philosophy offers highly competitive value for all TANDsoft's solutions. They include FileSync replication and sychronization software and the Enscribe-2-SQL and TMF-Audit Toolkits.

For more information, visit www.tandsoft.com. Or call us at +1 (514) 695 2234.

Come visit us in September in Booth #33 at the Connect NonStop Symposium & Expo in San Jose, California.