Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2014

With events comes insight – DataExpress thrives, NonStop!

Events of any type involving the NonStop community always produce unexpected outcomes. Whether it’s simply a reference in passing to use of NonStop systems by a company that you didn’t know about or it’s broaching a product or feature you hadn’t been exposed to previously. Irrespective of the information you come across, you always leave an event with more to think about than when you first arrived.

Over the past couple of months, DataExpress has participated in a number of user events with either ourselves or our consultants being present. More recently, we had the pleasure of travelling to Palo Alto to participate in an event targeting vendors and while signing CDAs was involved barring us from discussing anything about subjects that HPE NonStop specifically asked us not to reveal, in general terms there were still high-level topics we can talk about, given that they were the subject of presentations at last year’s Boot Camp and then again at both GTUG and more recently, BITUG.

As for the high-level topics, perhaps the biggest take-away for us here at DataExpress is just how fast NonStop development is moving today. Executing on a number of very major programs it’s becoming an effort simply to keep up and that is news that we can honestly say continues to surprise us. Who would have guessed just a few years ago that HPE NonStop would add a family of servers to its existing offerings – the NonStop X family; that it would embrace hybrid infrastructure giving vendors like DataExpress new options as to where the DataExpress product could be run – the InfiniBand / Yuma project; and when it comes to the news about NonStop running in a virtual machine as a product offering very distinct from what’s available today on either NonStop i or NonStop X systems – vNonStop - well, we certainly were among the many vendors who truly didn’t see this coming!

We are expecting to read other vendors commentaries in this issue of Tandemworld and the variety of feedback provided will likely vary significantly, but what DataExpress will be paying attention to is the initial divide between running traditional, tightly integrated hardware with the software stack, NonStop systems we are all familiar with, and the emerging non-traditional software only offering from NonStop. We fully anticipate that sales for the traditional NonStop systems will continue for at least the rest of the decade and the customers running traditional NonStop systems will be the heavy hitters in the financial industry we have known for decades. Not for them would be a NonStop system running essentially on x86 PCs.

However, there is more to this virtual NonStop story than just the pursuit of brand new customers in brand new markets. “The market for vNonStop will partly be these same organizations that already run Development, QA, Test and even PoCs behind their production systems as insurance of not putting their production systems at risk through those phases,” explained Billy Whittington, CEO of DataExpress. “vNonStop allows them to significantly lower their overheads in these areas and we can expect a march towards that offering. Depending on both current and future application offerings on the Guardian OS, there could be interest in vNonStop from new customers who want the resilience that has previously only been offered on HP NonStop iron, but that will be a slower path, we believe.”

Tandemworld readers will have already read of demos of vNonStop having been made at events supporting mobile phone operators and we are expecting there will be even more that is showcased at HPE Discover 2016 but more on that in next month’s issue of Tandemworld. As best as we can tell, vNonStop is a reality and like all NonStop vendors, we are looking at our own installation to see how availability of such a runtime platform can benefit our own development operation. Indeed, talking with other vendors, there is much to be gained from deploying vNonStop early as it fundamentally benefits those shops where for existing products there is an option as to what platform they are being run on.

“The hybrid cloud option with YUMA will be enticing to people like us, who have a solution on both NonStop and Open Platforms, so understand the resource it offers, and the highly doughy kneading capability of Java that runs in its own environment,” added Whittington. “Again, it would be our best guess that it will be existing NonStop customers who first venture down this path. We have one customer who is looking to deploy a NonStop X, where the immediate impact on DataExpress would be to look at certifying the DataExpress Open Platform to communicate via Yuma to the Guardian version.” It will be challenging to all vendors to determine just how much attention is paid to those products and features now appearing on the NonStop roadmaps being made public but again, the speed at which NonStop development is executing on this roadmap that is the real story and it’s one that we find extremely encouraging.

It will also be a challenge for HPE as well – communicating the many NonStop options coming to market will be very important for every member of the NonStop vendor community. While we don’t believe it’s too late to alter the directions being taken by some of the biggest NonStop communities, it will require considerable focus by HPE’s Mission Critical Systems marketing and sales folks. But just holding this recent partner summit is a huge step in the right direction. The partner summit, “is a positive move by HPE NonStop because it stimulates activity by everyone involved,” concluded Whittington. “This activity will in turn stimulate interest wider afield which will likely then stimulate sales so while not a pendulum gaining momentum, perhaps it is still a cyclic effect which needed the HPE as a hardware vendor to kick off.”

Events always attract our attention no matter where they are held around the world. They are where the news first breaks and in the past, being present with our customers as often was the case, we were caught off balance as were our customers. Now it looks like keeping the vendor community informed of the directions and plans is being addressed by the HPE NonStop in a professional manner and for that, we close with extending our thanks and appreciation to all within the NonStop product management and development teams for putting on a highly successful event.

DataExpress, LLC.
1401 Shoal Creek, Suite 250, Highland Village, TX 75077

972-899-3476 (sales)

972-899-3460 (corporate)

sales@dataexpress.com
www.dataexpress.com

Musings on NonStop!

June, ‘16

The opinions expressed here are solely
those of the now self-employed author

The frenetic pace of May has continued into June. A combination of roadtrips across the western states of America as well as flights to London and yes, to Dallas as well, it has provided me with ample opportunity to talk with many members of the NonStop community. We may no longer refer to Tandem or to the former Tandem User Groups (including ITUG) the way we once did but the spirit of Tandem definitely lives on albeit with apparently less emphasis these days on the beer busts of yore.

Three events do stand out – BITUG, the Partner Summit and more recently, HPE Discover 2016. This last event was held in Las Vegas and when it comes to the saying what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas then nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to HPE and NonStop! Case in point – HPE continues to ramp up the volume on The Machine even as CTO Martin Fink was unable to present in person.

However, for many the real highlight came when HPE CEO Meg Whitman invited the Home Depot CIO onto the stage and introduced as a highly valued customer who has based his solution on NonStop and ProLiant systems! Standing true to its objective for this event it will be at the upcoming Boot Camp where the real skinny on NonStop will be revealed and now I am really looking forward to that event in November.

As a professional writer and at times, an amateur futurist, I see transformations coming that might stop us in our tracks. For several months now I have been in exchanges with my clients about life in the “post-smartphone” era – yes, when it comes to transaction processing do we believe that we have reached the end game? Is the user experience all that is driving transformation and is that user experience a result of how we interact with mobile devices? I am no longer as sure about this as I once was – why will we need a device at all in the coming years? Have you had a good look at where augmented reality is headed?

While it is fun to throw out a lot of questions the point is nothing is locked down as a given. SNA Networks? Gone! Plug-Compatible Computers? Gone! Unix? Gone! Linux? Well, Linux may be different as it’s more a badge or label than anything else as what lies beneath continues to evolve. Today’s Linux is not at all similar to the very first Linux distributions I saw save in a few core areas. So, mobile phones are not a given as a source of future transactions – as we marry the world of IoT and sensors to the Internet then we may indeed all become just another collection of sensors capable of executing any transaction simply with a thought …

In the meantime, we are welcoming the NonStop X family of systems with open arms and volume shipments have begun and the face of the NonStop community is changing as a result. This is something I touch on in several of my most recent posts. But again, I hope I can catch up with many of you but in the meantime, here are all the posts and commentaries published last month …

Real Time View:
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2016/05/hybrids-continue-to-make-headlines.html
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2016/05/london-calling-to-which-i-can-add.html
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2016/05/nonstop-on-forward-path-and-its-just.html

ATMmarketplace:
http://www.atmmarketplace.com/blogs/with-atms-should-we-begin-to-color-outside-the-lines/

Mobile Payments Today:
http://www.mobilepaymentstoday.com/blogs/mobile-wallets-dont-have-enough-going-for-them-right-now/

LinkedIn blog / Pulse:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tandem-reunion-n2tug-sponsored-omnipayments-check-out-richard-buckle?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bitug-gathers-nonstop-community-together-london-richard-buckle?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-head-beach-riding-waves-nonstop-proving-rewarding-richard-buckle?trk=mp-author-card

Striim:
http://www.striim.com/blog/2016/05/big-data-makes-it-into-the-hpe-nonstop-playbook/

IR
http://www.ir.com/blog-pay/hybrid-systems-open-the-door-to-greater-choice
http://www.ir.com/blog-pay/visualization-is-becoming-even-more-important-nonstop-going-virtual-and-prognosis-will-keep-it-real

DataExpress:
http://dataexpress.com/2016/05/20/rug-revelations-continue-impress/

Tandemworld (Musings on NonStop):
http://www.tandemworld.net/newsletter_may16.html

The Connection Magazine May / June, 2016 (Back for more … column and feature Keep your hands away from the controls and nobody will get hurt!) Click Here

Buckle-Up-Travel:
http://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2016/05/track-talk-yes-i-am-seeing-red.html

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO

Pyalla Technologies, LLC
Email: richard@pyalla-technologies.com

· Autumn Newsletter, make sure you register for your copy by joining the BITUG mailing list at www.bitug.com

· LITTLE SIG – Thursday 8^th December 2016 – This event will take the form of an education/training session in the morning, followed by user and HPE presentations in the afternoon. Watch this space for more detail next month.

· The European NonStop Conference and Exhibition and the BIG SIG rolled into one major event (eBITUG):

For the latest information on this and all BITUG activity please visit http://www.bitug.com and join the BITUG mailing list. Any questions please email chairman@bitug.com

In that previous post, I also posed questions as to what the next generation of NonStop systems will look like and if future discussions on NonStop will see hardware become less relevant? It has only been a short time, but already the picture is becoming clearer. Presentation slides from the GTUG event in Munich, as well as the feedback I have received following BITUG in London, are painting a pretty clear picture of NonStop as both a complete system offering, as well as a software offering. It would not surprise anyone to know that a picture this clear, even as it fundamentally changes many of our thoughts about what exactly “NonStop” is, has serious implications for all NonStop vendors. Like all the others, IR must weigh these implications before taking further action.

I am certainly pleased to see HPE investing quickly and broadly in the NonStop platform. Feedback from my sales team, indicates that HPE is moving at a clip not seen since the early days of Tandem Computers. l Moving to two system families – NonStop i and NonStop X – as well as to physical NonStop and virtual NonStop, is not just unprecedented, but both imaginative and bold. Any impressions of a laissez-faire attitude within HPE have been positively squelched and yet, there’s even more to come or so it would seem. Everyone at IR will be tracking user uptake of these new systems very closely.

Should you have any questions relating to the path being taken by Prognosis and have questions about deploying it in this new world of NonStop, don’t hesitate in reaching out to me or any member of my team – the rate of change is certainly accelerating and the pace of change occurring within HPE when it comes to NonStop is unprecedented, but the good news is that the market for NonStop real and virtual is large and the commitment of HPE is rock solid. I am confident that Prognosis will continue to play a major role in bringing it all together.

It’s affordable, it’s scalable, and it’s pay-as-you-go. OmniCloudX on NonStop X hosts numerous instances of OmniPayments, the financial transaction switch that provides all the requisite functionality to manage credit/debit-card transactions.

OmniPayments, Inc. (www.omnipayments.com) is the product arm of Opsol Integrators Inc., a leading HP NonStop system integrator. For further information, contact Yash Kapadia at +1 408-446-9274 or at yash@omnipayments.com.

Like viruses that lie dormant in the human body, 160516 remained undetected for over thirty years. Then on Friday the 13th in May, word leaked out to NonStop users and vendors that a critical date-routine bug would wreak havoc in payment processing applications the following Monday, May 16th. Once the date changed to May 16th, impacted processes would abend and would continue to abend with an arithmetic overflow every time they were restarted.

“What the Heck is 2016” examines the single line of faulty code, used to calculate the Julian day before the availability of Guardian date-calculation procedures. The process-abending error was identified by a NonStop customer that switched to the Monday, May 16th processing date following the completion of work on Friday the 13th. Since the customer who cut over on Friday did not require OLTP capability until Monday, the actual production impact was minimal.

Fortunately, the customer sounded the alarm within the NonStop community. Vendors worked overnight to replace the faulty code in their products and shipped the updates to customers on Saturday, May 14th. Crisis averted...until the next dormant bug appears.

In addition to “What the Heck is 160516,” read the following articles in the Availability Digest’s May and June 2016 issues:

Pathway – HPE NonStop’s Application Environment - Pathway transparently provides fault tolerance and massive scalability with no effort required on the part of application programmers. That “under the covers” attribute is what makes Pathway so unique.

911 Systems Are Failing Too Often - “911” is the nationwide U.S. emergency number that immediately will get assistance for a caller in crisis. Yet a Google search of “911 failures” yields far too many real-life breakdowns of what should be a mission-critical service.

Pop Goes the Weasel – Even the most sophisticated safeguards were no match for the weasel who chewed through a transformer cable and shut down the Large Hadron Collider for two weeks.

Cyber Security and Downtime -The threat of cyber attacks is relatively new and was unheard of in the mainframe days of the 1970s and 1980s. Traditional thinking says that a cyber attack, although a nuisance, does not constitute an outage. Unfortunately, this belief is not borne out by experience; and numerous cyber attack-related outages have been reported in Digest articles. The biggest challenge, of course, is the openness of the Internet and the relatively easy access by hackers to any services using it.

Telstra Plagued with Series of Outages – Pity poor Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications and media company. Its marketing message touts the reliability of its network, yet reality struck in the form of seven outages from February to May of this year. Now pity the millions of Telstra customers who lost voice and data services for hours.

Migrating IBM Power Systems to HPE Open Systems - Hewlett Packard has several decades of experience in migrating mission-critical applications from IBM Power Systems to HP (and now HP Enterprise) open systems. HPE has demonstrated that the majority of such migrations result in a significantly less expensive operating environment – often by a factor exceeding 50%. At the same time, the new HPE open environments match or exceed the performance and availability attributes of the original Power Systems. Several pain points are encouraging organizations to consider moving their mission-critical applications from IBM Power Systems to HPE open systems.

CenturyLink Targets Six Nines – The U.S. telco giant CenturyLink has announced its plans to offer customers six 9s of reliability in upcoming SLAs. That is an extraordinary goal, and it will be interesting to see if and how CenturyLink achieves it. SLAs are famous for making big guarantees with only minor penalties.

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - Our article highlights some of our numerous tweets that were favorited and retweeted in recent days.

The Availability Digest offers one-day and multi-day seminars on High Availability: Concepts and Practices. Seminars are given both onsite and online and are tailored to an organization’s specific needs. We also offer technical and marketing writing services for a variety of industries as well as consulting services on risk assessment and system architecture.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 758 members and counting. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.

Save the dates for the following HPE NonStop events this fall. We hope to see you there!

We are working on great agendas for these events, and more information and when to register will be available soon.

Please register via EventBrite for the Mid-Atlantic Tandem User Group (MATUG) meeting scheduled for 8am-5pm on Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at the HPE Headquarters, Herndon, VA USA. (Click https://eventbrite.com/event/16902004350/ for more information.) The MATUG meeting is open to all HPE NonStop customers, partners, users, consultants, or interested parties. Members are usually from the following states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia, although anyone can attend. MATUG provides members with the opportunity to participate in quality informational sessions, learn about new HPE products and services, and interact with fellow HPE NonStop users.

Please share this information with others in your organization who may be interested in attending. If you are interested in speaking, please email Susan Loeliger, MATUG Secretary/Treasurer. User presentations take preference and are free. There are several 25 minute vendor presentation slots available, which include a small sponsorship fee (TBD based on overall meeting expenses, including meals), and will be filled on a “first-come first-serve” basis, based on the time of your email response.

Please note that MATUG is on Tuesday, October 18, CTUG is on Wednesday, October 19, and NENUG is on Thursday, October 20, which creates a tight travel schedule for vendors who will be attending all three events; however these meetings/locations should allow for sufficient time for evening travel.

Tributary Systems, for 18 years the OEM supplier of tape products for all HP NonStop Servers, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of IGNITE!

IGNITE is the budget friendly self-contained 2U backup storage appliance for HP NonStop, HPUX, SuperDome X, Oracle®/Sun and all IBM environments (including AS/400) running Windows®, Linux®, Unix® and IBM/HP proprietary operating systems.

IGNITE is fully compatible with HP Data Protector, Symantec, TSM, Veeam and most other backup management applications.

IGNITE is based on Tributary Systems’ time proven Storage Director® policy-based backup virtualization platform.

IGNITE satisfies even the most demanding operational backup and archival requirements for lights-out and multi-platform enterprise computing environments.

· Integrated alerting and messaging capabilities for industry leading reports, analysis, and capacity planning

· Data-at-rest compression/encryption on both disk cache and physical tape media

· Transparent remote backup and restore features to satisfy off-site archival requirements

· Supports tape library distribution and consolidation, or elimination of tape altogether

· Most budget-friendly enterprise class storage solution for proprietary OS platforms available today.

IGNITE is designed and architected by Tributary Systems, with the engineering expertise and attention to detail that developed the proven Storage Director policy-based backup virtualization platform.

IGNITE is designed to meet the needs of large data center customers as well as the requirements of small and medium businesses.

IGNITE can be configured based on: Backup sizes, throughput requirements, tape retention policies, availability requirements, as well as future growth rates.

IGNITE may well be the lowest cost Enterprise-class disk storage subsystem in the marketplace today, but it’s packed with features and is the only backup appliance that thrives in heterogeneous environments. Budget price yes, budget performance, no!

Contact your Tributary Systems’ Sales Representative at 817-786-3060 to order the new IGNITE disk subsystem, they are ready for shipment now.

For more information on Tributary Systems’ IGNITE or Storage Director, visit www.tributary.com.

NonStop systems are now being used in far more dynamic situations and have more external connections than ever before. Any compromise in security is likely to have far reaching consequences, both for the immediate damage that may be done in terms of financial loss and for the wider damage done to a merchant’s reputation. Needless to say, the security of personal cardholder information has become paramount.

File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) is an important requirement of the PCI data security standard for maintaining confidential (e.g. cardholder) information and is considered a crucial part of protecting business assets.

comForte 21 GmbH is pleased to announce that two of its security products are now generally available via the HPE NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) price-book. These new products are HPE NonStop cF Data Security and HPE NonStop cF Secure Tape.

comForte has been a long-term price-book partner and the inclusion of these security solutions into the HPE NED price-book complements the current product offering for protecting sensitive data.

Connect Worldwide is thrilled to personally invite you to the 2016 NonStop Technical Boot Camp [TBC] at the Fairmont San Jose Hotel in San Jose, California on November 13-16, 2016. We encourage you to take advantage of the special EARLY BIRD registration rate of $1295 until August 29th!

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER NOW

The Connect NonStop TBC is at the forefront of today's open system leaders and is a true user-driven consortium of Hewlett Packard Enterprise customers and partners working with HPE's NonStop Enterprise Division. The 2016 NonStop Technical Boot Camp will begin with cutting edge deep-dive pre-conference seminars on Sunday hosted by the partners leading the way in NonStop innovations and solutions, followed by three days of breakout sessions, keynotes, and networking receptions. Meet and learn from the partners, developers, engineers, and executives that are leading the global NonStop community.

Connect is pleased to bring the NonStop TBC Camp back to the beautiful Fairmont San Jose Hotel. We have secured an excellent rate at the Fairmont of $239 per night.
This rate is valid until October 21st, so book now to make sure you get the discounted room rate! You can reserve your room online here.

CALL FOR PAPERS IS OPEN!
Do you have an interesting NonStop topic you would like to present at Boot Camp? Learn more and submit your paper here.
The Call for Papers closes on September 1st.

No matter if you are new to NonStop or you have years of experience, you will benefit from this year’s event.
Click here to review the event guide and register today.

See you in San Jose!
~Connect Events Team

It’s tough to say goodbye to an old but trusted friend. Yet like many other HPE NonStop customers, one company made the decision to migrate from its S-Series servers to the new L-Series operating system on NonStop X. During the course of the migration, the company also elected to consolidate its two data centers, each located in a different time zone, into one data center in just one of the time zones. However, some applications still had to reflect timestamps for what had become the remote time zone.

How could multiple applications requiring different date/time environments run simultaneously on the same server? That was the challenge.

The solution for the customer was TANDsoft’s OPTA2000 clock- and time-zone simulator. It allows existing backup, development, test, and production systems to support worldwide consolidated applications. OPTA2000 is the only NonStop solution available for such time-critical simulation. It is one of TANDsoft most popular products and represents TANDsoft’s expertise in interception technology.

OPTA2000 provides date/time simulation and time-zone simulation for all HP NonStop applications and data bases. Date and time simulation allows organizations to "time travel" their applications in the future or past to test all date and time-sensitive logic. OPTA2000 eliminates the need to change system clocks for time-sensitive testing. Time-zone simulation allows applications to operate in any virtual time zone. With regard to data center consolidation, OPTA2000 becomes increasingly valuable by allowing applications to operate in local date and time, independent of the current physical location or time zone of their data center.

In addition to being critical to the customer’s consolidation efforts, OPTA2000 also played an important role in the migration process. While applications still operated in production in the S-Series environment, OPTA2000 allowed the staff to perform acceptance tests on those same applications running in DEV/TEST on NonStop X. Once the customer was satisfied that its time-zone-sensitive applications could run simultaneously on the same server, production operations were deployed onto NonStop X.

TANDsoft’s OPTA2000

● Time-sensitive applications operate with virtual time zones in consolidated data center

● Applications sitting on a server in one time zone can accurately timestamp local transactions generated outside that time zone

● Applications run in “user” time, not “system” time, without interrupting normal system operation

● No need to ever change the system clock. Multiple virtual system clocks on a single NonStop server

● All Nonstop Guardian and OSS programs, programming languages and data bases (Enscribe, SQL/MP, SQL/MX) are supported

● Date and time testing with future time, past time and frozen time

● Accommodates Daylight Saving Time (DST) transition tables

● Requires no application source-code modifications

● Supports in-house, HP, and major third-party solutions, even those where source code is unavailable

● Available for NonStop X and all other NonStop servers.

In addition to OPTA2000, TANDsoft solutions – all certified on NonStop X - include FileSync for automatic file synchronization, replication, and data deduplication; the OPTA suite of interception and trace utilities (OPTA-Trace Online Process Tracer and Analyzer, Recycle Bin, Low Pin Optimizer, and EMS Alerts Online Startup and Termination Capture Utility); Stack Monitor, which alerts developers to the impending threat of a stack overflow; Command Stream Replicator, which logs and automatically replicates TMF-audited/unaudited FUP, SQL/MP and SQL/MX DDL structure and other environment changes to target systems; AutoLib, which automatically loads a user library or a DLL for executing processes; the Enscribe-2-SQL and TMF-Audit Toolkits and the Enscribe-2-SQL Data Replicator, all of which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques; E2S-Lite, which permits efficient, low-cost Enscribe modifications without the need to change a program’s source code; and SDI, a seamless sensitive data intercept API for Enscribe, SQL/MP, and SQL/MX.

For information about TANDsoft solutions, contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Free trials are available. www.tandsoft.com.

NuWave Technologies has recently had the opportunity to chat with a lot of great innovators within the NonStop space for their "NonStop Innovations Blog".

FIM and PCI DSS

File Integrity Checker (FIC)

Real-time alerts with Alert-Plus