“When we say savings, we mean it. OmniPayments now sells NonStop hardware at $0 profit.”

The OmniPayments Financial Transaction Switch is a component-based software design that permits the creation of flexible business services, the kind that users can develop and deploy quickly to enhance the customer experience. The core of OmniPayments is a set of Business Logic Modules, or BLMs. As a whole, they comprise the OMNIs, whose open architecture (SOA) allows our building blocks and business modules to interact not only with each other but also with existing in-house systems and third-party solutions.

While all components are included within OmniPayments, some can be purchased separately.

The Omnis comprise both transaction and infrastructure services. 

Transaction Omnis

 OmniATM provides ATM terminal driving and broad support for the industry’s most popular ATMs. ATMs can be driven in their native modes, thereby optimizing their capabilities.  They also can be uniquely loaded and controlled from a centralized location. We currently support over 14,000 ATMs.

OmniPOS is available for financial institutions that desire the ability to directly control a POS terminal network and provide merchant settlement and reporting.  The module serves as a front end and mediates communication between the POS terminal network and the authorization application(s).

OmniSwitch  interrogates acquiring and issuing transaction messages, performs required actions, and applies rules and routing decisions both on-us and not-on-us according to financial institutions’ unique configurations. It currently accommodates more than 50 national and international interchanges.

Infrastructure Omnis

The primary function of OmniPayments is to route financial transactions to issuing banks for authorization.  However, OmniPayments currently offers additional services to support credit-card and debit-card use.  These services are provided via our flexible Business Logic Modules (BLMs), each tasked with enabling a specific function.  For instance, OmniAuth provides authorization services, OmniOffender is an interactive performance monitor, and OmniHub coordinates end-of-day settlement processing.  OmniPayments’ structured design permits the ongoing addition of new BLMs that can support new features and business functions as the market demands.

OmniPayments is a switching solution for the financial and retail industries. It is deployed on NonStop for the highest availability and offers all the requisite functionality to manage credit/debit-card transactions. It manages multiple devices, hosts application interfaces, and interoperates with third-party products or other systems if required. OmniPayments easily expands to provide additional functionality when needed and supplies complete security functions for every financial transaction handled, including encryption-at-rest and encryption-in-flight. Available around the clock, OmniPayments will survive any single fault, requires no downtime for maintenance or upgrades, and supports a range of disaster-recovery solutions.

OmniPayments can be installed either as a complete, off-the-shelf solution or can be enhanced with customer-requested modifications and features to improve cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and risk mitigation.  Our team of 100-plus NonStop specialists are skilled at rapid project turnarounds and meeting deadlines.

OmniPayments also distributes OmniCloudX on NonStop X. OmniCloudX hosts numerous OmniPayments instances at a pay-for-use price so attractive that mid-size retailers and financial organizations now can enjoy the benefits of having their own high-capacity transaction switches. Starts at only $5,000 USD per month.

The OmniPayments Preauthorization Engine is used by financial institutions in conjunction with the OmniPayments Financial Transaction Switch or as a seamless interface to other providers’ switches via a custom support module (CSM). We call it the Fraud Blocker!

OmniPayments systems in production today process 700 million transactions per month, generated by point-of-sales terminals and over 14,000 ATMs. A single OmniPayments system supports up to 10,000 transactions per second. Multiple OmniPayments systems can cooperate to provide any capacity required by an application. From our seven worldwide locations, we serve as a 24×7 managed services provider for remote production monitoring. 

To learn more about OmniPayments, attend our presentations and visit with our staff at the following events in September and early October.

VNUG – Viking NonStop User Group (13/14 September) – Stockholm, Sweden

HPE NonStop Education Day (21 September) – Berkley Heights, New Jersey (USA)

ATUG – Atlanta HPE NonStop User Group (29 September) Atlanta, Georgia (USA)

DUST – Desert Users of Tandem (4 October) Scottsdale, Arizona (USA)

PKF - Payments Knowledge Forum (4 October) - London, England

OmniPayments customers and others interested in our solutions are invited to join the new OmniPayments Discussion Group on LinkedIn at http://bit.ly/2bB1AGh.

For further information, contact Yash Kapadia at +1 408-446-9274 or at yash@omnipayments.com.   

This past weekend I watched the 1999 movie “The Matrix”. If you haven’t seen it the movie introduces us to the concept of a waterfall of data that surrounds us. They call it the matrix. There is so much data that it can be impossible to make any sense of it. In the movie we see a waterfall of bits falling across a green screen. Keanu Reeves plays the part of Neo, the one person who can see and understand the matrix.

While I find this movie cool I’m not here to waste your time with a movie review. Instead let’s play the “Six degrees from Kevin Bacon” game. The theory is that for any two random people on earth you can connect them with six or fewer acquaintance links. The game is commonly played by linking a random actor to the actor Kevin Bacon. In this case I am going to try to link Keanu Reeves to NTI in 6 or fewer steps. I am going to try to draw a line thru history connecting Morpheus & Trinity & Neo to a new project NTI has on the concept board.

·       1973 Tandem is born and introduces us to the Unaudited Enscribe file system. Very fast but no relational features (RDBMS would not be born for another decade).

·       1975 thru 1985 products like Base24 and Connex were born. Built on Unaudited Enscribe, these products were the foundation that Tandem’s success was built upon.

·       1987 Tandem introduced NonStop SQL. This was designed to run effectively on parallel computers, adding functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions.

·       1989 Tandem added the ability to run queries in parallel. This was the only RDBMS on the market that scaled almost linearly with the number of processors in the machine: adding a second CPU to an existing NonStop SQL server will almost exactly double its performance.  They added /MP to its name, for Massively Parallel.

·       1995 HP created SQL/MX. Built for the NT desktop hardware line, this was an attempt to compete with Oracle. MX for NT was never released.

·       By 2002 Tandem had been acquired by Compaq, and Compaq had been acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

·       In 2002 Tandem picked up the shelved MX NT code and introduced SQL/MX for NonStop. MX promised speed, fault tolerance, and ansi compatibility.

I remember giving a talk at the Tampa SunTUG event and asking the crowd if anyone had plans to start using MX. You could hear crickets chirp in the room. Nobody was interested. Nobody was going to redesign a mission critical system (currently using Unaudited Enscribe) to use a new relational database with no business drivers behind it.

·       HP saw an opportunity in the Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) space for NonStop SQL/MX technology, so in 2007 they introduced the HP Neoview data warehouse and business intelligence computer server line.

And here is where I think they made a strategic mistake. They forked the code stack. One team took MX down the Neoview path, fixing & enhancing & investing. One team took MX down the NonStop path and compiled long lists of bugs that never got fixed. Every time I go into a cheese shop and walk by the Limburger I’m reminded of that first version of SQL/MX.

·       At the end of 2010, after just 3 years, they quietly shot Neoview. *BANG*

Now here comes a problem. HP had rolled out Neoview across its internal support systems. The business ran on a warehouse product that they just killed off. No worries. Work had been going on to port the HP Neoview software stack to clustered Linux. This solution, code named “SeaQuest”, went into operation in 2012 and has since replaced all of HP-IT’s Neoview systems.

·       In 2014, with funding from HP Labs, the SeaQuest team ported the engine on top of HBase. This project was released open source under the name Trafodion. Trafodion is an enterprise-class transactional and operational SQL-on-Hadoop solution. It has now been accepted as an Apache incubation project.

·       By 2015 many of the Tandem database team had been together for over 27 years. It was time to write their own future. 30 of the members of the Neoview/SeaQuest team left HP and formed Esgyn. Their mission is to continue to evolve Trafodion as they build a commercial case.

What the heck does Keanu Reeves have to do with all of this?

How is this related to what NTI is working on?

Step 1 - In 1999 “The Matrix” was released introducing us to NEO and the MATRIX. Keanu Reeves was the one person who could see the matrix and understand the data.

Step 2 - One of the members of the Tandem data warehouse team thought the movie was so cool he named the new product after the main character. NEOVIEW.

Step 3 - At NTI we see the Tandem as a waterfall of data. We see this data flowing into a DATA LAKE. We see value in building and accessing and understanding this MATRIX.

I know my connections were a stretch, but hopefully you found this info fun and a bit quirky. In the coming months I will be writing more about the NTI MATRIX. For now I will end this article with my usual shameless plug.

DRNet is the coolest replication product on the planet. If you are not already a user you should call me so I can fix that.

DRNet® is world class NonStop Data Replication technology.

·       Real-time Active/Active Data Replication

·       Real-time Tandem to OPEN Data Replication

·       Real-time File Synchronization

·       Refreshingly Real-Time Support from Real Engineers

Cheers

Jim.McFadden@network-tech.com

+1 (402) 968 3674

NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2016

Click here to LEARN MORE AND REGISTER NOW:

Registration Information:

EARLY BIRD:  $1295 (before 9/29/16)
REGULAR FEE:  $1595 (after 9/30/16)

Pre-Conference Seminar Registration: $150
Guest/Spouse Pass for Evening Events and Receptions:  $100

Call for Papers is OPEN:

Learn more and submit your paper here.
Call for Papers closes on September 1st.

Example HPE Sessions:

 
The Partner SIG looks forward to reuniting with Customers and HPE this fall!

Kathy Wood

NonStop Partner SIG/Vendor Chair

kwood@blackwood-systems.com

 DataExpress

Integration – it is always on the minds of NonStop systems managers; DataExpress makes integration easy!

In the middle of the Formula One (F1) season, as soon as August arrives, the teams shut down for a month of no racing and even as the F1 teams are compelled to take two-week factory shutdown, the period provides an ideal holiday time for fans and drivers alike. No testing or repairs are allowed in those two weeks and definitely no time allowed integrating new parts or trying out something different. All teams are constantly looking for that little extra to propel them into victory lane but come August, it’s all a case of one big uninterrupted snooze.

When it comes to enterprise IT, these holiday times are often the busiest periods of the year. Unfortunately, this August was also a time when we read of outages as airlines ran afoul of glitches that remain puzzling to those who track such events. Making the evening news this way is never part of any CIOs playbook but when it happens, it is fodder for unrelenting speculation. In this particular case, when airline flights were cancelled, it brought out articles that called for a return to the good old days when systems weren’t integrated and where batch processing with some online properties were all the rage. However, it’s so easy to forget that the good old days of airline travel also were nowhere near the scale of operations that they are today nor were there the all-important airline alliances that mandated even more integration between airline operations computers.

For many, flipping the mental switch over to “summer mode” implies an idyllic time to ease up on the everyday activities that stress us out and to find a comfy lawn-chair from which to enjoy summer breezes. If only this was true for all of us working in IT – or indeed, any of us. With everyone connected all the time and where a smartphone or tablet is never far from our side, summer mode has degraded to where it’s just the sum of a few minutes of solitude here, a short nap there and in between, many hours spent responding to emails and joining conference calls. And yet, there are those applications that for whatever reason just have to run, reliably and securely, no matter what time of year it happens to be.

For the NonStop community, and unlike the F1 teams, there’s plenty of activity surrounding NonStop X and integration is a key component. NonStop X like many of the NonStop systems that preceded them, rarely enjoy life as stand-alone systems. Integrating with networks, core applications and external databases has always been de rigueur for NonStop systems but with NonStop X, it’s becoming even easier to do even as the demands on all systems to be an integral part of hybrid infrastructures increases. And right now, plugging a NonStop X system into a hybrid infrastructure is occupying those treasured summer moments for many of our customers.

At first it may not seem that all that much is happening within the NonStop installed base and yet, ever so gradually, NonStop X systems are beginning to appear. The traditional Itanium-based blade systems that constitute the NonStop i family are being augmented by new NonStop X systems and I expect this trickle in demand to escalate pretty rapidly in the fall. As we observed in our July article, here’s the new wrinkle; the performance, the price and the promotion from HPE is having a noticeable impact. And for many NonStop users, integration with hybrid infrastructure is becoming a case of hybrids comprised of NonStop i and NonStop X systems and for good reason - this is what they will be dealing with for many years to come.  

The majority of NonStop users may be in summer mode even as they are working with new NonStop X systems but their summers are less chaotic than those systems managers left to oversee commodity servers. The software stacks running on these commodity servers are rarely as well-integrated as they are on NonStop and the solutions these systems managers expect to execute flawlessly rarely do – there’s always a glitch somewhere in the processing path that proves distracting enough to bring these system managers out of their lawn-chairs and back into the data center. It always happens and we have seen it firsthand.

But here at DataExpress, responsible for moving files securely and without delays or outright failures has lessened the pressures on systems managers. Integration of NonStop with external systems of organizations and agencies that compel enterprises to continue providing data even during the holidays is made so much easier with DataExpress. And in this instance we have seen ourselves, firsthand, the results of the contribution DataExpress makes to better integration of data.

The best way I can put it is that we have been in summer mode here at DataExpress, taking a little downtime as the opportunity provided, and DataExpress has been holding its own. DataExpress customers have continued with their business and our product has quietly kept running in the background, with no fanfare, letting harried systems managers to get on with keeping other systems working. Probably the final comment coming from any of them is a phrase we too have come to appreciate this month - “no news is good news!”

DataExpress, Inc.
1401 Shoal Creek, Suite 250, Highland Village, TX 75077
972-899-3476 (sales)
972-899-3460 (corporate)

sales@dataexpress.com
www.dataexpress.com

This new feature of ITP-PANORAMA is making it easier for executives to manage their software. It shows per program, section and paragraph the result of fifty-five quality analyses which is displayed with twenty-six statistic values.

Result is a value between 1 and 10 shown also in colors red, yellow and green. From critical parts of the software a developer is only a mouse-click away from the relevant part in the program listing where corrections or improvements have to be made.

The video that explains how valuable the COBOL Quality Analysis is for your Application Portfolio Management is now available on our website:

    http://www.itp-panorama.com/index.php?videos-about-itp-panorama

For more information and a White Paper about the performed quality checks contact Juergen.Overhoff@itp-panorama.com

At CSP, we strive to be at the forefront of new technology.  This is why we are excited to announce that we just took delivery of one of the first NonStop X systems in Canada!

The addition of our new, in-house, NS3 X system to our existing network of NonStop servers, will allow us to continue the support of our extensive range of security solutions into the new NonStop X era. This will ensure a seamless transition for CSP customers as they begin migrating to NonStop X.

Get Ready for GDPR, PSD2: Here's What You Should Know

Imminent new security and data privacy regulations require a rethinking of traditional approaches to enterprise architectures. Here is some insight on GDPR, PSD2.

Rethinking current practices is particularly relevant to administrators and architects of HPE NonStop systems, which enable many of the world’s most critical transactions and therefore process many types of sensitive data covered by regulations. NonStop systems are currently deployed across many industries, ranging from financial services and retail to telecommunications and energy.

Industry-specific regulations vary widely. For instance, the financial sector tends to provide more broadly standardized approaches, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). In other industries, such as telecommunications, the growing body of regulations is more diverse, ranging from International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to country-specific standards.

Read the full story.

 There is quite a large disconnect in the way security breaches are evolving versus how security solutions and resources are keeping up to address them, much like the book from John Gray covering relationships and the different motivations, of men and women. Unlike the book though, we’re not trying to come to a happy medium – we’re trying to keep the war like Mars at bay. As a security strategist, I’m constantly evaluating what is possible to help identify gaps and opportunities. The one thing I have learned over the course of my career is:

The only thing constant in cyber security is that attackers’ methods will continue to evolve.  They get smarter, more resourceful and are impressively ever patient.

The HPE Integrity NonStop server is not only a foundation of the HPE Server business, it is also central to countless mission-critical environments globally.  For the longest time, security of these powerful systems and the “Mission Critical” applications they run remained mostly static and under the radar while high profile attacks on other platforms have taken the spotlight.  That hasn’t lessened the risk and exposure of the NonStop server.  It’s actually created a gap. With globalization and introduction of new technologies for the NonStop server, this security gap will only increase if not addressed.

Interestingly enough, the NonStop server isn’t the only mission critical enterprise solution in this situation. There are some colorful parallels that can be drawn between applications running on the NonStop server and those running in SAP environments. Both are in highly mission-critical environments and vital to the revenue generation of an organization, and they frequently run payments applications like ACI’s BASE24 and other homegrown applications. This creates some interesting security challenges. In a recent The Connection Magazine Article, Jason Kazarian, Senior Architect at HPE described legacy systems as “complex information systems initially developed well in the past that remain critical to the business in spite of being more difficult or expensive to maintain than modern systems”. His article went on to point out the security challenges of legacy applications.  In summary some of these types of applications can tend to be unsupported, security patches aren’t readily available and if they are, they aren’t applied in a timely fashion because of fear of disruption, and they don’t have a lot of the security features modern applications would have. This makes detecting and addressing security risk and anomalies a greater challenge than it already is.

MIND THE GAP

How can this problem be addressed? Protect what you can.  As a first step, be it system, application or data – push the risk down the stack to an area that is more controllable by typical security. For example, tokenizing data used by a legacy application will send an attacker to go search for that data through another method, preferably one better suited for detection.

Have a risk based, layered approach.  This will swing the odds in your favor. OK, maybe not completely in your favor, but this approach will provide you with the arsenal you previously did not have:  It will create those choke points, provide the visibility needed and help reduce mean time to detection and response.

With the way threats are evolving, those of us responsible for security need to constantly evaluate and assess our capabilities. Let’s take a dive into each layer to explore the benefits they provide in an overall security strategy.

Register for Upcoming NonStop Events

If you live in the northeast region of the US, make sure you have registered to attend the upcoming events in your area! We have great agendas and networking opportunities lined up for both of these events. Limited space is available, so don't wait to claim your spot! Register today.

Register for Greater NY/NJ Area HPE & Partner NonStop Education Day here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/greater-nynj-area-hpe-partner-nonstop-education-day-2016-tickets-26644612754

Register for NENUG here:

In recent years there has been an emergence of several new technologies to protect sensitive data, including Format Preserving Encryption (FPE) and Secure Stateless Tokenization (SST), such as those provided by HPE Security’s SecureData product. These products provide excellent capabilities to assist HPE NonStop users in protecting data within their application environments. Both HPE FPE and HPE SST provide strong protection against the exposure of sensitive data but they should not be used alone or to replace traditional access controls. Data protection methods such as FPE and SST need to be carefully considered and planned alongside traditional access controls to ensure all application data is comprehensively protected both from authorized and unauthorized exposure. This article will give a high-level overview of how to implement a best-of-breed HPE NonStop security framework; protecting all sensitive application files and tables using comprehensive access controls, and also selectively protecting the highly sensitive and valuable data those files may contain, such as credit card (PAN) data or personally identifiable information (PII).

Mission critical applications such as those typically found on the HPE NonStop Server are composed of programs and files or tables. There are multiple levels of access requirements for both programs and files. For instance, only certain programs running as certain users should be able to access tables containing application data. This simple access control rule can be challenging to implement on the HPE NonStop Server, as standard HPE Nonstop security controls do not include the granularity features necessary to implement the desired security. For example, using the requesting object file as an attribute that can be used to control file access is not an option. Standard HPE Nonstop security can only control file access by the user running the program. In addition to the emergence of data protection technologies like FPE and SST, XYGATE Object Security (XOS), which uses the Safeguard Authorization Security Event Exit Process (SEEP), can be used to achieve the desired access controls for application security. This solution can use the requesting object file, among others, as an attribute when making access decisions, thus introducing more granularity into the access control matrix.  Other partner products, including those from Greenhouse Software, also support the Safeguard Authorization SEEP.

In addition to controlling the access rights of users and programs to application data, it is often also necessary to encrypt or tokenize sensitive data in tables to prevent its exposure to non-authorized parties. This may be due to regulations, such as PCI-DSS, industry/corporate regulations, or just a result of the sensitive nature of the data itself. This can create a complex multi-tiered environment, which no single security product can fully address.

Two data protection methods have recently received a lot of focus in the NonStop space: disk (or volume) level encryption and application level encryption/tokenization. As a side note, file encryption is not considered for the purposes of this article as encrypting entire, live application files is generally either impractical, or involves extensive application redesign.  Disk level encryption, known as VLE on HPE NonStop, is generally transparent to any logged-on users and therefore only protects against the disk drive being taken off-site and accessed.  Due to this constraint, disk level encryption is no longer considered sufficient protection for PAN data, according to the PCI-DSS. Application level encryption also protects against disk drive removal but in addition also protect the data from being accessed by anything other than authorized users or programs.

There are typically two variations of application level encryption:

Integrated application level encryption/tokenization is implemented by modifying the application programs to encrypt/tokenize and decrypt/detokenize sensitive columns. This can be a very expensive proposition depending on how many programs need modifying. It may also require the application programmers to have encryption programming knowledge, for instance how to manage keys. Also, this method typically precludes the ability, if required, for operating system utility programs to be able to see unencrypted data, since those programs cannot be easily modified. Using integrated application level encryption can make it difficult to share encrypted data with off box applications because those off-box applications would also have to be modified in the same way.  HPE offers the HPE SecureData product for customers which want to use the integrated approach – and companies such as XYPRO, comForte and HPE are able to provide consulting services to assist with implementation if that approach is taken.

Transparent application level encryption/tokenization involves attaching a library to each program that needs to access the protected data. The library intercepts all I/O calls, and, based on its configuration, encrypts and decrypts specified fields or columns for specified programs running as specified users. The library can also be attached to operating system utility programs if required, and then those utilities can see unencrypted data. If this library uses underlying encryption technologies that are available on multiple platforms, sharing data with off-box applications is relatively easy. HPE offers two transparent application level encryption/tokenization products; XYGATE Data Protection (XDP) and cF Data Security. Both products provide these features and address these needs, using industry-leading HPE SecureData as the underlying ‘layer’ for encryption and tokenization.

When using transparent application level encryption, granular access controls are also important.  The encrypting of data has to be combined with the ability to configure which processes, running as which users, running which object files, can access the sensitive data in an unencrypted format.  For example, the process running the object file that is used to verify PANs should be granted the authority to see the unencrypted PANs. A process running any other object file should not see unencrypted PANs. An encryption scheme that encrypts and decrypts PAN data for processes running any object file accessing the data provides no better protection than disk level encryption.

Let’s look at some examples of how access control to a tokenization system can be implemented in the XDP encryption library.

The above configuration entry says for any file called CRDTBL on the system, there is a 16 digit PAN starting at position 6 in the record that needs to be encrypted with Format Preserving Encryption. This entry only applies to object files named CRDFPROG run by user APPL.USER. All access is audited and can be captured and/or forwarded to a SIEM using XYGATE Merged Audit.

While the above entry controls how the PAN column is encrypted, and which program can see the unencrypted data, it does not control overall access to the file.  Access should be controlled to the file so that only those programs that need to access the file are able to. This is important because the file may contain other information that needs to be protected, not just the encrypted/tokenized PAN. This could be implemented with an XOS entry like the following:

The above entry says that for the file $*.*.CRDTBL, which is owned by user APP1.USER, the APP1.USER can perform any file system operations on the file when running a $*.*.CRDPROG or $*.*.ALTPROG program. Note that in combination with the XDP entry above, while ALTPROG can access the file, it will only see encrypted PAN data.

Being able to control the security of a file based on the requesting object also helps in the situation where two different applications need to share a file when the applications run as different users. Assume that there is a primary application and a secondary application that both need access to one file owned by the primary application. Typically the security to access the shared file would need to be granted to both applications UserIDs. However, this means that any program running as one of the secondary applications UserIDs would be able to access the data. Having a security scheme that includes the object file as one of the access controls means that the one program in the secondary application that needs to access the primary applications file will be the only program that can access it. Any other program running as the secondary application’s UserID will not be able to access the data.

The above entry says that for the file $DATAA.APP1.TXFR, which is owned by user APP1.USER, the APP1.USER can perform any file system operations on the file when running the $APP1.OBJ.WRTETXFR program, and that the APP2.USER, when running the $APP2.OBJ.PROCTXFR program, can Read or Write the TXFR file.

HPE NonStop servers and most modern computing platforms have always benefited from a layered approach to security – there is no point locking your windows when your front door is wide open. Newer technologies like HPE Format Preserving Encryption and HPE Secure Stateless Tokenization provide another layer in the security administrator’s arsenal and can be very powerful when deployed in conjunction with more traditional security mechanisms. Just make sure to plan out your complete implementation so that all users and applications get just the access they need, and nothing more. As an added benefit, you’ll also address both PCI-DSS Requirement 7 “Restrict access to cardholder data by business need to know” and Requirement 3 “Protect Cardholder Data”.

The Connect NonStop Technical Boot Camp is fast approaching. NuWave's Mandi Nulph takes a look at what happened last year and what we can expect to see this year out in San Jose. 

Read the article on the NonStop Innovations blog.

I had a proud moment the other day. Kind of like when you get to brag about your children (or grandchildren):

I was enjoying a beverage with a group of Mainframe support team members. We had just completed a long day of meetings on HPE NonStop topics.  Only one of the Mainframe team had attended. At some point, the question was asked “What is a NonStop server and why do we have them?” The company has had their servers for decades. Everyone knows about the machines, but like so many other places, no one ever asks. To my utter amazement, the answer straight from the Mainframe guy was: “It is a mainframe system. HPE makes them. They run application x”.

Unprompted, without influence, an old school IBM Mainframe systems person tossed this out.  The look on my face must have been an odd mixture of happiness and confusion as I have NEVER heard anyone who wasn’t raised on NonStop calling my systems a main­ frame. We spent the next few hours educating each other on the benefits (and difficulties) of managing our chosen systems.

What I wish I could reproduce at any gathering of plat­ form advocates, whether it be Windows, Mainframe, Linux or NonStop is that spark of understanding. We all enjoy what we do (at least I hope we do) and there is a certain devotion/dedication  and pride that goes along with  it.  At  the end of this discussion,  we all laughed an really appreciated what the others go through every day.

The next time you run into someone who isn’t as savvy as you are on the subject of our favorite platform, take the time to bring  them up to speed.  While you are at it, try and build a bridge by trying to see why they love what they do as much as you. You never know where  the next convert may be.

Rob Lesan

XYPRO Technology

Originally published in The Connection Magazine

comForte at events near you in 2016

Please contact us if you would like to arrange meetings with our team at any of these events.

XYPRO looks forward

to seeing you throughout 2016

OZTUG Summit 2016August 23, 2016 August 23, 2016 Sydney, Australia

Event Website >

VNUGSeptember 13, 2016 September 14, 2016 Stockholm, Sweden

Event Website >

HPE Protect 2016September 13, 2016 September 16, 2016 Fort Washington, MD, USA

Event Website >

PCI North America 2016September 21, 2016 September 22, 2016 Las, Vegas, NV

Event Website >

Greater New York/New Jersey Area HPE & Partner NonStop Information Day September 21, 2016

Event Website >

ATUG 2016September 29, 2016 September 29, 2016 Atlanta, GA

Event Website >

DUST – October 2016 October 4, 2016 October 4, 2016

Event Website >

MATUG 2016 October 18, 2016

Event Website >

PCI Europe 2016October 19, 2016 October 20, 2016 Edinburgh, Scotland

Event Website >

CTUG 2016October 19, 2016 June 20, 2016 Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

Event Website >

NENUG 2016 October 20, 2016

Event Website >

NonStop Technical Boot Camp – 2016 November 13, 2016 November 16, 2016 San Jose, CA, USA

Event Website >

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8546566

 Kind Regards

 Tony Craig

Managing Director

TCM House, Saltire Centre, Pentland Park, Glenrothes, Fife, KY6 2AG

Musings on NonStop!

August, ‘16

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

Even though there have been days spent out of the office there was still time enough to continue writing blog posts and commentaries. While it is summer here in North America and, even though working Americans are reluctant to take vacations, Margo and I did take a bizcation. Think of staycation, but with time away from home although for me, the biz definitely dominated the ‘cation. It was a time though when we parked the RV and trailer at different places on the Atlantic coast including both North and South Carolina.

We had first visited this part of America late last year following MATUG. This event was held late in the week at HPE’s offices on EDS Drive, a short distance away from Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport. It was on the advice of some of the participants that we might want to think about heading to the coast as part of our return trip to Boulder and we are now glad for that advice as it’s complete change from everything we know and love about Colorado – not a hill or tree in sight. Just sandy beaches, stretching as far as one can see! Not real beaches by Australian standards, mind you, where the sand is golden and clean, but sandy all the same.  

For the NonStop community everything we know and love is changing too. No easy way to get past this but the new NonStop running on x86 based NonStop hardware has quickly morphed into vNonStop on x86 Commercial, Off-The-Shelf hardware (COTS) and in all likelihood, is headed not just to private clouds but in time (and with the expected availability of RDMA over Commercial Ethernet - RoCE), public clouds as well. Quite an change in expectations – and yet it’s still NonStop and it’s still fault tolerant.

Depending on your appetite for risk, as we have heard a lot about of late, you can run vNonStop pretty much configured any way you like and on the hardware you prefer. Enter (very soon) a new breed of services vendors who can configure, validate and then order just the vNonStop software stack for pretty much any way you want to run NonStop. Looking good …and yes, consider the emergence of such a breed of service vendors as becoming very strong and influential stakeholders within the NonStop community.      

Much of this has been captured in my most recent commentaries and posts published in July and what follows are links to the coverage I provided on NonStop across all the media channels I support.

Real Time View:
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2016/07/misconceptions-all-computers-will-never.html
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2016/07/yes-once-again-i-ask-are-our-wishes.html
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2016/07/i-am-in-your-mirrors-and-am-about-to.html

ATMmarketplace:
http://www.atmmarketplace.com/blogs/life-without-limits-say-it-isnt-so/

Banking Technology:
http://www.bankingtech.com/519022/all-that-glitters-isnt-just-our-clothes/

LinkedIn blog / Pulse:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/waves-change-new-thoughts-re-nonstop-richard-buckle?trk=mp-author-card
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-do-you-want-run-your-payments-solution-hpe-nonstop-richard-buckle?trk=mp-author-card

LinkedIn Groups / TCM Solutions:
Managed service providers – so what’s this all about, then:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8546566/8546566-6156418734014676993

Striim:
This month featured a two-part blog post looking at the impact from some of the changes we saw taking place within HPE:
http://www.striim.com/blog/2016/07/surprises-aplenty-as-hpe-refines-its-focus/
http://www.striim.com/blog/2016/07/changes-at-hpe-foster-nonstop-partners/

IR
http://www.ir.com/blog-pay/the-future-of-servers-keeps-changing-but-prognosis-lets-nonstop-users-see-more-clearly
http://www.ir.com/blog-pay/there-s-still-the-need-for-skilled-personnel-prognosis-augments-nonstop-operations

Tandemworld (Musings on NonStop):
Where you will find a collection of posts and articles in support of IR, DataExpress, TCM Solutions as well as my monthly Musings on NonStop:

http://www.tandemworld.net/newsletter_jul16.html

Buckle-Up-Travel:
http://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/2016/07/some-like-it-hot-way-way-too-hot.html

All of this has been posted to the LinkedIn blog, Pulse and if you have missed this update as well as previous months, you can always find them referenced on the LinkedIn group, Real Time View The big news next month? With the post of August 20, 2016 I will kick-off my tenth year of blogging!

Richard Buckle
Cofounder and CEO

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