Tandemworld eNewsletter for February 2013

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Tandemworld Newsletter for February 2013

For further details of WebSphere MQ Series Training and Consultancy please contact Dave Stewart today on +44 (0)7831 775115 or email him on dstewart@brightstrand.com.

Are you considering Nonstop OSS? Are you concerned about the security issues?

The number of applications - for example payment systems-  that are exploiting Nonstop OSS is growing as more enterprises learn of the benefits of this environment.

Securing the Nonstop OSS environment poses a significant challenge for administrators above and beyond the requirements of Guardian and Safeguard.

While there is much that is common between the OSS and Guardian "personalities", there is much that is different. The Unix-like flexibility of OSS gives rise to new opportunities for weak defaults, mis-configuration, hidden and forgotten settings and consequent vulnerabilities.

CSP's suite of security tools for Nonstop OSS is unrivalled, and meets the challenge with solutions for:

OSS Security Policy - stop managing OSS file permissions one-at-a-time from the command line! Protect-UX is the ONLY solution for OSS that gives you policy management, automated implementation and validation of file permissions.

OSS Auditing -  audit reports of all OSS file access events.

OSS Session auditing - complete audit of all OSS sessions.

OSS File Integrity monitoring - set baselines  and monitor for any change to OSS file sets or files, including security attributes.

OSS Alerting and real time intrusion detection - get real time alerts of unauthorized access attempts to OSS objects and more.

Nonstop (OSS) User management  - manage your Nonstop OSS user accounts  from any LDAP compliant user management suite (e.g. Tivoli.).

·        Avoid the problem: They set a goal of having enough capacity, but are always surprised when it runs out, and don’t have a plan when it happens.

·        Bounce the application: when things get bad, bounce the app.  If that isn’t sufficient, bounce the box.  Very painful.

·        Protect online, defer batch: When things slow down, defer certain classes of transactions.

·        Muddle through: No clear strategy, with manual and ad-hoc techniques to try and fix things. 

·        Competent and paranoid: The ideal, but rare, shop.  This shop designs for reasonable and unreasonable workload.  They constantly track usage and demand, and have defined plans in place for the possible unusual incident.  They know their maximum throughput, and frequently test and refine their data and plans.

This month I was contacted by industry analysts working on behalf of an investment company. Their focus was on NonStop, on solutions available for NonStop with a couple of questions directed at finding out more about the potential for further NonStop success. While the specifics of the questions and the answers I provided remain confidential, what was interesting to me was that they found out about me simply by Googling HP NonStop.

Today we know all too well how well connected everyone has become and how few keystrokes it takes to find out pretty much everything about everyone, and when it comes to technologies and solutions, the information on hand is prolific for even the most obscure products. Whether it is politicians checking out their ratings, sports-stars looking for everything being said about them or just a group of investors looking for background material on a company, it’s all at our fingertips.

For the past couple of weeks, Margo and I have been actively promoting the product from a company we just happen to like. Our good friend whom we met in Simi Valley while enjoying coffee at the Starbucks in Woodland Ranch, Kevin McGushion, came up with the idea that there was a product opportunity that could change the way we view accessing the internet. A way, if you like, to reverse the manner in which we interact with popular sites. Once we have selected sites we like, and chose a part of the site we want to see, then a behind-the-scenes server will maintain a current view of all selected sites (with nothing older than 60 seconds) and that refreshed content of the selected parts of the sites is then pushed as a single page to our device – be it our desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

For an explanation and demo, just go to YouTube and enter HD Introduction to InkaBinka and watch. And if you are interested in hearing Kevin give an update to a FOX news interviewer, just enter Kevin on Neil Cavuto. I have written two posts to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, about Kevin – one just this past month Ideas! Innovations! Will we keep on inventing? while the other, all the way back in June 2010 What’s in your garage?

Whether or not InkaBinka.net is of interest, the important (and newsworthy) item here is that the evolution of the Internet continues and the manner in which we each can track-down information is becoming a greater part of our daily lives than many of us had ever anticipated. And of course, with all this reliance on the Internet comes even more transactions that in turn provide even more data about how we live our lives. It’s a relatively easy task to find out just how involved I have become with NonStop and just how widely read my posts have become.

Clouds! Big Data! Only a few years ago not many of us had any inkling that these technologies would become as influential as they have become, or that they would prove to be powerful catalysts for change to the point where many CIOs believe that they see the possibility of a vastly different model for future enterprise IT deployments. InkaBinka.net already is heading to the Clouds – from public to private – and yes, if Margo has any opportunity at all to influence InkaBinka, in time there may even be NonStop systems involved. Just keep reading her posts to Real Time View.

On March 7 I will be participating in an Attunity sponsored webinar on Big Data. The webinar will feature much of what I included in a recent opinion paper I wrote in support of Attunity Replicate and as the time for the webinar firms up, I will promote it to give everyone an opportunity to register. The feature of this latest opinion paper, as I continue to look at Big Data, is the impact of the information generated as everyone turns to mobile smartphones and tablets to access applications. Such an explosive growth as has occurred over the past couple of years is generating greater transaction traffic than anyone had expected and yet, we really want to know what it is everyone is doing.

If you would like to read this opinion paper, follow this link to download it:
http://learn.attunity.com/hp-nonstop-transactional-data-critical-for-meaningful-big-data

MATUG provides members with the opportunity to participate in quality informational sessions and networking. Please contact Susan Loeliger (Chapter Secretary) at sbproductmanagement@gravic.com to request a speaking slot and/or discuss sponsorship opportunities.

(All vendor/consultant speakers will be asked to support the chapter with either a drawing prize or a sponsorship.) More information will be forthcoming on the MATUG Connect Chapter web page.

If you would like to schedule a specific time to meet with Ernie at the summit, e-mail info@nuwave-tech.com.

NonStop users have been taking advantage of the capabilities that XOS provides in Guardian for many years.  In general XOS, through its advanced wildcarding and regular expression support, allows for a hugely increased amount of granularity and flexibility, when compared with standard Safeguard ACLs.  One XOS user (a leading credit card company) was able to reduce their list of Safeguard ACLs from over one million to approximately 300 with XOS, based on this additional flexibility.  Yes, one million to three hundred...Read the full article at http://blog.xypro.com/

comForte 21 GmbH, a global provider of connectivity, middleware, and security solutions for the HP NonStop platform, has joined the Accredited Standards Committee X9 (ASC X9) at the beginning of 2013. comForte 21 is a member of the X9F Data & Information Security sub-committee which deals with standardization to reduce financial data security risk and vulnerability. Click here to read the full press release

NEW: HP NonStop [Tandem] Security Group on LinkedIn - join the discussion.

Come and join us at these events in 2013

SUNTUG, Tampa, Florida, USA, Mar 8-9, 2013

BITUG Little SIG, London, UK, May 8, 2013

HP Discover, Las Vegas, USA, June 10-12, 2013

PCI US Community Meeting, Las Vegas, USA, Sept 24-26, 2013

PCI EU Community Meeting, Nice, France, Oct 29-31, 2013

CONNECT Advanced Technical Boot Camp 2013, San Jose, USA, Nov 3-5, 2013

PCI AP Community Meeting, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Fall 2013

Stay connected and follow the discussion: 

comForteLounge BlogSpot

comForteLounge LinkedIn Group

comForteLounge Twitter

comForte on YouTube

As a visionary leader in strong authentication, NetAuthority turns the device itself into the key or token for authentication.  This device-centric solution, unlike other forms of authentication, links the user to the identified device, providing multi-factor authentication that is massively scalable, easy to integrate with existing systems, and that is invisible to the user.

You can learn more about this solution to achieve trusted internet connected devices and transactions by watching this new on-demand video webcast:  Achieving Irrefutable User and Transaction Authentication.

For more information, please contact your XYPRO sales representative or email us at info@xypro.com

               Third Data Corporation provides numerous products which can reside on HP Nonstop and other HP hardware platforms.

Contact the specialists in HP NonStop at info@xypro.com

More Never Agains VIII – Periodically throughout the year, the Availability Digest summarizes major outages caused by such occurrences as user errors, software bugs, natural disasters, and hardware failures. For the first time, however, a predominant cause of major outages has been cyber attacks.  More Never Agains VIII takes a stroll back through recent challenges faced by major U.S. banks, the New York Times, Netflix, Amazon Web Services, United Airlines, Microsoft, GitHub, the U.S. state of South Carolina, and others.

TANDsoft’s OPTA-Trace Stack Monitor Avoids Stack Overflow

 

OPTA-Trace is a popular TANDsoft product that provides real-time tracing and debugging for all HP NonStop applications. New this year to OPTA-Trace is an early warning feature that alerts developers to the impending threat of a stack overflow.

OPTA-Trace Stack Monitor analyzes an application’s stack usage for memory shortages in the call stack. It is used primarily in development and testing environments. Programmers can manually establish and test stack levels to identify optimal limits for preventing stack overflow once an application is placed into production. Stack Monitor also aids in spotting potential stack-overflow culprits.

Stack Monitor provides developers with a clear snapshot of all their programs on one screen. They can look at trace files globally (show me all files with only 500 bytes remaining), or they can look at one file at a time. Long before its stack limit is approached, an application’s memory issues can be evaluated and modified; and an updated version can be installed.

Here’s an example: A program running in a J06.14 operating system is perilously close to its stack limit, or red zone; but no one knows it because the program still functions. The company then upgrades to a J06.15 operating system, and the migrated program suddenly abends in the upgraded operating system. OPTA-Trace Stack Monitor can prevent this from happening by allowing developers to a) recognize how close to the stack limit the program is operating in the J06.14 and b) to modify stack memory usage for the program in the J06.15.

OPTA-Trace does not fix stack overflow. Instead, it helps developers monitor all program stack limits. The result? Programs don’t abend, unscheduled downtime is avoided, and users aren’t inconvenienced. Without OPTA-Trace Stack Monitor, customers remain blind to which of their programs are about to experience the nasty outcome of a stack limit that has been exceeded.

TANDsoft’s “best of breed, best in price” philosophy offers highly competitive value for all TANDsoft solutions. In addition to OPTA-Trace, they include the OPTA2000 virtual clock- and time-zone simulator; Command Stream Replicator, which automatically replicates DDL structure and other environment changes to target systems – changes and settings that normally are not replicated because they sit outside the TMF Audit Trail; FileSync for automatic file synchronization and replication; and the Enscribe-2-SQL and TMF-Audit Toolkits, which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques.

TANDsoft products require no application source-code modifications and are available for all HP NonStop servers. Free trials are available. For information about TANDsoft solutions, contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Our Enscribe to SQL Migration Forum on LinkedIn is at 156 members and counting.

TANDsoft will be represented at the SunTUG/Connect Florida Sunshine Summit on March 8th. Check out www.tandsoft.com for “Virtualize and Synchronize Your NonStop Systems with OPTA2000 and FileSync,” TANDsoft’s partner presentation at N2TUG’s recent meeting.

 

XYPRO Webinars on Demand

From compliance to database management to the latest HP NonStop topics, our Webinars offer timely information and insight into the issues that matter most to you.

Click on any of the links below to access our Webinars (https://www.xypro.com/xypro/webinars)

Find out more about us at www.tandemworld.net

www.tandemworld.net

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

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