Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2013

With new CAIL Suite Release 11 you have more options to improve information services –

D. Upgrade to an " Enterprise Client Solution " for additional benefits with NonStop

.... with examples of NonStop supporting a Corporate Standardization strategy at - www.cail.com/nssc

To summarize, CAIL enables organizations to realize more value from the investment in current systems as follows –

Enhance connectivity, security and modernize NonStop systems - bundled solution with extensive interfacing, embedding, encryption, Host access, etc. capabilities

- a single icon on the screen to access, secure and modernize systems with information from all platforms (ie: NonStop, UNIX/Linux, IBM, etc.)

- have NonStop included in the Corporate Standard for Host Access and better positioned to contribute to business success going forward

For details of new CAIL Suite Rel 11 capabilities, please see www.cail.com/CSR11

For those on the CAIL Customer Support Program, the new software is being sent to you.

If you are not on support but are interested in evolving information services, please contact CAIL to discuss upgrading to Release 11.

In closing, if there are any questions or comments about CAIL R11 or your options to move systems forward, please let us know.

Third Data Corporation provides numerous products which can reside on HP Nonstop and other HP and Non-HP hardware platforms. In addition we provide custom high performance software design and development for our clients.

FastBuild Switch – When building a switch be it ATM-POS, Wire Transfer, EFT, Medical, or any other type of data that needs to get from one place to another, you are usually faced with three choices. Take an existing package and modify your system to match it. Get the vendor to “enhance” their system to meet your needs. Write a new system from scratch. The FastBuild Switch integrates with your existing system, or if you are building from scratch gives you a great start. The switch is also built around the latest HP technology to maximize performance. It integrates several of our other products to maximize cost savings and security in a fault tolerant manner. In a cross platform environment it also runs on other non-Guardian HP supplied platforms.

SecureStore – If you are security conscience trying to become compliant (PCI, HIPAA, etc) then you know that you can not leave sensitive data readily viewable. SecureStore does three things for you. The data is encrypted so that you can become compliant. The data is compressed so that your hardware costs are reduced. As part of disaster recovery your data is sent to multiple locations so it will be available when you need it. As a bonus for those having trouble with Guardian 4K limits there is no record size. It supports Big Data with up to 18 Exabytes. It can also integrate with SQL systems (SQL MX/MP, Oracle, Postgres etc).

NxLib – NxLib provides a platform and utility libraries for developing a high performance multi-threaded applications on NonStop Guardian. The platform provides threading, queuing and network capabilities. This enables development of an application written single threaded style to perform as multi-threaded. Extensible command processing and help are supported. Development time can be cut to a fraction of the time it would normally take. This results in fast application development with consistent look and feel across multiple projects.

NxWeb – A high performance web server which provides support for NxLib applications. It also can be used without NxLib. It provides for secure connections, virtual domains, full http support and interfaces to pathway and IPC communications.

NxFile+ – NxFile+ provides compression and encryption to Enscribe structured files. The files are configured through a GUI interface and the results are provided seamlessly to your applications, typically without any code changes. In addition this provides for dynamic key changes on the fly so data stored at-rest may have its encryption keys changed as required. Because the records can be compressed prior to encryption, it’s also possible to have records which significantly exceed the 4k record size limitations.

NxSSL – NxSSL is an SSL proxy which may be used to provide SSL encryption and authentication services to TCP/IP connections. It provides full support for certificates and multiple encryption standards. It has been carefully tuned to provide the highest performance available for any NonStop SSL connection.

NxUndelete – Files accidentally deleted can be a real problem. Even when a backup is available, it is frequently a significant effort to retrieve it from a backup tape. NxUndelete implements a recycle bin function on the the HP NonStop system. Files deleted may be easily recovered using its GUI interface.

BrightStrand International provides an array of NonStop Services to its customer base. Its consultants have the skill and experience that make it the premier service deliverer in the NonStop sector. Services are tailored to individual customer needs to reduce costs and risk whilst getting the best from the environment.

BrightStrand delivers a Fully Managed Service to many of its customers. BrightStrand take account of the particular needs of the customer and offer a variety of options. BrightStrand currently supplies managed services; ranging from standby ad hoc onsite cover through to fully managed with secure datacentre hosting, systems management, operations, 24/7 support and remote support.

Each service is tailored to meet customer needs to provide a focused but low cost and flexible solution to meet your changing business requirements.

A Managed Service can include all or some of the following elements, as required by the customer:

BrightStrand Service Managers and consultants are ITIL and PRINCE2 accredited and therefore all have an excellent understanding of service delivery best practices and risk management/avoidance. BrightStrand delivers services where possible using customer processes and procedures ensuring a fully integrated solution to provide better response, improved reporting and faster communication.

For further details call Dave Stewart today on +44 (0)7831 775115 or email him on dstewart@brightstrand.com.

Episode IV – A New Hope
(...for Both Archived Legacy and Real-Time Transactions
and NonStop EMS) by Insider Technologies Limited

A long time ago (well, 2010) at an EBUG far, far away (I guess it depends on where you’re coming from but anyway, Madrid)… Cue anthemic signature music and then, as the strings slowly fade away, pan low and left to a NonStop hand held aloft on the back row of a technical track presentation and an Insider speaker raising his eyebrows to acknowledge… ‘Yes, at the back’… a qualified voice is heard and a question is raised… ‘Can I store and query on 10 to 15 years’ worth of legacy, tape archived BASE24 TLF and PTLF transaction log data?’… the qualified voice continues… ‘I would also like to query on related EMS messages, POS and ATM administration data’…slight pause… ‘Oh yes, and display appropriate standard and custom tokens for EMS alerts, TLF and PTLF transaction data’… and one last volley of questioning tone ‘with consideration towards on-site directives for PCI DSS compliance?’…

The Insider speaker is not fazed by the informed, acronym ridden questions but rather smiles knowing that his subsequent PowerPoint bullet points have all been pre-empted (...phew). The usual adrenaline and nerves subside and the Insider speaker relaxes into a recent case study where all these questions have been answered. For a moment (or three), he adopts the character of Morpheus talking to Neo (in The Matrix training program… good code that) and presents his beautifully animated slides (probably a little over animated to be honest) as if to say ‘Welcome to the World of the Real!’… In ‘Reality’ (ironically), in answer to the delegate’s question, I probably just said… ‘Yes, all of that can be achieved and more, much more with RTLX Reactor’ but as a movie buff, I like to remember my past podium performances with a little more romance and poetry injected. That aside, the science fiction from this point on, now becomes science fact.

Fact: A Microsoft SQL Server database can contain up to 999 partitions (15,000 in MS SQL Server 2012).

Fact: Hard drive sizes these days are measured in terabytes. My desk ruler bears this out on the external hard drive I use to store NonStop IT conference photos.

Fact: 10 – 15 years of transaction data partitioned by month (including header, authorization, tokens, administration, settlement and summary data) equates to 50+ terabytes.

Fact: (I mean factual conclusion)… Storing and accessing this amount of transaction data is very, very doable (with an Insider’s approach of course) with today’s database technology (with room to spare)… read on.

Sometimes modernization can be as much about dove-tailing with and extending a reliable, business critical, legacy application (and trusted platform like HP NonStop) into more widespread technologies (alas, known more intuitively by those pesky (but likeable) graduates). In this context of BASE24 transactions (and other competitor payment engines - LUSIS Tango, S1 Postilion, BASE24, BASE24 eps, FIS / eFUNDS Connex Advantage or IST/Switch, Alaric Authentic, electraSWITCH from ElectraCard Services, Clear2Pay, ISO 8583 card messages) and NonStop EMS message alerts (generated by XPNET nodes, stations lines, links, processes, device handlers, WebSphere MQ, Open System Services (OSS), Pathway and so on), this means taking fully optimised data feeds from the payment application, across TCP/IP (v4 and v6), onto server platforms like Windows running Microsoft SQL Server.

Whilst doing this, making sure to uphold those golden NonStop commandments of check pointing and fail over for restart situations (or glitches in The Matrix… that’s right, I am beginning to believe) and ensuring that transaction and EMS data is appropriately normalized (masked and/or encrypted if required) and stored to enable ultra-rapid query response times.

This following case study highlights how one of Insider’s many clients have successfully enhanced their BASE24 ATM and POS transaction querying capabilities, away from restrictive, legacy green-screens to intuitive, browser based, wizard-driven visuals. This initiative and strategy has alleviated many back office headaches for chasing enquiries by card holders and other bank departments.

Third-party solutions are available for taking transaction data off the NonStop platform (and other systems) for monitoring purposes, escalation, producing real-time charts and management information reports. This case study acts as a ‘real world’ (versus Matrix dream world) summary for what works when taking sensitive payment data sideways and of course, for building your own product check list if currently looking for solutions for extensive payment querying (multiple years), monitoring and problem escalation in real-time.

To read the rest of this article, click here: http://www.insidertech.co.uk/Products/RTLXReactor/EpisodeIVANewHope/tabid/311/Default.aspx

Company Introduction

For information on any of our products, please visit our website at www.insidertech.co.uk where you can also sign-up for our free newsletter or why not follow us at our TWITTER account, http://www.twitter.com/insidertech

Insider Technologies Limited
Spinnaker Court
Chandlers Point
37 Broadway
Salford Quays
Manchester
M50 2YR
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 161 876 6606
Website: www.insidertech.co.uk
Email: support@insidertech.co.uk

All Trademarks acknowledged.

Gravic representatives enjoyed the well-attended HP Discover 2013 conference in Las Vegas. Highlights included keynotes from Meg Whitman, HP President and CEO, and Dave Donatelli, EVP and GM of the HP Enterprise Group, and a cameo appearance from actor Kevin Bacon. Whitman focused on HP as the best technology partner for your business, stating HP’s strengths are your strengths to leverage, with investment areas of focus in cloud, security, big data, and mobility.

To illustrate these points, examples of recent service outage costs were given: the Nasdaq Facebook IPO ($40M); the 36-hour outage at France Telecom (20M Euro); and the Amazon.com public cloud loss in sales ($7M/hour). The need to avoid such costs of service outage and lost data is music to the ears of Gravic, whose products are all about maintaining service availability and data integrity. NonStop systems are highly fault-tolerant, but still represent a single point of failure, so there is a need for multiple geographically-distributed NonStop systems (using online data replication between systems) to enable service continuity. Answering this need is where Shadowbase solutions come in – making your locally fault-tolerant NonStop application solution geographically fault-tolerant with the capability for truly continuous service availability across entire data center or regional outages. For more information on creating truly continuously-available solutions, please read our white paper: Choosing a Business Continuity Solution to Match Your Business Availability Requirements.

Other NonStop sessions supported the “continued investment in NonStop” message, showing new hardware and software product features and plans that extend for several years. Overall, it was a very positive and informative conference and the future of NonStop looks as bright today as it did back in the mid-1970’s when Tandem was founded! If you want to find out more about ensuring the availability of your critical business services, and avoid the costs of outage such as those examples given above, please contact us.

HP really does a good job for the blogging community. They provide a blogging lounge close to the heart of the exhibition hall that they keep well stocked with goodies, sodas and coffee. Recognizing that the majority of bloggers would be best served if HP brought their speakers to them, a series of coffee talk presentations were held whereby a select number of HP executives dropped in to discuss company directions, services offerings, as well as new product initiatives.

This helped us all and I sat in on the coffee talk of Project Moonshot which I found fascinating. This is definitely an example of disruptive innovation with all the hallmarks of being a game changer and no, it has nothing to do with small glasses of Moonshine. Leveraging technology that is blossoming in the world of mobile phones and tablets, the first round of deployment saw take-up of Moonshot by HP itself – serving up static pages for anyone accessing HP.COM.

While at the Conference, I posted regularly to the LinkedIn group, Real Time View, where you will find seven posts, including:

First update about HP Discover
Written prior to our departure to Las Vegas, it sets expectation about what I thought would interest attendees …

Second update about HP Discover
Following the first evening, it covers the informal gathering of NonStop community members and looks at what’s happening with OpenVMS …

Seventh, and final, update - a review...
The wrap-up; “Perhaps more engaging for the NonStop community was the very clear presence of HP’s support for Clouds and Big Data – and with Converged Infrastructure playing an even more prominent a role.”

Should you have time to spare, then yes, browse through these posts as tucked away within each of them are observations and opinions formed in the moment and they will be the subject of further posts in the weeks to come. Talking of posts (to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View) make sure you find the time to check out my final post on HP Discover, At long last, disruptive innovation from HP!

For me it was highly encouraging to see just how much attention HP is paying to the key focus areas unveiled last year – Mobility, Social (and Security), Clouds and Big Data. While I tended to gravitate to Mobility and Clouds, there were others who were very much interested in what HP was doing with Big Data. So much that is needed by Big Data is generated by the transactional systems on NonStop – it is imperative that NonStop is not forgotten when enterprises begin to look at their own Big Data initiatives.

It is the intersection of mission-critical real time transactional data, typically found on NonStop systems, with the volumes of unstructured data produced by email exchanges, social media interactions and text (and even voice) messages where the real value lies – actions can be initiated that will prove valuable to enterprises only as these intersections are occurring. Among the vendors exhibiting this year was WebAction and a quick check of their kiosk revealed many familiar faces from my time with GoldenGate.

What was also encouraging to see was just how many vendor’s CEOs made the trip to Las Vegas. As always, OmniPayments Inc. CEO, Yash Kapadia, was easy to spot and never too far away from his kiosk. I managed to catch up with him briefly towards the end of the show and he was pleased to have made the commitment to participate in HP Discover – business for him in Latin America appears to be doing extremely well.

While they were visible supporting ACI who had a presence this year – the first time I can recall bumping into them for a while – Integrated Research found plenty of time to talk up the finer points of Prognosis 10. Once again, as he had done last year, Mark Brayan had been able to work into his busy schedule a couple of days for HP Discover and it’s always good to hear the latest from Mark. Clearly, the business is doing well and while it’s always hard to pull specifics on wins and market volumes from a public company, it’s safe to say that once again, they are enjoying healthy returns from working with the NonStop community.

Present too were comForte and this year, the comForte team took advantage of the Monday to hold a sales meeting – a mini kick-off type of event – and Peter Shell, Margo Holen and myself spent a couple of hours updating the team on uLinga as well as on the latest offering from Infrasoft, maRunga. comForte, too, had a kiosk and they weren’t hard to miss.

But as much as I gravitated to the announcements surrounding mobility (and Moonshot) and Clouds, when I caught up with Itamar Ankorion, Vice President, Business Development and Corporate Strategy, Attunity, talk quickly returned to Big Data. Today, Attunity enables Big Data solutions having successfully loaded data into Vertica from NonStop SQL as well as loading into Hadoop. Having done this and developed relationships with several key folks within HP, what caught Ankorion’s attention was HP’s announcement of HAVEn.

Perhaps not on every NonStop user’s must-view list, HP’s HAVEn was designed to bring its analytics software and high-performance hardware together on a common platform. Yes, new life for Autonomy in addition to the support of Vertica. According to HP, the HAVEn platform will incorporate technologies from Autonomy, as well as HP ArcSight Logger (which collects machine data for analysis) and HP Business Service Management (which includes operations-analytics tools).

In other words, HAVEn is a potential very serious competitor to the likes of IBM, SAP and even Oracle. “What’s important for the NonStop community to realize,” Ankorion said “was that HAVEn really wanted to get hold of the important transactional data produced by applications running on NonStop. With Attunity Replicate already tested in support of NonStop SQL and Vertica, a very real opportunity now existed for the NonStop to become an integral part of any enterprises move into Big Data and the Business Analytics that goes along with it!”

As always, there was far more going on at HP Discover than anyone could hope to cover. However, with a highly active blogging community supporting HP I am sure it will not be long before nearly everything makes it into print – and for the support HP provides the bloggers, the NonStop community should be especially appreciative.

Until next month – keep checking the social media for more updates to come from me and let me know should there be a topic you are particularly interested in and would like me to cover. And with that, I will wrap up this month’s Musings …

…. And check out the Group on LinkedIn, realtime.ir

ATMmarketplace at
http://www.atmmarketplace.com/blogger.php?id=130763

Live Demo system - see the comForte Hall of Fame Cloud Live Demo running in the Windows Azure public cloud. Go to www.comforte.com/cloud9.

comForte 21 GmbH, a global provider of connectivity, middleware, and security solutions for the HP NonStop platform, and Protegrity USA, Inc., a leading provider of end-to-end data security solutions today announced they are forming a strategic partnership to provide complete encryption and Vaultless Tokenization Solutions to customers who want to achieve end-to-end data security protection across their entire organization. comForte's SecurData is now among the rich set of enterprise platforms supported by Protegrity, some of which include Teradata, Netezza, Greenplum, Big Data and the IBM mainframe.

The Protegrity Data Security Platform complements the existing HP NonStop platform, extends to BASE24 and other platforms in the ecosystem by offering superior protection methods along with the Protegrity Enterprise Security Administrator (ESA). Easy to use and flexible, ESA provides Security Officers central policy and key management, separation of duties, and central reporting and auditing for compliance purposes. Once the data is secured it can flow seamlessly through the entire enterprise, allowing for the analytical insights and reporting needed in today’s complex business world.

A new trial now underway of TANDsoft’s flagship product FileSync is being evaluated by a long-time NonStop customer in its plans to migrate its SQL database from S-series to NonStop Blades. The company needs to continually update its S-series system while the migration is taking place. Once the migration is complete, FileSync will be used to synchronize programs and files between the company’s production and disaster-recovery environments. The company is trialing FileSync because of the product’s robust performance and reputation for ease of use.

A system migration is only one of the many uses for FileSync. TANDsoft customers use FileSync for disaster recovery, upgrades, and backups. One TANDsoft customer counts on FileSync to replicate and synchronize thousands of non-audited Guardian files in a matter of minutes and with reliable accuracy. FileSync automatically monitors, replicates and synchronizes source files, program environments, application environments, configuration files, programs – anything non-database that needs to be kept current across the network. It supports qualified expressions and referential integrity as well as the synchronization of SQL/MX catalogues, schemas, tables, partitions, and indices. In addition, FileSync supports the SQL/MX filter, SQL/MX 3.2.1, and all earlier SQL/MX versions.

FileSync supports a wide variety of file types, including all Enscribe files – audited, non-audited, structured and unstructured; all OSS files; NonStop SQL/MP Catalogs, Tables and Partitions; NonStop SQL/MX Catalogs, Schemas, Tables and Partitions; program source and objects; and configuration and TACL files. FileSync-Audit replicates only Enscribe file modifications, not entire Enscribe files, in order to efficiently synchronize all files across the network.

FileSync replication and synchronization software works closely with all NonStop real-time data replication products to provide a comprehensive solution for maintaining duplicate system and application environments. It is valued by customers of NTI DRNet, Gravic Shadowbase, HP NonStop RDF, Oracle GoldenGate, and Attunity Replicate.

TANDsoft’s “best of breed, best in price” philosophy offers highly competitive value for all TANDsoft solutions. In addition to FileSync, they include the OPTA2000 virtual clock- and time-zone simulator; the OPTA suite of interception and trace utilities (OPTATrace Online Process Tracer and Analyzer, Recycle Bin, EMS Alerts Online Startup and Termination Capture Utility, Low Pin Optimizer); 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, which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques; and our newest solution, E2S-Lite, which permits efficient, low-cost Enscribe modifications without the need to change a program’s source code.

TANDsoft products require no application source-code modifications, are available for all HP NonStop servers, and support major third-party applications. 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 161 members and counting.

New York City’s new 911 computer system crashed four times in its first three days of operation. What happened to redundancy? Was there adequate testing? Where was the fallback plan? The city’s emergency communications system was long overdue for an upgrade; and the US$ 2 billion allocated for the upgrade included a web-based 911 system and a US$ 630 million call center to combine the operations of police, fire and medical dispatchers. The system went live on May 29, 2013, and crashed within a half day. Three more crashes occurred within the next 72 hours. The Availability Digest investigates the outages and the series of steps that the city could have taken to better manage the introduction of its new system.

Superstorm Sandy Survivors – Biztech Magazine contributor Melissa Delaney recently wrote an insightful series of case studies about three companies that managed to survive Superstorm Sandy relatively unscathed due to their multilayered disaster-recovery plans and business-continuity strategies. The Availability Digest highlights key points from Melissa’s excellent article, “How 3 Companies Disaster-Proofed Their IT Ahead of Superstorm Sandy.”

Sophos Security Threat Report 2013 – Every year, the U.K.-based security firm Sophos Ltd. publishes a report that highlights both the past year’s security threats and the threats that appear likely to make news in the coming year. Sophos’ Security Threat Report 2013 includes concerns about such top targets as Facebook and other online social media sites, the Android operating system, cloud services, Java, even Apple’s OS X.

Enterprise Availability Architecture for Business Critical Services – This article by guest author Arvin Levine, PhD, provides an approach to risk-based availability architecture and analysis. Arvin certainly knows NonStop. He was a systems analyst for Tandem Computers and remained with the product for years as it became part of the Compaq family and then later an HP solution.

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 as well as consulting services for achieving high availability.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 547 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

· A grocery chain’s back-end authorizer goes down for a half-hour during peak season. This causes a backup throughout the card processing flow. The chain usually exceeds 100 transactions per second during heavy times, and much more than that during the holidays. That means that there is easily $5K to $10K or more going through the system each second! After they recover from the outage, including recovering all of the audit trails and manual records, they still estimate that they lost $7K per minute in real dollars.

· A retailer has a new relationship with a gift card processor. During the run-up to the holidays, they sell lots of gift cards and the link to the gift card processor performs just fine. And then, the day after Christmas, everyone shows up and tries to redeem their cards. The link and the system are overwhelmed, the customers and store staff are upset, sales are lost, and customer loyalty takes a big hit.

· A regional chain of gas stations knows that outages are expensive. They have a class of “customers” who always try a bad card first. If the network is in stand-in mode for whatever reason, and the card is improperly authorized, these “customers” call all their friends to come get free gas.

· Every year the trade press has horror stories about internet retailers who are slow, or broken, or offline sometime during the heaviest period of the year. It’s not unusual for major retailers to do the majority of their business during the two months prior to the holidays, with a huge amount in the last two weeks. If you’re a $100 million business, you can easily do $10MM on the heaviest day. Go down, and the CIO and EVP will be looking for new jobs.

DRNet for free?

Formal Capacity Management

DRNet for free?

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 547 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

Formal Capacity Management

Meet us at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp in San Jose in November!