Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2014

There’s no question about it; NonStop is on the move. After so many years of simply watching Tandem, then Compaq and finally, HP, do just enough to retain the biggest users of NonStop systems, the work done of late represents a huge step up in both visibility of NonStop and HPE’s commitment to it. You really don’t spend a quarter of a billion dollars and evidently, a lot more, on a product that is hanging on precariously to its position in the product portfolio. Not for the fainthearted are sums this big, and reading the announcements that have followed it’s clear HPE has high hopes for the future of NonStop.

If you think you have read this message from me before, let me tell you the events of just the past couple of weeks have added to the storyline. In prepping for a webinar sponsored by IR as part of their Payments: House of Cards series, the move by NonStop into software, independent of infrastructure, has accelerated. If you missed my presentation, NonStop X – The New Goal, then click on the hyperlink or cut and paste this link to replay the presentation in its entirety:

It was at the 2013 NonStop Technical Boot Camp where Randy Meyer made public the work being done to port NonStop to the Intel x86 architecture. At the time, I took it squarely on the chin as I had scoffed at such a possibility earlier in the year – at the request of HPE, as at that time there was still a healthy backorder of NonStop I systems to fulfil. Seems some of my earlier blog postings had hit a little too close to home, but rolling out the new NonStop X family of systems is exactly what HPE did. In the short video played to the audience that featured Meg Whitman, CEO of HPE, “Our NonStop customers truly make it matter!”

If you missed reading about this, check out the post of November 2013, to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View: The real deal - NonStop supports x86! And no, I haven’t quite looked at a bottle of Cognac the same way ever since. The point though is that this was just the beginning of the journey as not one but two members of the NonStop X family of systems became available and if you had an interest in a single core, dual core, even four and perhaps six cores, HPE had a NonStop X model to meet your needs.

By the time the 2014 NonStop Technical Boot Camp was held we already knew what the story line would be – the unveiling of the NonStop X NS7 X1. What we may not have fully appreciated was that NonStop development was hard at work bringing forward the release date of the entry-level system, the NonStop X NS3 X1. Just like that, what had been expected to take many more quarters was about to be delivered ahead of schedule! Our hats should be raised for the many hours of effort by NonStop product management and development that went into making this all happen.

There was little time to lift off the gas, however. With the early 2015 GTUG event, HPE quietly informed us of Project Yuma and of the plans to use the new InfiniBand interconnect fabric to hook up NonStop X to other platforms and allow data to flow between these platforms and Nonstop systems at blistering speeds. What a coup – with HPE telling us all of their vision of the need to move into an idea economy. “Every company,” Whitman told audiences wherever she went, “is having to take their legacy IT systems and transform themselves so that IT can be a competitive advantage.”

Fair enough. We get it. Wire up NonStop and connect it to server farms, whether configured in support of clouds or not, and you can begin supporting the vision of an idea economy. Cool. But wait, there’s a whole lot more coming down the pipe – think Converged Infrastructure on steroids. Of course, by the time 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp came around, attendees got to hear it from Martin Fink, EVP and HPE CTO himself. “Now the question is ‘do we need a new strategy?’” Fink asked the NonStop community. “I don’t think we do. I think we need to take our software strategy to the mainstream. The mainstream software world today tends to revolve around 4 things: Linux, Virtualization Open Source and Cloud.”

It was a heady stuff, certainly, and if you have a long history with NonStop then perhaps you are a little uneasy at this stage. Infrastructure as code? A single API by which we can quickly compose, decompose and then re-compose disaggregated pools of compute, storage and a fast flexible fabric? HPE Synergy? Even ContainerOS? All capable of accommodating NonStop at some future point as NonStop development is working on the goal of making NonStop free of all infrastructure – real, or otherwise. And then we heard Fink admit that “In the labs, they have NonStop running in a VM on Linux. It’s not ready to be a product, but it’s a proof point that we can get there.”

Amazing! In the labs NonStop running in a VM on Linux! All of which is by way of transition to the big news of this past month – it’s not really in the labs anymore but being demonstrated in public. As first reported in a discussion Can you Visualize NonStop in a Virtual World? in the LinkedIn group, Real Time View, Check out the “Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain; will be interesting.” And why? Well, under the heading of "Transfer to a hybrid infrastructure” HPE adds the following. "Visit this demo to learn about the future of highly available and massively scalable infrastructure for your core network. This is a live demonstration featuring a potential HPE virtual NonStop environment with x86 COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) hardware. Touch and see virtual network core functions of HPE I-HSS and INS." And what’s the value for the NonStop community?

“Regarding the value proposition, virtual NonStop would enable customers to fully utilize their IaaS, run NonStop VMs and Linux VMs in the same physical server, connected via YUMA (RDMA over RoCE / RDMA over Converged Ethernet).” Said the NonStop development director most closely involved with the project. “I see mention of just firing up another NonStop VM if a physical server fails, rapidly bringing the virtual CPU back up. Also think about the possibility of doing hot patches / SPRs by firing up a second virtual NonStop system on the new SPRs running active/active, then downing the ‘old’ virtual NonStop system.”

Yes, NonStop is on the move. As Fink continues to talk about the mainstreaming of NonStop no one in the NonStop community should take this lightly – HPE is making huge investments in NonStop and again, why? Well problems with scale, fault tolerance, quality and even database are best addressed with NonStop. There is nothing new about this, naturally, as far as the NonStop community is concerned. However, what is new is the attention NonStop is getting from HPE executives wherever they present and with prominence comes acceptance. And this is big news for all involved; NonStop is certainly on the move!

Richard Buckle
Founder and CEO

DataExpress

Can NonStop teach the rest of IT about best practices? Should NonStop systems managers be involved with more than just the oversight of NonStop systems under their care? When the boundary lines between systems are becoming blurred and where a single business solution may span multiple systems, should the NonStop team make their presence felt more strongly?

It is easy for many within the NonStop community to look back at the good old times when they were extremely proud of their systems – capturing much of the front-end business of mainframes as they took on more and more responsibility for running what was once called the online systems. Fault tolerance actually meant something to these businesses and the value proposition of running 24 X 7 was a distinct competitive advantage.

Travelers returning from Japan would recount how ATMs across the country would be unavailable for extended periods on select days of the week, to the point where Japanese society simply accepted that it was de rigor for computers not to be operational at some point. At least one of our contractors recalls such experiences first hand. However, today, it seems some of the value proposition we attribute to fault tolerance has taken a back seat and yet, isn’t it time when we should be shining a brighter spotlight on NonStop?

HPE continues to place emphasis on the transformation to a hybrid infrastructure. This is executive talk for how best to accommodate the legacy, or traditional, or contemporary data center that exists with the introduction of cloud computing. No senior business executive is prepared to simply throw out what’s already in place just for the sake of it and budgets simply don’t accommodate dismantling working systems on a whim. HPE is absolutely correct in its assessment that there is a need for coexistence between what is in place with new technologies, and in order to make such a mix of systems perform seamlessly a common infrastructure, whether it’s external storage, a standardized middleware option or even a single pane of glass for operators, needs to be deployed.

At DataExpress we see great advantage in leveraging the emergence of hybrid infrastructure for the benefit of our customers as well as ourselves. Having now completed the testing of DataExpress NonStop (DXNS) on NonStop X systems in cooperation with HPE NonStop and the Advanced Technical Center (ATC), we are beginning to map out our plans to bring to NonStop our DataExpress Open Platform (DXOP) product.

According to the HPE NonStop product roadmaps, 2016 is going to be the year for Java 8.0 becoming a viable option on NonStop and this represents a significant milestone for DataExpress. Not without teething problems at some level, and understandably so, as each implementation of a major Java release comes with a certain level of risk for any member of the NonStop vendor community – but the upside is that greater number of Java applications can be supported. And DXOP is one such candidate.

In combination with NonStop X and the significant uptick in performance that comes with its support of the Intel x86 architecture, few members of the NonStop community still harbor any doubts about either the performance of Java on NonStop or about functionality. We all well remember one high profile NonStop user having said recently how on NonStop, “Java rocks!” But it’s not just the availability of Java on NonStop per se, but rather, the completion of the NonStop journey to becoming truly a part of mainstream computing.

Ultimately, many will have forgotten that there was a time when business asked its IT organization whether an application could run on NonStop? Had there been a successful port? How expensive would it be to bring it over to NonStop? Today, with Java 8.0 on NonStop there really isn’t any barrier to bringing every application to NonStop, something that has become even easier when you consider the work HPE NonStop is doing with their Yuma project to ensure a better mix and match of functionality across system boundaries!

Would you like the application on Linux and the database on NonStop? Would you like the transaction executing on NonStop and updating a database on Windows? Very soon, or so it would seem, we will see further boundaries crumble as we run NonStop as easily on a virtual machine as we do on a real machine. IT will have forgotten all about past issues of compatibility and transparency the more HPE mainstreams NonStop.

In time NonStop will occupy a critical space amongst commercial, off-the-shelf, servers, COTS, as they are called, it is an acronym creeping into more of HPE’s presentations including those where “NonStop as Software” participates. If you missed it, take a look at the material being used to promote the first ever demonstrations given of NonStop running in a virtual environment at the Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, only a few weeks ago: http://h71056.www7.hp.com/mwc/global/showcase

For the session HPE labelled, "Transfer to a hybrid infrastructure” attendees were advised of a “demo to learn about the future of highly available and massively scalable infrastructure for your core network. This is a live demonstration featuring a potential HPE virtual NonStop environment with x86 COTS hardware.” Like many within the NonStop community we had heard from Martin Fink, EVP & HPE CTO, at last year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp that there had been a success in running NonStop in this fashion within the labs. Transitioning to where live demos could be performed is an altogether different story.

In presentations we have been giving for a number of months now, what this all means is that, as we contemplate our own journey for DXOP to where it will likely become the single code base we run on all open platforms, including NonStop, our focus turns to providing more functionality. We will begin shining the spotlight more brightly on DXOP. Fault tolerance is important and as a community we should be placing more emphasis on NonStop as the preeminent fault tolerant server. As IT professionals we should also be more proactive in our exchanges with our IT peers – and yes, as systems managers, we should be far more expressive in all our communications with management.

NonStop systems may not be for everyone and NonStop systems may not always be the right system for all applications. However when it comes to transaction processing and the need to provide information in customer facing situations, NonStop should be a first consideration - at DataExpress we constantly remind our customers of the value it provides. Shouldn’t everyone in the NonStop community be doing the same? And yes, NonStop can teach much of the rest of IT about best practices, but watch for more about that in a future article!

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

The OmniPayments 50%-Less Guarantee: How Do We Do That?

How does OmniPayments sell its popular NonStop-based financial transaction switch at a price that guarantees you 50% off your current transaction costs? Easy. It’s all in our pricing model.

Unlike other switch providers, who base your costs on transaction volume, OmniPayments sells you a one-time, perpetual software license. That is what makes the “50%-Less” difference. No volume fees. No transaction fees. No surprises. No penalties for company growth. All of our prices are presented to you up front. It’s just that simple.

In addition, our software leasing option allows you to acquire standalone OmniPayments with a minimal upfront investment.

Included within the OmniPayments License Fee are post-installation support services. The OmniPayments Service Level Agreement is very strong and is one of the reasons why financial institutions select us as their choice for a financial transaction switch.

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, meeting deadlines, and enhancing OmniPayments to address a customer’s specific requirements.

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. OmniCloudX is continuously available with automatic failover to other NonStop X systems. Like the OmniPayments standalone transaction switch, OmniCloudX provides complete security functions and is PCI-DSS compliant.

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).

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.

Visit the OmniPayments exhibit at GTUG on 18-20 April in Berlin, Germany. Along with our exhibit at BITUG’s BIG SIG in London on 12 May, OmniPayments CEO Yash Kapadia will present The OmniPayments Preauthorization Engine – Our Customers Call it the Fraud Blocker! Yash also will speak at N2TUG on 5 May in Plano, Texas (USA).

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.

To learn more about how HPE SecureData with XYGATE Data Protection™ (XDP) can help you address your security and compliance needs, read or download the latest datasheet from HPE on Data Protection for HPE NonStop.

Payment (high-value) versus security (low-value) tokens, and how both types of tokenization can be part of an ideal payment security solution.
Mobile payments and electronic commerce (e-commerce) are booming globally. Businesses continue to roll out innovative omnichannel capabilities, which allow consumers to shop, purchase, and ship merchandise from practically anywhere to basically everywhere. Indeed, eMarketer estimated worldwide e-commerce would reach $1.6 trillion in 2015, up 25% from 2014.

The growth has continued despite headlines revealing businesses’ ongoing struggles to protect payment data. In 2015, for instance, the U.S.-based Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reported there were 781 total reported breaches, the second highest annual number on record since 2005 (when ITRC began tracking data). The 781 breaches exposed over 169 million records, which included 800,000 credit/debit card numbers.

Security concerns persist throughout the payment ecosystem, but solutions are emerging to address the threats and vulnerabilities that put primary account numbers (PANs) and other sensitive payment data at risk.

Gravic recently published a new case study, Bank Chooses HPE Shadowbase Solutions for BASE24™ Business Continuity. A regional bank serving a major resort island took an aged BASE24 system and upgraded both the hardware platform and BASE24 software with no outages except for a brief disconnect/reconnect time during the final cutover. The bank also replaced a legacy costly data replication product with HPE Shadowbase software. In addition to bringing its system into PCI compliance, the bank implemented reliable failover procedures that reduced its downtime due to a production failure from two hours to under four minutes. The bank is now positioned to reduce its outage time to just seconds when it moves to a full Shadowbase sizzling-hot-takeover configuration. This case study illustrates that there are no barriers to choosing Shadowbase software as your BASE24 business continuity solution.

Gravic Presents on HPE Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) Technology at March Events

At the March events of the SunTUG Sunshine Summit in Tampa, the MRTUG Meeting in Chicago, and the OTUG Meeting in Columbus, OH, attendees enjoyed our presentation, Reducing Downtime and Eliminating Risk for Disruptive Migrations with HPE Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) Technology. This presentation demonstrated how customers are leveraging HPE Shadowbase solutions to perform zero downtime migrations for otherwise risky and disruptive application, database, and operating system upgrades. Several use case scenarios were reviewed for both homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations. Please contact us if you are interested in discussing this presentation’s content or having us present it to you or your colleagues.

To speak with us about your data replication and data integration needs, please visit us at www.ShadowbaseSoftware.com, email us at SBProductManagement@gravic.com, or call us at +1.610.647.6250.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise directly sells and supports Shadowbase Solutions under the name HPE Shadowbase. For more information, please contact your local HPE account team or visit our website.

Compliance Reporting Module (CRM) and File Integrity Checker (FIC) have rapidly become CSP's most acclaimed NonStop solutions and they are now being updated to provide even more protection.

Designed to meet the requirements of PCIDSS, Compliance Reporting Module (CRM) automatically performs hundreds of PCI related checks on NonStop servers to provide a "health report" with recommendations on how to fix any PCI compliance issues. In addition, users have free access to the CSP-Wiki which contains hundreds of recommendations on how to harden your Nonstop system against intrusions and attacks.

File Integrity Checker (FIC) monitors Guardian and OSS files for unauthorized modifications. FIC works by taking a unique file "fingerprint" of selected filesets and stores those fileset fingerprints in a secure database on the NonStop server. You can select multiple different filesets to be monitored, so that critical files can be checked frequently, and less critical files less often.

Both CRM compliance scans and FIC check runs can be scheduled in advance using the built in scheduler. FIC performs thorough checking of numerous file attributes automatically. These include:

FIC stores its results in a database for historical comparison. With its MD5 Incremental checking capability, FIC can even monitor log files to detect if previously written records have been altered. With the included intuitive GUI interface, Both CRM and FIC have a full merged Audit capability and can also raise real time alarms for changes detected.

CRM Compliance and File Integrity from CSP. It's everything you could want for NonStop File Integrity and PCIDSS Compliance.

For more information on File Integrity Checker and our FREE NonStop Security Wiki, visit WWW.CSPsecurity.com.

CSP is a Platinum Sponsor at the upcoming GTUG HotSpot Event In Berlin, April 18 -20th, 2016. See you there!

Sometimes you can be preemptive to the point where the coincidence may be hard to explain. Call it fortuitous and even accidental if you like, but the post to the IR blog of February 8, 2016, Can you Visualize NonStop in a Virtual World? has generated comments on multiple LinkedIn groups. They began appearing on the LinkedIn group, Real Time View , and then continued on the LinkedIn group, Connect HP User Group, following promotion of the IR post to these LinkedIn groups.

If you have not net joined in the discussion, you may want to follow the links above to see for yourself. I really would like to encourage you to do so, as this is all part of HPE NonStop development delivering on the goal of not just freeing NonStop from the hardware, but the infrastructure as well. The point is that as we get deeper into the topic of NonStop running on a virtual machine, there are as many opinions as there are members of the NonStop community. From where we stand here at IR, this is a huge sea change for NonStop, but one that we have been prepared to see occur for some time now – it’s almost as if the opportunity for future growth of NonStop needed it to embrace the way resources are provisioned these days just to remain relevant.

IR team members who have attended major HPE events of late report that there is renewed energy in support of the “mainstreaming of NonStop.” It is as if a corner has been turned and there is no going back. We recall clearly how it was NonStop that was funded to support the Intel x86 architecture, whereas there was no similar funding provided to do the same with HP-UX or even OpenVMS. It was NonStop too that benefited from the change to InfiniBand for the interconnect fabric to where, according to some recent statements, we can consider NonStop running on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware. And it was NonStop that is being freed from the hardware and became the “best software platform on the planet.”

This information has been well publicized since the curtain was lifted at the 2015 NonStop Technical Boot Camp, and then discussed again at the December 2015 HPE Discover event in London, as well as at the Mobile World Congress conference just held in Barcelona and reflected in the comments to both LinkedIn groups referenced above. But freed of the infrastructure is something altogether different from being simply free from the hardware as it elevates NonStop to being able to add value to most customers virtual environments that are becoming increasingly more commonplace as cloud computing makes its presence felt.

At IR we have been focused on telephony for many years and our Unified Communications (UC) offering has become a stalwart in the world of Voice over IP (VoIP). If you aren’t up to speed on this part of our product portfolio, you may want to check out the page, Take the headache out of multi-platform environments. Here you will read of how today we provide solutions to manage Avaya, Microsoft Lync and Cisco UC systems. Addressing multi-platform and multi-vendor environments is an area where IR has excelled and its significance shouldn’t be lost on the NonStop community.

As NonStop moves into environments where the infrastructure is of little concern, it will likely be part of a multi-platform and perhaps even multi-vendor environment. Furthermore, our experience with telephony, traditional telcos and mobile phone operators, has given us visibility into the world of virtualization – from our perspective, we have seen the broad adoption of a virtual world happening for some time. At one point, we thought NonStop would be vulnerable. But clearly, that is no longer the case.

What generated the comments to the LinkedIn groups following the post of February 8 was the news that NonStop would be publically demonstrated running in a virtual environment at the upcoming Mobile World Congress event. According to the promotion provided for the session Transfer to a hybrid infrastructure, “Visit this demo to learn about the future of highly available and massively scalable infrastructure for your core network. This is a live demonstration featuring a potential HPE virtual NonStop environment with x86 COTS hardware. Touch and see virtual network core functions of HPE I-HSS and INS."

Both products being showcased running on “a potential HPE virtual NonStop environment” were well known telco applications available from HPE for NonStop systems for some time. Even though the NonStop community had been informed that NonStop development had NonStop running in a virtual machine on Linux in their labs, the qualification at the time was that no, “It’s not ready to be a product, but it’s a proof point that we can get there.” Well, it is now clear that HPE NonStop has moved well past that point.

The timing of the February 8 post was not completely accidental, as it had been planned for several weeks, but it definitely proved to be fortuitous. Having said that, it is encouraging to see the NonStop community becoming as enthusiastic about the elevation of NonStop to where it is free from hardware and infrastructure (without losing its value proposition). The telco community may be the initial beneficiaries from running NonStop in a virtual world, but at IR we view this as just the beginning.

Anyone looking to begin the journey towards a hybrid infrastructure where the traditional IT systems are combined with private clouds, as HPE is so clearly predicting, will benefit from NonStop in a virtual world as well. The mainstreaming of NonStop we have all been hearing so much about of late is officially up and running!

To learn more about how Lusis LitePOS can reduce your overall costs, make quicker standardized updates, and improve your speed-to-market, please contact me at: (630) 728-2734 or schedule a webcast at your earliest convenience.

Stay connected and get the latest NonStop news at the European NonStop HotSpot event in Berlin, Germany, 18-20 April 2016!

The European NonStop HotSpot is your chance to take in keynotes from HPE, great presentations from HPE NonStop senior management and vendors, and an inspirational non-IT keynote speaker.

comForte has lots in store for you at the event including two new presentations, exciting product announcements, and the kick-off of the "comForte Challenge."

Meet up with NonStop colleagues both new and old, and learn the latest about NonStop from users, HPE, and vendors. And be sure to watch your email for more on what’s coming from comForte!

For an overview of the event and to register, visit the European NonStop HotSpot event page.

Is your legacy Payments platform getting too expensive to maintain? Is it unresponsive for today’s demanding and ever changing payment world? Has rapid transaction growth caused your 3rd party processing bill to reach the size of Fort Knox? Don’t know where to start to bring your payment processing in-house?

Too often, the fear and hassle of going through a conversion or platform migration leads to a "Do Nothing" strategy. In today's demanding and highly competitive world, to stay ahead of the competition one has to embark on a "Do Something" direction. Lusis Payments and our TANGO payments platform can help you DO SOMETHING!

Whether you decide for a big-bang conversion, or a phased approach of feathering in new technology to gradually replace your legacy environment, NOW is the time to start planning.

See what NuWave thought of SunTUG, as well as MRTUG and OTUG.

If you are in Europe, don't miss your chance to connect with NuWave at these amazing events to learn more about how you can modernize your NonStop systems easily and cost effectively.

GTUG: April 18-20
BITUG: May 12

Learn more about these events on NuWave's website.

Interested in connecting with NuWave at these upcoming events? Email David Ross (davidross@nuwavetech.com) to schedule a time to meet.

HPE recently released its extensive (96 pages) 2016 Cyber Risk Report. It examines the vulnerabilities that expose organizations to data breaches. The report provides insights into how security funds and personnel can be allocated better to counter cyber threats and to prepare proper breach responses. Prepared and distributed by the HPE Security Research Team, the report focuses on seven key themes. Among them are: overreaching regulations push research underground, the monetization of malware, and the industry didn’t learn anything about patching in 2015.

In addition to “HPE Cyber Risk Report 2016,” read the following articles in the Availability Digest’s March 2016 issue:

Australia’s Telstra Downed by Fat Finger –Telecommunications company Telstra connects its customers to the Telstra network via ten connection points called nodes. They provide tremendous redundancy. Around Noon on 9 February, a malfunctioning node was taken down for maintenance by a Telstra engineer who unfortunately did not follow rerouting procedures. Instead of moving customers to a functioning node, the engineer reconnected them to the downed node. Suddenly 10% of Telstra’s customers – about 1.5 million businesses and individuals – found themselves without mobile or landline telephone services. Internet connections were impacted as well.

How the Ukraine Power Grid Was Hacked – The Digest and other publications have donated much print space to the 23 December 2015 breach of Ukraine’s power grid, believed to be the first-ever incident of hackers causing a widespread power outage. After months of forensic analysis, Ukraine is releasing details about how the attack was carried out. It all began with a phishing campaign.

High-Voltage Transformers – The Power Grid’s Achilles Heel – The U.S. power grid is famously reliable in that seldom do outages last weeks or even days. However, a significant vulnerability to the power grid is the risk of destruction of an extra-high-voltage (EHV) transformer. Monstrous in size, a challenge to transport, and prohibitively expensive, a damaged EHV can take months or more to repair or replace. Enter the RecX transformer. Smaller than EHVs, easily transportable, and economical to produce, the RecX is the key component to the U.S. rapid replacement strategy.

@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 as well as consulting services.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 743 members and counting. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.

XYPRO - Detecting “the Low and Slow (attack)” with XYGATE SecurityOne™