Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2014

XYPRO Completes Management Buy-Out

The management team of XYPRO Technology Corporation, a leading provider of mission critical security solutions, has successfully completed a management buyout from the company’s founders, and previous owners, Dale Blommendahl and Sheila Johnson.

The buyout has been led by Lisa Partridge, XYPRO’s President, along with Barry Forbes and Andrew Price, who are both executives with the company.

Big Data is certainly the thing of the moment.

There is immense interest in the subject from all quarters, with many organisations appointing Chief Information Officers (CIO) to meet the challenges of this new deluge of data and information.

So what is ‘Big Data’ and what’s all the fuss about?

Firstly it is not new; the term was first coined in an article by Erik Larson for Harper’s magazine containing the sentences “The keepers of big data say they do it for the consumer’s benefit. But data has a way of being used for purposes other than originally intended.” In its present form it was coined by John Mashey, at the time working for Silicon Graphics, who found that the parallel architecture of the Silicon Graphics environment had data mining benefits too. Indeed, further back, John did work with linear regression to determine where squirrels were most likely to bite through the telephone lines. Trivial by the standards of today but massive in the 1980s.

John Mashey was also interesting in that he highlighted over 20 years ago that data will always have the properties of ‘bigger, further and stronger’, in the sense that we will always want to collect more, store more and be able to do more with it.

Technology in terms of storage, architectures and hardware are making that possible; the thing that was missing was the software. The interesting development is that most of the software to enable Big Data is open source, which of course, means it’s free. Alas, there is never such a thing as a free lunch. The really costly aspect is finding people who can not only talk this strange language of Mahout, Splunk, Hadoop, Sqoop and other strange names but actually produce things with it.

One of the key philosophies of Big Data manifested itself during the time of the ancient Greeks, when Aristotle said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Big Data comes into its own when data is merged. A small example of this is where Insider Technologies have merged Social Network feeds into its monitoring system, as on occasions, the Twittersphere has a valuable contribution to add to the sum of the parts when incorporated with a centralised monitoring system.

Having all this data also presents another issue - the visualization of large amounts of data. John Mashey used the analogy of ‘wetware’ for the brain. As hardware gets faster and able to contain more and more data, software must keep up. Our brains – wetware - are only as capable as they were 20 years ago to take in and process data, therefore it becomes imperative that software can select and display the data we need to see. This has given rise to visualizations that can only be described as works of art. However beautiful they are, are they really that useful? That is ultimately the key to the success of Big Data: large amounts of data need to be presented in a clear and concise way.

A small example from Insider Technologies on how to visualise large amounts of data, transactions, the infrastructure and events in a clear and concise solution.

In a NonStop environment we have been dealing with Big Data for many years – the real time transaction processing system that has dominated the NonStop space is the perfect seed for Big Data. At Insider Technologies we have been involved in many projects where we are turning the data from the NonStop environment into Big Data friendly formats. An interesting twist on this was quoted by the author Revathi Subramanian in a recent book “Bank Fraud”, when talking about how organisations, mangle, not harvest their data. She noted that data warehouses tend to ETL - Extract, Taint and Lose, rather than Extract, Transform and Load. Big Data relies on not tainting data, and getting more of it at source.

Insider Technologies provides real time monitoring solutions for these environments. This is an example of Aristotle’s view of additional data adding to the clarity of data. With everything being monitored within the multiple log files for the environment, application and HP NonStop EMS, to the actual data within the financial transaction, there is an enormous amount of data to retrieve. This requires an enhanced ability to manage networks and in order to achieve this, data needs to be turned into visualisations that can be easily managed and are targeted to the user.

This same data can also be used to analyse and detect fraud, which is, again, an example of how large amounts of real-time data can be used to respond to and categorise data. The key here, in an environment measured by the ratio to False Positives, is to ensure that only the relevant data is presented to the user.

There is little doubt that Big Data is here to stay and HP NonStop systems will be a key provider of this resource. The standards however, still have some iterations to perform, but they will ultimately emerge. In order for these Big Data initiatives to succeed they must be able to provide clear visualizations which provide continuous automation, monitoring, reporting and alerting, which we at Insider Technologies are specialists in.

It should be noted though, that predictions are always dangerous in the world of IT. To quote the OS/2 programmers guide in November 1987: “I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”

Insider Technologies believe that some of the Big Data tools will outlive OS/2 but at this stage only the brave will predict which ones.

For further details on our Social Network monitoring solutions, please visit the following link:

Sentra for Social Networks – The price of not monitoring

Alternatively, please contact Insider Technologies at:

Insider Technologies Limited

Spinnaker Court

Chandlers Point

Salford Quays

Manchester

M50 2YR

United Kingdom

Website: www.insidertech.co.uk

Tel: +44 (0) 161 876 6606

Email: enquiries@insidertech.co.uk

Insider Technologies Limited is ISO9001:2008 and TickITplus certified: TickITplus

Third Data Corporation

High Performance Switching and Secure Data Storage

888-301-2431 / sales@thirddata.com

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.

Preview TANDsoft’s “Interception Technology Enhances Application Functionality”

“Interception Technology Enhances Application Functionality” is TANDsoft’s latest contribution to The Connection, the bimonthly, NonStop-focused publication that in one form or another has been a staple of the NonStop community since the early ITUG days (ITUG Newsletter, The Tandem Users’ Journal, Tandem Connection, The Connection). The TANDsoft article will appear in the publication’s May/June issue, but Tandemworld subscribers are invited to preview “Interception Technology…” at http://bit.ly/Rb8eEM. The article also can be found by visiting TANDsoft at www.tandsoft.com.

TANDsoft is an interception specialist. The company’s products are designed to create new application functionalities for existing applications without the need to make source code changes, of particular importance when the source code is unavailable. As TANDsoft President and article author Jack Di Giacomo writes, “If you bought software from a third-party provider, you don’t need the source code. If it’s HP code, you don’t need the source code. Even if you wrote the application in-house and have the source code, you don’t need the source code.”

The article defines interception technology as a range of techniques that enable the capture of a variety of system and database API calls in order to enhance application behaviors. Interception takes place at the native API level, so any program written in any language can interact with the operating system without the need to alter the original program logic. The program, or code, that handles intercepted function calls, system calls, events, or messages most commonly is called a “hook.” In the NonStop world, a hook is known as an intercept library. Intercept libraries can be used for many purposes – debugging, tracing, application monitoring, statistics collection, testing, replication and synchronization, encryption and tokenization, virtualization, etc. All are examples of enhancing an application by extending its functionality beyond its original purpose and beyond the limitations of its source code.

“Interception Technology Enhances Application Functionality” reviews the architecture of interception, including the interception methods of Intercept-Dynamic and Intercept-Retarget. The article discusses the origins of NonStop interception, the benefits of interception, the misunderstandings about interception technology, and the areas in which today’s NonStop customers use interception technology to enhance the functionalities of their existing applications. Encryption and decryption for data in-flight and at-rest are some of the latest uses for interception technology, and future solutions are only as far away as are the problems they need to resolve.

TANDsoft solutions are based on interception technology. They include: the OPTA2000 virtual clock- and time-zone simulator; FileSync for automatic file synchronization, replication, and data deduplication; 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 and the new Enscribe-2-SQL Data Replicator, all of which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques; E2S-Lite, which permits efficient, low-cost Enscribe modifications without the need to change a program’s source code; and SDI (Sensitive Data Intercept) for Enscribe and SQL/MP.

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. Visit www.tandsoft.com, or contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Our Enscribe to SQL Migration Forum on LinkedIn is at 188 members and counting.

OmniPayments Preauthorization Services Minimize Complexities of Credit/Debit Card Transactions

The OmniPayments financial-transaction switch offers a comprehensive solution for financial institutions to acquire, authenticate, route, switch and authorize transactions across multiple input channels such as ATMs, POS (point-of-sale) terminals, kiosks, IVR (interactive voice response) units, mobile devices, and the Internet. It provides a full set of functionalities to support payment transactions. As OmniPayments routes transactions to the card-issuing institutions, each transaction must be validated against an often complex set of rules before its execution can be authorized. The authorization process consumes valuable processing resources and requires the continual maintenance of authorization rules and parameters. OmniPayments offloads this complex task from the transaction-acquiring and card-issuing institutions with a powerful Transaction Screening rules engine that can preauthorize transactions, thereby minimizing the time and bandwidth typically required to obtain transaction approval.

An acquiring bank is a financial institution that processes credit/debit-card payments on behalf of merchants. OmniPayments allows an acquiring bank to initiate a payment or to request and receive authorization from an issuing financial institution for an action on a customer card or an account. OmniPayments routes the transaction between the acquirer and the authorizer. It can handle both On-Us transactions (the issuing bank and acquiring bank are identical) and Not-On-Us transactions (the issuing bank and acquiring bank are different). For transactions that must be forwarded to external issuers via regional, national or international interchanges, OmniPayments provides switch interfaces and optional stand-in functionality when the issuer for whatever reason is unavailable. Although individualized rules are created by different acquirers, OmniPayments’ procedures for rules maintenance, established by the OmniConsole rules-configuration browser, are consistent across all institutions, thereby easing the manual effort to keep the rules up-to-date and error-free.

Additionally, OmniPayments can manage multiple devices and host application interfaces, offers a comprehensive security framework, and can interface with third-party products or legacy systems if required.

With successful implementations at many customer sites, OmniPayments is just one member of the Opsol family of solutions for the financial industry. Opsol Integrators specializes in NonStop mission-critical applications and offers customers all the requisite functionality to manage credit/debit-card transactions. Based on SOA architecture, OmniPayments is easily expandable to provide additional functionality when needed.

OmniPayments supplies complete security functions for every financial transaction that it handles, 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.

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

CSP is receiving more and more inquiries on how we can help customers extract, report and act on BASE24 OMF events – simply merging the audit is not enough.

Using Alert-Plus, users can extract selected events from the BASE24 OMF logs, for example, logon/logoff events, institution security errors etc., and then selectively:

Find out more on how Alert-Plus can help you take control of this key event stream at www.cspsecurity.com.

At NuWave, our middleware users tell us time and again that SOAPam has no competition. Many of them couldn't be quoted, but we still have a long list of testimonials that show how enthusiastic our customers are about the SOAPam suite.

It is also the only option that runs in Guardian, for a smaller footprint. To learn more about SOAPam Server and SOAPam Client, visit our website, or email info@nuwavetech.com.

Availability Digest Managing Editor Dr. Bill Highleyman will present “Help! My Data Center is Down!” at the upcoming Korea NonStop User Group (KNUG) meeting, 2-3 July, in Seoul, South Korea. Created from a popular series of Digest articles, the presentation focuses on spectacular data-center failures. Causes include power outages, storage subsystem failures, Internet and Intranet problems, upgrades gone awry, and human errors. Data-center managers have told Dr. Highleyman that they routinely gather their IT personnel to discuss the lessons to be learned from the articles and to subsequently develop operational improvements to avoid becoming a Digest Never Again story themselves. Dr. Highleyman also will make the presentation to a group of NonStop customers in Taipei, Taiwan, on Tuesday, 8 July.

Read the following articles in the Digest’s May issue:

IE Exploit Allows Remote Code Execution – Security firm FireEye recently discovered a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. A zero-day vulnerability is one in which the first attack is made before a company becomes aware of the vulnerability. As yet unnamed, the security exposure was reported on April 26, 2014. It affects IE6 though IE11, which represent 55% of all browsers worldwide.

U-2 Spy Plane Crashes FAA Computer – On April 30, 2014, the air-traffic control computers at the busy Los Angeles, California, Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) suddenly went down, paralyzing air traffic across the U.S. Southwest. After some denial, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally admitted that a U-2 spy plane operating within the area at high altitude caused a software problem that crashed the computers.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt – Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt tells the story of how the U.S. financial markets, once stable and predictable, grew predatory by feeding on the ordinary investor. A group of dedicated individuals set out to correct the situation. “Flash Boys” offers a comprehensive exposé of the exploitative practices that today’s financial markets have subtly adopted, practices not understood by even the most sophisticated investors.

Heartbleed Attacks Androids – Heartbleed is a flaw in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library, which provides communication security over the Internet. It allows attackers to read memory data from both client and server devices to obtain private keys, passwords, and user names. Android versions 4.1.0 and 4.1.1 contain the Heartbleed bug. Although Google has released a patch to correct the vulnerability in the Android operating system, it will take time for the patch to reach existing phones because updates must come via the smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers. An estimated 50 million Android phones worldwide may be at risk.

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - This article highlights some of the @availabilitydig tweets that made headlines in recent days. If you currently are not following @availabilitydig, consider making our Twitter presence a daily read.

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 632 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

Musings on NonStop! - May, ‘14

XYPRO Completes Management Buy-Out