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NonStop ™ Newsletter for May 2019
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Contents
Gravic Celebrates its 40th Anniversary!
What Wikipedia can tell you about Batch Scheduling
enthusiastic audience greets the OmniPayments presentation in Edinburgh
NTBC 2019
Hand-in-Hand with MOMI at the 2019 NonStop TBC!
Proactive Security and Threat Detection – it’s not That SIEMple
Multi-Factor Authentication on Nonstop Made Easy
Visit the XYPRO events calendar
Gravic Celebrates its 40th Anniversary!
In 2019, our 40th year of business, we reflect on the past and look forward to the future.
Swings in the economy, the stock market, inflation, regulation changes, IT analyst fads, and even the price of oil were met as opportunities and not problems. How do we measure our success? It is in making progress toward our core purpose of Improving Society Through Innovation. Our ability to improve society is manifest in the numerous industry-leading and household-name companies that rely on HPE Shadowbase software to keep their datacenters operational in the event of disasters that routinely put unprotected businesses into bankruptcy. Our core values, including honesty, integrity, and commitment, permeate all of our actions, both internally among employees, and externally with our customers. We are a humble company and temper our successes with the belief that we can do even better.
We hosted a 40th celebration event at the American Helicopter Museum, and were happy to have our good friends and colleagues, Dr. Werner Alexi, Dr. Bill Highleyman and his spouse Janice, and Bill Knapp join us. Here's to the next forty years!
Gravic Presents Use Cases, a Case Study, and the Latest HPE Shadowbase News at ETBC
This month, the world’s senior architects, designers, and technology managers across NonStop came together in Edinburgh at the European NonStop Technical Boot Camp (ETBC) event. We enjoyed the time to network and connect over the critical developments shaping the future of data replication and integration technology in Europe, and to grow and futureproof regional businesses. We presented on HPE Shadowbase Update and Enterprise Use Cases and a new case study on accessing resident data in online transaction processing systems in real-time, Using Data Replication to Offload Online Host Processing and Enable New Business Applications. We especially enjoyed the Taste of Scotland Gala Dinner at Castlehill, and thank the BITUG Board, Connect, and the HPE staff for hosting a terrific event.
If you are interested in discussing our presentations’ content or would like us to present these or other HPE Shadowbase topics to your staff, please contact us. To speak with us about your data replication and data integration needs, please contact us, call us at +1.610.647.6250, or email us at SBProductManagement@gravic.com.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise directly sells and supports Shadowbase solutions under the name HPE Shadowbase. For more information, please contact your local HPE Shadowbase representative or visit our website.
Please Visit Gravic at these Upcoming 2019 Events
|
HPE NonStop Customer Event—Santiago, 4-6 June |
|
HPE Discover—Las Vegas, 18-20 June |
|
N2TUG Meeting—Dallas, 27 June |
|
KNUG NonStop Technology Day—Seoul, 16 July |
|
TNUG NonStop Technology Day—Taipei, 19 July |
|
ATUG Meeting—Atlanta, 18 September |
|
CTUG Conference—Toronto, 25-26 September |
|
DUST Meeting—Phoenix, 8 October |
|
Connect HPE Technical Boot Camp—San Francisco, 3-6 November |
What Wikipedia can tell you about Batch Scheduling
Lots! But nothing about NonStop batch schedulers, especially MultiBatch, the mainframe-class NonStop Batch Scheduler. Therefore, let me resolve this shortcoming (depending on your view of Wikipedia)…
For a start, some examples of the benefits that our UK Central Bank and OFI customers have when using MultiBatch:
· Help run RTGS applications
· Reduce NonStop online-dealing batch run times by 6 hours per day (source available)
· Manage and process securities settlements and servicing of these securities
· Manage and monitor Atlas/GBS applications
· Meet or exceed SLAs for NonStop site-swaps
· Fast batch and application recovery following a site-swap
· Fast and reliable NonStop system coldloads
· Run Guardian and OSS jobs within the same schedule
· Run OSS jobs, incorporating STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR (no TACL scripts, or work around)
For 25+ years, our customers have depended on MultiBatch to help improve their SLAs and batch scheduling run times. All of our customers configure complex and serious, mainframe-class batch schedules, requiring the reliability, flexibility and ease of use to ensure their schedules are easily maintained, configured and monitored.
It goes without saying (but I shall J), that first-class support and development are provided by Insider Technologies to ensure MultiBatch is continually enhanced and maintained, resulting in the latest version, 9.5, just being released (and enhanced GUI).
Some of the new features within MultiBatch 9.5 include (based on in-house enhancements or customer requests):
· CRON scheduling · Historical trend view of batch schedule(s) · Simple two-step approach to recover a batch schedule, e.g. during a site-swap o Batch Recovery file is audited o Recover the batch on new ‘live’ node, in the process modifying node, volume and subvolume values to replicate this ‘live’ nodeo During recovery, Instant update on status of schedule at point of failure
o Now you know where your application is up to
MultiBatch arrives with TACL, Pathway and GUI interfaces, of which this article will concentrate on the GUI and some of the benefits this brings.
GUI
All batch and scheduling configurations are available via a single interface, easily navigable around the various screens and real-time status monitor entities.
Some of the facilities the above screen provides:
· Runtime values
· CAID (user ID the job will run as)
· Defines
· Assigns
· Params
NO JCL MAINTANANCE
MultiBatch does not require lengthy and expensive JCL (NBEXEC / TACL) maintenance, as all scheduling, dependencies, run time options are configured via the GUI. So, inexperienced users can easily maintain the batch schedule, as long as their access rights have been setup accordingly.
Compared to the above, having to maintain your very complex batch schedules via JCL scripts can be very risky and prone to user error, e.g. maintenance of JCl, associated attachment-sets:
SECURITY
Within the GUI, you can see that Guardian user id ‘MBTEST.CONFIG’ is logged on. Other batch schedules generally require, super.super logon to perform maintenance.
MultiBatch arrives with an inbuilt security set, providing various levels of access, e.g. MBAT.OPS user for just viewing the configuration and status monitor screens, whereas MBAT.CONFIG user is utilised to maintain the batch schedules (either one, more, or all).
CAID
A user can either run all of their MultiBatch jobs under the owner of the batch monitor process (BMON), or if required, specific jobs can run under certain user ids, e.g. during a MultiBatch system coldload schedule, some Pathways may run as APPL.MANAGER, whereas starting TMF will run as 255,255.
MIGRATOR
Our customers utilise a control node in which to maintain their MultiBatch schedules ready for testing, trialling and if successful, migrating to production.
Alternative NonStop batch schedulers require some form of TACL maintenance to copy across schedules from one node to another.
MultiBatch simply extracts a batch schedule from one environment and inserts it into a target environment; no TACL changes, amendments required. All completed, simply and effectively and in the process, dynamically changing node name, volumes, subvolumes, parameters, defines, assigns, OSS file-descriptors and environment variables.
REAL-TIME STATUS MONITORING
Within the GUI interface, a user, say on the Bridge area, can visually check where the batch schedule is up to. This is extremely important in large, complex batch schedules such as that run for RTGS, Atlas/GBS, securities settlements.
Any failures are immediately migrated to the top of the status monitor display, from where a user can interrogate the cause of failure and with appropriate access rights, execute various command and control functions, such as restart, hold, mark as complete.
The MultiBatch GUI provides a more in depth and real-time approach to the batch status, compared to other batch schedulers:
Of course, the reliance on real-time status monitoring facilities is not enough; therefore, MultiBatch is supplied with an extensive list of fully tokenised EMS events that can be monitored via ViewPoint, EMSDIST, and Insider Technologies system monitoring products such as Reflex, Sentra, with associated escalation and resolution as required.
If you would like further information on how MultiBatch can provide your entire mainframe-class batch scheduling requirements, then please contact Insider Technologies Limited:
+44 161 876 6606
Additionally, download our MultiBatch White Paper to obtain an in-depth description on how MultiBatch is the class leader in NonStop batch scheduling:
https://www.insidertech.co.uk/solutions/batch-processing
Please visit Insider Technologies at the European NonStop Technical Bootcamp (ETBC), 13th-15th May, 2019, Edinburgh. Further details available here, where you can also attend a presentation by Insider on how we can help you monitor your Enterprise and within this, your BASE24 infrastructure (Braemar Suite, 14:50 hours, 15th May)
enthusiastic audience greets the OmniPayments presentation in Edinburgh
Introduction
It was such a pleasure for Vineet and I to greet so many of the enthusiastic NonStop fans at the EBitug (or ETBC) Conference in Edinburgh over 2 days last week. The recent JC Penney success story continues to filter through and stimulated an increasing amount of interest in OmniPayments solution, with clients curious to learn more.
For those who couldn’t make the event, the story of how JCPenney managed to migrate to OmniPayments is not your standard Case Study fodder. It’s an open and frank account of the steps JCPenney went through in selecting and implementing the OmniPayments payments gateway. OmniPayments wasn’t their original first choice; other major names were higher on the list, but for reason or another, declined to meet the challenge.
The article describes how JCPenney achieved just this; and in a matter
of months. It describes the steps they took to make their choice, and
why they eventually settled on OmniPayments. They now feel their new
solution is superior in many ways to the old one. The new solution
provides a much improved and flexible solution that can process their
payments transactions much faster, with higher volume at a much lower
cost. The new solution enables business monitoring capabilities, and an
infrastructure perspective that was not available to JCPenney with the
previous solution.
JCPenney is extremely satisfied with the product architecture,
performance and support as evidenced by the following quote:
The expression that best summarizes how JCPenney feels about this
Payments system upgrade in their own words is “we achieved the
impossible”.
The Trigger
In the spring of 2016, the vendor of the legacy Payments solution at JCPenney, ACI, informed JCPenney that the existing old version of their Base24 product will no longer be supported as of March 2018. In order to move to a newer version, JCPenney would need to upgrade both the software as well as the hardware.
This requirement essentially imposed not only a major, and in some way risky platform change, but also required a significant rewrite of the environment.
Due to the foreseeable effort to do the rewrite, JCPenney decided to “open up the field” to other providers. Thus, initiating a new evaluation process that included several other solution providers.
Vendor Selection
The selection process looked at a total of eight providers. One of the most critical criteria for JCPenney was risk. How did they resolve that question? Read on here.
Make plans to join the global NonStop community for four days of networking and learning with NonStop Engineers, Executives, Partners and Customers:
Registration is open!
Pricing Information:
Early Bird price: $1395 expires October 1st
Regular price: $1695
Call for Papers is open!
https://www.nonstoptbc.com/call-for-papers
(Deadline for proposals is September 1, 2019)
Hotel info:
Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport
1333 Old Bayshore Hwy
Burlingame, CA 94010
Phone: (650) 347-1234
The Partner SIG looks forward to reuniting
with Customers and HPE this fall!
Kathy Wood
NonStop Partner SIG/Vendor Chair
Hand-in-Hand with MOMI at the 2019 NonStop TBC!
For the first time, BlackWood Systems will be offering private, individual training at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp for our customers and those interested in learning about MOMI.
Since we don't know the Breakout Session schedule yet, we are simply taking names/companies at this time and will be in touch with you to schedule an optimum time for your MOMI training.
This is a great opportunity for you to get everyone 'up to speed' with their MOMI usage!
Registration Info:
https://events.eventzilla.net/e/handinhand-with-momi-at-the-2019-nonstop-tbc-2138750011
About MOMI:
MOMI is the superior real-time tool for monitoring, troubleshooting and diagnosing your HPE NonStop™ System operations:
User Friendly
Budget Friendly
Resource Friendly
Reliable, Technical Excellence and Strong Customer Support
MOMI runs on all NonStop platforms!
602-569-8766
Proactive Security and Threat Detection – it’s not That SIEMple
Steve Tcherchian
Chief Product Officer & CISO
XYPRO Technology Corporation
Real-time threat detection is an indisputably critical element for maintaining operational integrity across a rapidly changing mission critical environment. Knowing when your system has been compromised quickly can make the difference between a controllable incident and a headline grabbing, catastrophic data breach.
Most organizations cannot assign the time necessary to proactively monitor their environment. Investigating potential incidents is a manual and time consuming process requiring resources to collect, correlate and search through multiple, disparate logs looking for the answer to whether something is a real incident. It’s looking for a needle in a haystack while more hay is piling on. To do this very heavy lifting, most rely on Security Incident Event Management (SIEM) systems – such as SPLUNK or IBM QRadar.
The truth is, a SIEM-only reliant security strategy is unsustainable and leads to a false sense of security that your SIEM is the ultimate authority on security threat detection and alerts. Unfortunately, SIEM technology is limited by the types of data and devices it is aware of on which it can alert.
It’s all Just Too Much
Even when the most basic, mandatory signatures and rules are applied, SIEMs alert on way too many events that are neither suspicious nor urgent. You really don’t want to be alerted on every possible incident. It would prove impossible to investigate them all and so there would never be any progress. You want to identify, in real-time, security events, driven by actual malicious activity.
Such massive amounts of raw activity also impact the quality of SIEM responses. SIEMs without environmental and industry context are not able to detect what’s business as usual vs. unusual but acceptable activity vs. what’s a legitimate potential threat. The unavoidable “alert overload” means security personnel eventually tune out alerts , making it easy for malicious activity to slip by, making the SIEM something used only when “looking back” for analysis. Obviously that means you’re too late.
The longer it takes to figure it out, the further ahead the criminals get, the more expensive the damage will be.
SIEM Limitations
- SIEM results are based on log data only.
- SIEMs are not contextually aware of HPE NonStop servers and other non-commodity devices, their applications or data.
- Due to lack of context, SIEMs have a very high false positive rate and are very “noisy”.
- Because of a fragmented SIEM market, there is a lack of standardization making it difficult to detect events of disparate types
- SIEMs rely on binary values or thresholds for alerts. SIEMs don’t know what they don’t know
They’ve got you when it comes to fees!
To add to the complexity, most SIEM vendors base license fees on the volume of data they consume. This is definitely to their advantage. The data required to detect a breach is increasing. In fact, the more data you have on which to base your analysis on, the better your results. Unfortunately for you, that means SIEM license fees will only go higher.
There’s a Better Way
Industry experts (and anyone responsible for SIEM management) say that current SIEM technology has reached limitations, which makes it inefficient without additional investments in technology and personnel to deal with modern cybersecurity threats. Put that investment in solutions that automate real-time detection activity. This type of automation for investigating “in flight” activities with real correlation and the proper contextualization, can free up resources by nearly 80%.
Financial Analysis/Cost Savings1
|
Benefit |
Year 1 |
Year 2 |
Year 3 |
TOTAL |
|
Compliance |
$172,800 |
$177,984 |
$183,324 |
$534,108 |
|
Risk Reduction |
$215,338 |
$215,338 |
$215,338 |
$646,164 |
|
Security Ops Improvements |
$66,560 |
$68,557 |
$70,614 |
$205,731 |
|
Threat Intelligence Savings |
$47,600 |
$49,028 |
$50,499 |
$147,217 |
|
Total Benefits |
$502,298 |
$510,907 |
$519,775 |
$1,533,220 |
Let’s Make it all More Efficient
XYPRO’s
XYGATE SecurityOne (XS1) is a security intelligence and analytics solution that automates the activity necessary to actively detect threats by combing through data in real time and intelligently highlighting the actionable incidents that need immediate attention.Not only does XYPRO possess unique expertise in this area, but our contextualization technology is patented. XS1 consumes data not only via logs, but also a variety of agents and other sources unique to XYPRO and relevant to the
NonStop server.For example, the XS1 Integrity Monitoring (FIM) module efficiently monitors and alerts when key files or system configurations are viewed, deleted, modified or ownership has changed. It has the ability to identify who made the change and if the change put the system at risk or violated a policy. This intelligent form of real time integrity monitoring simplifies monitoring activity and helps meet the strictest of compliance requirements.
Let’s Make it Worth it
XS1 does not rely on a consumption based licensing model. It is licensed per connected server.
The cost for each XS1 module remains the same regardless of the volume of data it consumes. For example, when 10 HPE NonStop events are forwarded directly to the SIEM, all 10 events have an effect on the SIEM license fees. With XS1, those same 10 events can be sent to XS1, which will then be correlated and a single contextualized incident to be forwarded to the SIEM.
This means instead of the SIEM receiving 10 raw events, it would receive a single incident, resulting in up to a 90% cost saving on SIEM license fees.
XYGATE SecurityOne identifies and tracks changes across your NonStop IT environment much more efficiently than SIEM technology alone. By sending contextualized XS1 data to your SIEM, you’re now able to incorporate enriched NonStop data with meaning that can be coupled with data from your other platforms and applications to paint an overall risk profile of your IT environment. You’re suddenly nimble and able to quickly address real threats as they’re happening and BEFORE they do damage.
1Projected ROI over a three year period for a large US Based financial institution with multi-node NonStop environment
Multi-Factor Authentication on Nonstop Made Easy
with CSP AUTHENTICATOR+™
Multi-factor authentication has become vital in ensuring secure access to systems. It provides superior safety measures over easily compromised single password methods and is also an important requirements to comply with regulations such as PCI 8.3 and GDPR.
Any remote user or non-console admin user that has access to the cardholder environment must include multi-factor authentication. From legacy Pathway applications to the latest RESTful interfaces, effective MFA must be provided for users and applications that have the potential to access sensitive data.
The new CSP Authenticator+™ supports both primary and secondary authentication for NonStop. It provides a RESTful interface which supports multi-factor authenticated logins on NonStop systems. CSP Authenticator+ resides on the NonStop Platform and uses an OSS “bridge” to connect to the RESTful interface of the CSP Authenticator+ web server.
CSP Authenticator+™ Dashboard
Primary authentication methods such as RADIUS, RSA Cloud, Active Directory, Oracle ID Manager and Open LDAP are supported. User Rights Synchronization will make it easier than ever before to integrate a NonStop system into the Enterprise ID management platforms.
CSP Authenticator+ can provide authentication services via Safeguard Authentication SEEP, or Pathway and Non-Pathway servers. Almost any application, including TACL, can now easily support multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Secondary authentication methods supported include RSA SecurID, Email, Text Message, Google Authenticate and RADIUS. You can now enable MFA logins for different applications, making them more secure!
CSP Authenticator+ Workflow
CSP Authenticator+ Key Features:
· Primary and Secondary authentication support
· Browser-based user friendly interface
· Standardized authentication across platforms
· Configurable for all or selected users
· Certified for the latest RSA release
· Support for virtual addressing
CSP - Compliance at your Fingertips™
For complimentary access to CSP-Wiki®, an extensive repository of NonStop security knowledge and best practices, please visit
wiki.cspsecurity.com
We Built the Wiki for NonStop Security ®
Regards,
The CSP Team
+1(905) 568 - 8900
Visit the XYPRO events calendar here to see where we will be and to sign up for free webinars.
HPE – Business Critical Dialogue 2019
May 24, 2019 - May 26, 2019
Kochi, Kerala, India
June 17, 2019 - June 20, 2019
Washington, DC
June 19, 2019
Las Vegas, NV
N2TUG – Texas/Oklahoma Tandem User Group Meeting
June 27, 2019
Grapevine, TX
2019 PCI SSC North America Community Meeting
September 17, 2019 - September 19, 2019
Vancouver, BC, Canada
ATUG – Atlanta HPE NonStop User Group 2019
September 18, 2019
Alpharetta, GA
September 25, 2019 - September 26, 2019
Mississauga, Ontario
2019 PCI SSC Europe Community Meeting
October 22, 2019 - October 24, 2019
Dublin, Ireland
NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2019
November 3, 2019 - November 6, 2019
Burlingame, CA
2019 PCI SSC Asia-Pacific Community Meeting
November 20, 2019 - November 21, 2019
Melbourne, Australia
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