Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2013

For many 2013 contained surprises, whereas for others, it merely confirmed steady-as-you-go continuation of what we hoped would transpire. We may not “always get what (we) want,” to paraphrase the popular song, “But if you try, sometimes you just might find, you get what you need”. Continuation of NonStop beyond Itanium has been a concern for some enterprises, but this year we gained reassurance that NonStop will live on for many years to come.

Perhaps the best observation about our need for NonStop continuation came from IR’s General Manager, Products & Alliances, John Dunne, in a quote he provided for the post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View. In the post, HP continues to set goals very high and the NonStop community is enjoying the stretch! Dunne said, “With the architecture moving to a mainstream chipset, as is the case with the x86, NonStop won’t fall off the ‘chipset cliff’”.

We often overlook the importance of telling those around us of what we are doing, a circumstance, I have to admit, I am just as guilty as any other member of the NonStop community. I often look back at conversations, email exchanges, and even phone conversations and wonder whether I could have done more in articulating the value proposition of NonStop. Will I lose credibility hammering away at the positive message of NonStop? It’s something I am always conscious about, however for me the glass is always half full, with a lot more yet to come.

Across the vendor community I am seeing change. Who would have imagined a year ago that we would be reading about vendors as diverse as OmniPayments, NuWave, Infrasoft and comForte all talking about Cloud usage and support out of NonStop? Or that vendors, like Integrated Research, would be openly presenting features that include the availability of a downloadable “app” for use by operations staff? Or who could have foretold just how many vendors – among them WebAction and Attunity – will be providing solutions to first integrate with and then extend the analytics from Big Data? Again these significant dots are being connected.

In an email exchange with Attunity this week, the response to the work they are doing in support of Vertica has seen the focus of Attunity shift to more positively emphasize the work they are doing with Big Data. Similarly, the work just completed by Infrasoft in support of Cloud “bursting” is entering a new phase where more attention is being given to the practical aspects of just what to do with such a technology. All of this is definitely generating the buzz around NonStop that we had hoped for at the start of the year.

Few, I expect, missed the references in blogs by OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia, this past week. “We are fully supportive of Cloud computing and see it’s exploitation as a resource-on-demand,” Yash informed readers of the latest post to Real Time View. “We will see the Cloud increasingly become a repository for data as our clients turn to Clouds for Disaster Recovery, and we anticipate the next phase to be Cloud bursting in support of low value transactions – if the data is already in the Cloud, supporting transactions that simply look-up data, will be an easy next-step to accomplish.”

Just recently, Yash expanded on this observation by saying, “Our intention would be move Disaster Recovery replication to the Cloud first so the takeover is much faster and the availability times increase”. Yash then added, “Active transactions will then be next to head into the Cloud. And of course all of this will always stay anchored and driven out of NonStop.”

Last month in My Musings on NonStop I wrote about the transformation taking place across the NonStop community. This wasn’t just casual small talk on my part – it’s a real tangible pursuit by vendors, and one with visible outcomes, some of what have been referenced above. Transformation has become a key theme, I wrote, simply because we are all participating in change on an unprecedented scale – NonStop support of x86 being just a small part in this transformation.

The headlines that savagely dismember IT organizations who fail to deliver service 24 X 7 will only get worse, and it’s not

to the big service providers either – just look at the fallout from the huge outage experienced recently at RBS. In an FT article, “RBS chief blames lack of investment for IT systems failure”, RBS’s chief executive, Ross McEwan, clearly embarrassed by the news, acknowledged, “Last night’s systems failure was unacceptable.”

It’s true that, following complex M&A activities as well as considerable government intervention worldwide, the robustness of many of today’s largest banks is questionable. However, it’s going to take a lot of action on all of our parts to communicate the message of NonStop – it may not be what many CIOs want to hear but it may indeed be just what they need! This is not a case of me losing credibility but rather, jumping wholeheartedly on the transformation bandwagon. But rather, berating those CIOs that are happy in doing nothing at all and leaving complex IT decisions to those inexperienced in such matters.

The coming year, too, will be one where I anticipate even stronger user and vendor support of Regional User Group events worldwide. I anticipated seeing some growth there when, at the beginning of the year, I wrote of how the stand out item for me in 2012 had been the support given to user group meetings and events worldwide. Attending this year’s NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp reinforced those early observations – the user community is definitely on its way back following a period where its likelihood of survival looked grim.

And about that, I am now extremely optimistic for the future despite so many CIOs seemingly prepared to fall on their swords – if we are to tell the story and convince our management, RUG meetings represent a step in the right direction and I plan on attending a number of RUG meetings around the world this year. I hope to see many of you as I do, and in this final musings for 2013, I want to close with wishing all of you the very prosperous of New Years!

Attend the main NonStop Community event in Europe 2014! This conference & exhibition is presented in the tradition of ITUG Europe for the third time by GTUG and Connect Germany. It takes place every two years with a focus on NonStop (2012 in Dresden, 2009 in Darmstadt).

This is your chance to meet your fellow NonStop users and learn the latest on NonStop from users, HP and solution partners. The organizers are going to put together a strong international agenda, featuring keynotes from HP and others, as well as user and vendor presentations while also offering educational and networking opportunities for users of other platforms. Further more workshops will provide detailed insights in actual NonStop topics.

Enjoy the comfortable conference facilities at the luxury Hotel Atlantic Kempinski, located in the heart of Hamburg next to „Außenalster“. Discover the Hanseatic Spirit of Hamburg and get a glance of the tradition, present and future of this magnificent city.

A number of social events will provide a relaxed and inspiring environment for networking with your peers in the NonStop Community.

Stay connected with comForte

We have posted our latest Newsletter on our website and we invite you to read up on our company and product news. The comForte Newsletter is available online at http://www.comforte.com/ecomaXL/get_blob.php?name=cF_Newsletter_November_2013.pdf.

And there is more, join the security discussion in the HP NonStop [Tandem] Security Group on LinkedIn.

Last but not least, follow us on ...

comForteLounge BlogSpot

comForteLounge LinkedIn Group

comForteLounge Twitter

comForte on YouTube

Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year from Insider Technologies Limited.

Insider Technologies would like to wish all of our customers, present and future, a very Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year.

So, now that we’ve got your attention, please come and visit us at our new, redesigned website, at:

Insider Technologies

So what’s new? Well, everything really!

We have designed the new site from scratch, to help you understand our expertise and innovation in looking beyond the obvious, to project the unlikely, to escalate, alert, warn and protect your payments systems and the underlying infrastructure and applications.

As part of our innovative solutions, we are highly specialised in delivering new aspects of the information that you already have access to, condensing complex data and processes into a single comprehensive operational dashboard.

Millions of transactions take place every second. We monitor them, check them and analyse them, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. If they are different in any way to the ‘norm’, if they deviate, if they take longer, if there’s a pattern change, then we notify, escalate, display and ring alarm bells – we inform you, your clients, your business, your operations – we become your inner eye. We store, we query, we find fraud, all within stored transactional and payments data, long after it’s disappeared from source.

There are many more improvements and updates to our website, not just within the payments and transaction arena but also for our HP NonStop, Windows, Linux, Unix and Message Tracking products which helps make our company website more informative and helps you to identify solutions to match your requirements.

We really do hope you enjoy the new site and thank you for visiting us.

Merry Christmas to one and all.

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

Tel:        +44 (0) 161 876 6606
Fax:        +44 (0) 161 868 6666
Email:   enquiries@insidertech.co.uk

LT-CONSULT and comForte 21 announce partnership for Austria and CEE

LT-Consult has entered into a cooperation agreement with comForte covering business development and sales of selected comForte products in the target markets Austria and Central Eastern Europe.

"comForte's strong history and presence as a market leader in Connectivity, Security, Nonstop Enterprise Application Integration and Application Modernization solutions gives us a very unique opportunity of providing Nonstop customers located in Austria and Central Eastern Europe with a very complete product and service offering.", says Thomas Leeb, owner and GM of LT-CONSULT.

"We are very pleased about the partnership with LT-CONSULT.", says Dr Michael Rossbach. "Thomas Leeb has a long history of more than 20 years in these target markets and our cooperation builds on his experience and excellent network in Austria and the CEE."

For more information please contact:

Thomas Leeb, LT-CONSULT, Thomas.leeb@lt-consult.at

Thomas Gloerfeld, comForte, t.gloerfeld@comforte.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.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 605 members and counting. Our latest thread is “Try Doing This Today!” Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

Call Dave Stewart today on +44 (0)7831 775115 or email him on dstewart@brightstrand.com for more information.

A growing number of CSP customers are taking advantage of CSP’s unique real-time monitoring and alerting of Safeguard, BASE24 and EMS events. Additionally, events generated from CSP Passport, CSP’s session and command control product, can also be monitored.

Today's payments landscape is changing and financial institutions around the world have never been under so much pressure: regulation is increasing and customers are demanding improved service with ever more emphasis on convenience and simplicity. Legacy systems cannot adapt in a rapid and cost effective manner owing to the inflexibility and complexity of their design.

Extending the life of the legacy solutions exposes financial institutions to loss of market share and creates an inability to compete which will ultimately constrain the commercial operation of the business. Meanwhile, the impact of faster, easier to use, more flexible technology has aligned with the growth in expectations to change payments as we know them today.

comForte 21 planning to acquire Escort SQL suite of database modernization products

Back In Training – NonStop Technical Bootcamp 2013

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 605 members and counting. Our latest thread is “Try Doing This Today!” Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.