Business critical applications derive their importance from the functionality they provide and the data they contain. Today, data is recognized as the key to breaking down barriers between systems and ensuring that legacy processing silos are tapped for the unique information that every company needs to develop greater business insight. Externalization of applications as services via the web allows any computer equipped with a browser to pull data directly from web-enabled application, and locally integrate it with other data that can come from a variety of sources, both internal and external to the company.

This has caused the requirements for application monitoring solutions to grow exponentially.  The familiar dashboards we associate with application monitoring solutions have become programmable entities in their own right. Tools have emerged rapidly in support of operational staff who needed to see far more than just what is running on the system.  This applies just as much to applications running on NonStop systems as it does to any other platform.

The Universal Dashboard
Dashboards have become points of integration, transitioning from simply providing visibility into a working application, by adding context sensitive guidance on the best response options for addressing and correcting potential error situations. This topic has been the subject of numerous posts to the IR blog and highlights the important operational role that a world class monitoring solution provides by capturing, displaying and sharing data. In additional to NonStop and NonStop X, Prognosis for Payments and Infrastructure supports a number of other fit-for-purpose platforms that will serve the NonStop community well as it embraces hybrid systems.  

Want to learn more? Check out IR on Demand where you can watch any of our webcasts on demand and join us for our next webcast on December 3^rd at 8:00am MT. Richard Buckle will be providing a recap of the highlights of NonStop Technical Bootcamp.

Andre Cuenin
andre.cuenin@ir.com

 

Be sure to subscribe to the NonStop Innovations blog for great articles like this, a recap of Boot Camp—which will be posted shortly—and much more. Read this article and subscribe.

 With the recent announcement by HP that the NonStop is moving to the enterprise it seems like this is the perfect time to tell the NonStop world about a project that NTI has been working on for some time. On December 4^th at BITUG in London I will be unveiling a new infrastructure direction.

Did you miss NuWave Technologies' latest webinar, "Modernization through Integration"? Well now you can now view the video, which includes a demo of NuWave's latest product, LightWave™ Server, for free. 

In this video, Gabrielle Guerrera, NuWave’s director of business development, and Dave Belliveau, NuWave’s senior software architect, show how you can modernize your HP NonStop applications by integrating them with other platforms, applications, and Web services. As an added bonus, Dave, one of the original developers of the product, gives a demo of how simply LightWave Server can share information from your NonStop servers using JSON Web services and REST APIs. View the webinar now.

               Third Data Corporation provides numerous products which can reside on HP Nonstop and other HP  hardware platforms. In addition we provide custom high performance software design and development for our clients. Don't forget to download the latest version of Sysbusy. It's FREE at www.thirddata.com/dwnlds.html

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.

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  encrypts the data  for your application so that you can become compliant. 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 can also integrate with SQL systems (SQL MX/MP, Oracle, Postgres etc).

TokenStore – TokenStore supports multiple formats. From generation and storage of Tokens per EMV specifications to translation and non-storage of full or partial customer PCI data.

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.

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.

Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers, reminded everyone of his secret to success last month while presenting at CTUG in Toronto. 

Innovation and Change, without those, you have no success.

Criminals are constantly finding new and clever ways to exploit security defenses.   Security providers must drive the innovation necessary to counter these attacks to protect business operations and data. The strategy that worked yesterday probably won’t work tomorrow.  That’s why XYPRO is looking beyond what’s there today.  To innovate and develop the solutions that protect you and your business from threats – today and tomorrow.

Mission critical systems like the HPE Integrity NonStop servers house an organization’s most valuable applications and assets and must be protected against a variety of threats. Although the NonStop has unique security features not typically seen on other enterprise systems, it is still at risk from insider and outsider threats, misuse, non-compliance and security breaches.  As systems grow larger, faster and more economical, the amount of data generated, and thus put at risk, exponentially increases.  Keeping track of what is happening to that data and those systems becomes a very expensive and inefficient exercise for system operators.  Without proactive control and visibility into their NonStop infrastructure, organizations expose themselves to greater risk. Current solutions do not provide the specialized NonStop security intelligence and contextualization to paint the correct picture for this purpose.

XYPRO is pleased to announce XYGATE SecurityOne! SecurityOne provides real time Security Intelligence and Analytics for HPE NonStop™ Integrity Servers. SecurityOne leverages the data generated by many sources to Reduce Your Mean Time to Detection and take a proactive approach to security.

To learn more see our article in the upcoming Connection Magazine!

XYPRO Technology Corporation

It has been almost a week since the event and it is fair to say, it has been a great event with more than 400 attendees. 

The future of NonStop, Security and YUMA were all high on the agenda for me as well as comForte's pre-conference workshops on Tokenization and YUMA.

Last but not least, Michelle West’s account of the joint tokenization project using SecurData at TD Canada Trust was a great testimony to the team's technical expertise and the superiority of the solution.

Read my day-by-day account of the highlights and other noteworthy points.

XML schemas define the “rules” that a set of XML documents must follow.  These “rules” cover two main aspects:  

1.      The structure of an XML document (e.g. element and attribute names, minOccurs, and maxOccurs)

2.      The data content found within the XML document (e.g. minLength, maxLength, and domain)

As part of defining the structure of an XML document, XML schemas use order indicators (also known as compositors) to specify the order that elements must appear in as well as identify elements that are mutually exclusive. 

The order indicators used by XML Schemas are <all>, <choice> and <sequence>.  These three schema elements provide a powerful technique for defining how a set of XML documents must look; however, they also add complexity and therefore significantly increase development time when coding support for them by hand.  

XML Thunder by Canam Software Labs, Inc. simplifies working with order indicators by automatically interpreting these rules in an XML Schema and then generating all of the COBOL or C source code needed to read, write and validate associated XML documents. 

To understand more about XML Schema order indicators and how XML Thunder can expedite the process, please click here for more info.  (http://goo.gl/gOFLdl)

Our Financial Transaction Switch is Available as a Standalone System or as an OmniPayments Instance in Our Private, NonStop X-based Cloud

Any successful slide presentation includes at least one memorable graphic.  In the case of OmniPayments, the TCO slide left session attendees talking.  “Migrate to OmniPayments from Your Existing Financial Transaction Switch in Just Four Months” focused on OmniPayments’ efficient, pain-free migration schedule with no disruption to customer services. Although the takeaways were many, what stood out were OmniPayments’ efforts to reduce Total Cost of Ownership by optimizing its software stack. 

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.

The OmniPayments pricing model is based on a one-time software license instead of on transaction volume.   OmniPayments guarantees that customers will save at least 50% off their current transaction processing costs.

Also cost-effective and a successful TCO reducer is OmniCloudX, the next generation of OmniPayments’ standalone system. It is built on NonStop X and hosts numerous instances of OmniPayments at a price so attractive that mid-size retailers now can enjoy the benefits of having their own high-capacity transaction switches.  OmniCloudX starts at only $5,000 USD per month and is available on a pay-for-use basis.  OmniPayments also supplies the IT staff needed to manage the transaction switches running in its private cloud, thereby allowing participating companies to focus on their core businesses.

OmniPayments systems in production today process 700 million transactions per month, generated by point-of-sales terminals and over 14,000 ATMs. 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.  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, 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. 

Join NuWave Technologies at the Trinity House in London on December 4^th for BITUG’s Big SIG.

David Ross, NuWave’s regional sales director for the EMEA region, will explain how to modernize your HP NonStop applications by integrating them with other platforms, so be sure to catch his presentation, “Modernization through Integration” at 11:35 in the Pepys room.

If you haven’t registered for the Big SIG yet, you can do so at https://bitugbigsig2105.eventbrite.co.uk, and then email davidross@nuwavetech.com to set up a meeting about how to modernize your applications!

The science of data communication has come a long way since AT&T first introduced the technology in the late 1950s. Back then, AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph Company) was studying the potential for transmitting data over a telephone network. Initial results proved depressing. Data transmission was unreliable due to issues inherent in AT&T’s network, and those issues had to be fixed before data communication could be made commercially viable. Once the network was upgraded, AT&T began developing their products, or modems, in earnest. AT&T referred to their modems as dataphones.

A modem (modulator-demodulator) is a device that produces an encoded digital signal that can be transmitted easily and then decoded to reproduce the original data. Why after all this time have memories about modems surfaced? Availability Digest Managing Editor Bill Highleyman (he’s the old Tandem guy) recently toured the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California USA (http://www.computerhistory.org). It is a huge facility, and a visitor easily can devote a full day or more to seeing all the exhibits. To Bill’s surprise, he found displayed the DataPhone 103, the design and development of which he supervised when he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs), AT&T’s development unit.

Bill joined the company after receiving his Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and Bell Labs sent Bill to school for his Doctorate in Electrical Engineering. Why no degree in computer science? None existed at the time.

The DataPhone 103 was the second commercial modem for computers. Released in 1962, it offered full duplex communication (data travels in both directions simultaneously) at a speed of 300 baud. Fast for its time, it nevertheless would have taken the 103 an excruciating seven hours to transmit a standard, one megabyte JPEG photo.

The DataPhone 103 paved the way for such modern mobile communications standards as 3G (third generation networks) and 4G (fourth generation networks). Thanks to Bill and his design team, the 103’s encoding scheme, now known as Bell 103 Modulation, remains in use today in shortwave radio, amateur radio, and some commercial applications. For many years, higher-speed modems retained the ability to emulate the Bell 103 as a fallback method for data communication at lower speeds if network conditions deteriorated.

“Modem Memories” is among the articles in the November Availability Digest. http://bit.ly/1IctoHk It provides an interesting look-back at a technology that now sits in a prominent position in the archives of computer history.

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 712 members and counting. Our most recent thread is “Continuous Availability vs. Zero Downtime.” Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.
 

comForte took part in the “Yuma” project which enables tight coupling of Linux systems with HP NonStop NS X systems and used Yuma to “Infiniband-enable” it’s Client Server Link (CSL) product. CSL can be used to easily build distributed applications between a Linux system and the HP NonStop, a.k.a “Hybrid architecture”. While that in itself is not new, the reduced latency and improved throughput of Infiniband compared to TCP/IP changes the scenario massively.

comForte and HP ran a successful pre-conference workshop at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp which was presented in three parts: Justin Simonds, HP,  talked about the Hybrid architecture and potential use cases. Mike Rice, HP, explained the Yuma/Infiniband architecture in more detail and Brad Poole, comForte, covered the results of comForte’s Proof of Concept based on an early version of the Yuma product; he also discussed comForte’s product plans based on its existing product set and the new possibilities.

Earlier this year we reviewed our website and realized it was time for something new, fresh and modern. We wanted a site that allow our customers easy access to valuable information and resources that we strive to provide in real time.

As many of us know rebuilding a website is not easy task, but after months of hard work we are excited to say that it is ready to break out of the shadows and step into the spotlight. The brand new www.xypro.com is now available, we hope that you will take the time to look around and take advantage of all the added resources and features.

As the year is drawing to an end we are looking forward to yet another key event in the NonStop space - the BITUG BIG SIG in London.

What's in store?

comForte’s plenary session is entitled ‘Highly available tokenization services for the payments industry’ which will be given by Thomas Gloerfeld, VP Marketing.

In light of ever increasing security threats to the payment industry it is becoming more and more important for those businesses to limit or eliminate their exposure to data breaches. Tokenization is the last line of defense which provides both lower risk and compliance with industry standards (such as PCI). This presentation looks at a new, innovative tokenization solution which can be implemented cross-platform to help reduce operational risk and achieve compliance.

Please visit www.bitug.com for more information and registration.

Stop by our booth to learn more about Payment Security, Application Modernization and Connectivity.

Dave from Tandemworld will be attending BITUG on 4th Dec 2015.

Come find Dave and see how the eNewsletter could assist you in 2016.

You can reach Dave on +44 (0)7801 540086 or info@tandemworld.net

This book is for anyone with an interest in HP NonStop systems. This book is for you if you're new to the platform, have spent many years working with it, if you manage people or IT systems, or if you're a system operator or developer on/for the HP NonStop platform.

Find out more about us at www.tandemworld.net