Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2013

The NonStop Advance Technical Boot Camp in San Jose is around the corner and we are ready to go.

We have exciting news to share with you and comForte will be featured in three presentations.

· The planned acquisition of an exciting set of products for NonStop from a very well respected supplier.

· The distribution of QMAN from CS-Software - persistent message queuing on NonStop.

· The availability of SecurData/SQL for the tokenization of data in SQL databases.

· The strategic partnership with Protegrity for Enterprise Tokenization across platforms

Bjørn Morten Holm, Senior IT Consultant, Hemit (comForte customer presentation)

Last but not least, please stop by our booth to find out more about what's new at comForte.

Because high-availability and fault-tolerant systems need strong security

Recent studies have shown that hackers (both internal and external) often use relatively simple attack methods and that it’s as important as ever to follow basic security best practices. Therefore, it makes sense that the first three items in our Top 10 list were about establishing a base level of security within the NonStop system:

Now that we’ve covered those broader fundamentals, this week we’ll get into a more “granular” security topic—controlling user activity at different levels within the NonStop system.

A fundamental IT security challenge is to provide users with only the system access and privileges they need to do their jobs (least privilege or Role Based Access Control RBAC). Allowing users to have system access and privileges greater than their job requires presents a significant security risk—particularly on the NonStop which typically has mission-critical applications running and sensitive information being processed or stored. The risk is not only from intentionally malicious activity but also from the possibility of an unsophisticated (or stressed or rushed) user, when given too much power, not realizing the ramifications of their actions.

Gravic Presenting Three Sessions at Connect NonStop Advanced

Please stop by Gravic Booth #21 at the NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp on November 3-5 held at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose. We will be handing out a limited number of yellow wristbands at our booth and presentations for a tour of the HP ATC Headquarters in Palo Alto on Tuesday, 7-11pm. We look forward to meeting with customers, HP executives and engineers, and other attendees at the show. We appreciate the opportunity to share ideas regarding how the Shadowbase product suite provides solutions to your most pressing business issues within business continuity, data integration & synchronization, and application integration needs. We hope to see you at one or all of our presentations:

· A two-hour pre-conference seminar on Sunday, November 3, 1-3pm, Recent Advances in High and Continuous Availability Architectures for NonStop Systems, which will also review the upcoming synchronous transactional replication benefits and how the technology works. This talk is directed to technical architects, technical management, and other practitioners

· A business-level presentation for managers, architects, and practitioners on the current 'state' of business continuity replication in the NonStop space. This presentation discusses the unfortunate realization that many sites eventually build an active/passive Disaster Recovery environment, only to have major issues when it is called into use after a major disaster. The take-away is that an organization can certainly start with an active/passive DR environment for business continuity protection, but that it should not end there as the active/passive DR architecture may not deliver the needed support when it is actually called into use. Instead, plan to continue and move into the higher availability, less risky, and less expensive (from a TCO perspective) architectures including sizzling-hot-standby or one of the active/active architectures.

Interested parties may contact us at +1.610.647.6250 or SBProductManagement@gravic.com to discuss their specific situation and to learn more about the solutions we offer.

During the first week of October, Paul J. Holenstein, EVP, attended and presented at the INNIG Meeting at the HP BV offices in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The meeting’s focus was on business continuity architectures. It was one of the largest that INNIG has ever hosted, and was well-attended by all of the NonStop users/customers in the Netherlands. After presentations by HP, ING, Rabobank, and Equens, Mr. Holenstein spoke about the business continuity continuum, and how recent advances in async and sync data replication technology is bringing truly continuously-available architectures to the marketplace without any application service downtime ever, regardless of a planned or an unplanned major outage occurs. To hear more about new zero data loss (ZDL) and active/active route-anywhere collision avoidance technologies, please contact Gravic or plan to attend the upcoming Connect TBC event and attend the Shadowbase educational pre-conference seminar, Recent Advances in High and Continuous Availability Architectures for NonStop Systems on Sunday, November 3, 1-3pm.

In September, Gravic gave a well-received presentation on Disaster Preparedness and the Cost of Being Offline at the 2013 CTUG Fall Conference at the Hewlett-Packard Canadian Headquarters in Mississauga, Ontario. Please contact us for a copy of the slides. Approximately 120 delegates and vendors attended from North America, with some from Europe and points beyond. Congratulations to Sunil Balakrishnan of HP Canada who won our Kindle Fire prize! Please click for more information on the CTUG Fall Conference.

Also in September, Gravic attended The EBUG User’s Forum, held in The Great Hall of the Institution of Civil Engineers in Westminster, London. Gravic provided attendees with a copy of its latest case study, Shadowbase ZDM Achieves Zero Downtime Migration for Large ACI BASE24 Bank Datacenter. EBUG was previously the “European BASE24™ User’s Group” and is now affectionately known as the “Everybody Belongs User’s Group.” It is officially “The Independent Group for All Payments System Users,” with the purpose of assembling a forum to discuss the latest trends, technologies, and products in commercial payments processing. The event drew over 160 people from Europe as well as Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and Mexico. Session categories included Market Intelligence, BASE24 Processing, Postilion Processing, Customer Case Studies, and C-level Presentations. Please click for the EBUG Forum Agenda.

Please stop by Gravic’s booth or table at these fall tradeshows and meetings to speak with us about your data replication and data integration needs or just to say hello. We look forward to attending and/or presenting at the following events:

In much of what I published last month transformations were featured, and for good reason. NonStop, HP, and the industry itself are transforming before our very eyes. Systems are getting even smaller, the amount of data being captured has soared and the volume of transactions is escalating to unimaginable numbers – passing 1,000 tps on a single NonStop system processor has been achieved, even as processing 10,000 tps on a single NonStop system processor is in sight. A feat Randall Becker is willing to bet a jar-full of candy on, if you happened to be at the recent CTUG event. However, these past couple of weeks it’s been all about Hybrids and Hybrid computers.

In an upcoming post to realtime.ir I wrote of how Hybrid computing is being brought about because it just makes sense to optimize configurations around technology that best serves a specific function. In that post I noted, too, that already when we look at modern NonStop systems we see controllers for storage and communications running on ProLiant boxes supporting Linux. So, no, let’s not get too worked up about NonStop and Hybrids, I concluded, as we already have them in one form and NonStop development has implemented this in a manner that hasn’t impacted the familiar availability characteristics of NonStop.

In the post of October 1, 2013, to comForte Lounge, CTUG: Choice, options and hybrid computing featured in response to emergence of HP Megatrends I wrote of how caution was still needed when contemplating Hybrid computing. In that post I wrote of how it’s a wise IT executive who explores the opportunity more closely. When it comes to running the mission critical applications a business may rely upon, I suggested then changing from one platform to another is a high-risk proposition at best. Moving selected less critical components though to an adjacent, less costly, platform offers a higher probability for success and it is this option that is receiving greater consideration by IT executives.

Returning to the upcoming post to realtime.ir I was able to quote an IR executive familiar with Hybrid computing who added yet another perspective. “Hybrid computing is inevitable from what we are watching take place in the market. The optimization that is taking place today suggests a return to specialization – not just at the hardware level but at the software level as well. For Hybrid to work involves virtualization as it does embrace Clouds – Virtualization has been driving the adoption of Clouds even as the arrival of Clouds has further fueled Virtualization,” said John Dunne, IR’s General Manager of Products and Alliances “But Hybrid computing also fuels diversity in new and valuable ways – there’s a growing awareness that new skills need to be mastered and new middleware embraced.”

I have always been concerned about introducing too many moving parts into a transaction path in case the resultant solution introduces instability. Combining many different parts doesn’t extend the MTBF, but ultimately reduces it. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of scope here to explore capitalizing on less costly components where the properties of NonStop can be extended to give, at a minimum, a level of persistence all within what or that which? the NonStop community expect. By this I am referring to the additions to the latest release of Pathway that allow instances of Pathway server classes to execute on other NonStop systems where Pathway may not be configured and where, with the help of partners such as Infrasoft (and marketed by comForte) this has been extended to platforms apart from NonStop.

And then of course, there’s always data to be protected, just as we need to protect transactions, and even as we elect to move where transactions are being executed so too we may elect to move the data – something that continues to come up in discussions with the partners such as Attunity that to date is being viewed highly among the vendors such as HP’s Vertica group. It wasn’t by accident that HP VP & GM, Integrity Servers, Randy Meyer specifically called out partners like Attunity and WebAction when it came to Big Data and Business Analytics where NonStop would be involved.

It’s going to be a Hybrid computing world for the foreseeable future, I suspect, and we will be increasingly dependent upon the NonStop vendor community to plug the gaps that may surface when servers, apart from those from HP, are involved. Monitoring, moving and making sense (of all that’s taking place) has been a common theme for much of the history of NonStop. From the very first time NonStop front-ended an IBM mainframe at a financial institution (in support of an ATM network, for instance), Hybrid computing has been alive. Complementing the IBM mainframe with server farms and clouds will become the norm soon for many businesses utilizing NonStop servers.

The pressure on vendors to add expertise on platforms and solutions apart from NonStop will only increase as businesses do build more complex Hybrid computing … focusing solely on NonStop will likely be the oddity in the coming years for vendors providing solutions to the NonStop community. Perhaps not the message everyone expects to hear but a looming reality none the less. Hybrid computing by definition demands knowledge of what’s on all technologies constituting a hybrid. Big Data, Hybrid (computers) and Cloud (computing) will be dominating the messages from NonStop so it’s really not that surprising to see Hybrid computing being the topic of as many features and posts as it has been.

Lessening the value proposition of NonStop? Detracting from why we even run NonStop? I don’t think so – indeed, quite the opposite. For me, Hybrid computers demonstrate clearly just how flexible and accommodating the architecture of NonStop is and how well it can be applied to addressing the business problems of today!

TANDsoft Adds Data Deduplication Technology to FileSync 3.1

Yet another attractive feature is about to be added to FileSync, the automatic file synchronization and replication software solution from TANDsoft, Inc. FileSync Version 3.1 will offer data deduplication, which significantly reduces bandwidth requirements and the size of backups by streaming only data that has changed within a file or database. Redundant data is not transmitted.

FileSync automatically monitors, replicates and synchronizes source files, program environments, application environments, configuration files, programs – anything non-database that needs to be kept current across the network. It supports qualified expressions and referential integrity as well as the synchronization of SQL/MX catalogues, schemas, tables, partitions, and indices. In addition, FileSync supports the SQL/MX filter, SQL/MX 3.2.1, and all earlier SQL/MX versions.

The data-deduplication feature allows FileSync to improve synchronization / replication times for large files. Only changed data, not entire files, are sent to the backup database. FileSync deduplication – or client deduplication - takes place at the system hosting the primary database. The FileSync deduplication algorithm detects what changes have been made to an already replicated file and transmits only the unique data. In addition to reduced backup sizes and bandwidth requirements, FileSync deduplication decreases disk loads, increases Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and reduces Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

FileSync supports a wide variety of file types, including all Enscribe files – audited, non-audited, structured and unstructured; all OSS files; NonStop SQL/MP Catalogs, Tables and Partitions; NonStop SQL/MX Catalogs, Schemas, Tables and Partitions; program source and object files; and configuration and TACL files.

TANDsoft customers use FileSync for system migration, disaster recovery, upgrades, and backups.
The software works closely with all NonStop real-time data replication products to provide a comprehensive solution for maintaining duplicate system and application environments.

TANDsoft will exhibit at the NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp, November 3rd through 5th, in San Jose, California, USA. Visit us at Table #12. We also encourage you to attend our Boot Camp presentation, “Interception Technology Enhances Application Functionality.”

TANDsoft’s “best of breed, best in price” philosophy offers highly competitive value for all TANDsoft solutions. In addition to FileSync, they include the OPTA2000 virtual clock- and time-zone simulator; 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, 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 program source-code modifications, are available for all HP NonStop servers, and support major third-party applications. Free trials are available. For information about TANDsoft solutions, contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Our Enscribe to SQL Migration Forum on LinkedIn is at 170 members and counting. www.tandsoft.com.

CSP celebrates its 25^th Anniversary at Technical Boot Camp

CSP is excited to be joining the world-wide NonStop community at Technical Boot Camp this November at San Jose.

Please drop by our booth (#35) to get the latest information on CSP’s new and enhanced solutions for Change Control and Compliance. We would also be happy to review a number of updates and improvements to our wide range of products for NonStop users with you.

This year, CSP celebrates 25 years of excellence in providing security solutions to the NonStop users community. As part of our celebrations we will be having a special draw at our booth for a 25 year old bottle of Scotch, bottled the same year that we started in business. Make sure you visit our booth and participate in this draw.

In addition, as sponsors, we invite everyone to the Beer Bust on Sunday between 6pm and 8 pm to help us kick off another great year!”

Regards,

Bill Simpson

Director of Product Management

Computer Security Products, Inc.

200 Matheson Blvd., West - Suite 200

Mississauga, Ontario

L5R 3L7

+1 905 568-8900 X 278

E: bills@CSPsecurity.com

W: www.CSPsecurity.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.

Availability Digest Warns that Windows XP Retirement Will be a Hackers’ Boon

Microsoft will retire its venerable and very popular XP operating system on April 8, 2014. The OS currently is used on over a third of all PCs worldwide, and therein lays a serious challenge for users and a wonderful opportunity for hackers. As of next April, Microsoft no longer will issue patches to correct security flaws or other bugs in Windows XP. Although large XP users can continue to receive support via Microsoft’s expensive Custom Support program, the remaining XP users will be exposed to hackers who are banking their zero-day vulnerabilities until next April.

agileTel Runs Active/Active with Linux and MySQL – In last months’ Digest, we looked at the paucity of active/active implementations in the commodity server world. We review in this article one successful example of an active/active system using Linux servers and a MySQL database. It is a virtual PBX marketed by agileTel.

Protect Your Mission-Critical Applications with HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux – HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux is a suite of complementary software solutions designed to work together to meet the variable needs of any business. It protects against faults within a data center and enables downtime-free maintenance and upgrades.

"DDoS Attacks - The Latest Availability Threat" is Digest Managing Editor Bill Highleyman’s presentation at the upcoming Connect NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp, to be held November 3rd through 5th in San Jose, California, USA.

Knightcraft Technology senior consultant Greg Swedosh will be presenting at the upcoming HP NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp in San Jose. The topic is PCI DSS – A Practical Approach to Compliance and it draws on real life NonStop customer experiences to provide a practical framework on how to approach PCI compliance for the HP NonStop platform. Included are lessons learnt from recent PCI projects, common obstacles faced by organizations, details of what a QSA will typically look for during a PCI assessment, the balance between compliance and security, separating the PCI myths from the facts, and approaches to achieving and maintaining PCI compliance through an ongoing program.

Knightcraft Technology is the leader in security consultancy services and PCI DSS compliance for the HP NonStop Server platform. With a number of packaged services including our PCI DSS Readiness service, security analysis, configuration and documentation, all of which can be delivered either onsite or remotely to international customers, we can help you with your security, audit and compliance requirements, wherever you are located in the world. Our definitive technical whitepaper on PCI DSS Compliance for HP NonStop Servers can be downloaded for free from http://www.knightcraft.com.

To find out more information on how we can help you achieve your security and compliance goals for the HP NonStop platform, please see our services page on the Knightcraft website at http://www.knightcraft.com/hp-nonstop-pci-compliance-security-services or email us at info@knightcraft.com. And of course, come and say hello to Greg if you will be attending the boot camp in San Jose.

Yves Tournier
NSAS NonStop Availability Services
www.nsas.fr
7 rue des 4 cheminées
92100 Boulogne
France
Tel +33(0)6 1480 3175

Day 1: Education Day - 9am-4pm, 4th December, HP Offices, Wood St, London
This year's Big SIG Education Day will be on XYGATE User Authentication (XUA), which is now included with all NB56000 systems. XUA helps fill the gaps in enterprise class authentication for the NonStop server. XUA expands on the native security functions available on the NonStop by providing additional features such as multi-factor authentication, sophisticated error management options and logon specific audit reporting. Adding RSA, RADIUS and LDAP authentication as well as time based controls, XUA also brings much more granular authentication control to your NonStop enterprise. Register to attend this Education Day to learn more about how XUA can help secure your NonStop server while adding enterprise authentication methods to your system.

BIG SIG Social Evening - 6pm, 4th December, The Minories pub, Tower Hill, London
We're continuing our tradition of holding a networking evening following our Education Day. So come and join us the night before the Big SIG kicks off and take the opportunity to chat with your fellow BITUG members about the latest in the NonStop world (or anything else..) in a relaxed environment. For information on the venue and how to find it see www.minories-london.co.uk

Day 2: BIG SIG Main Day - 9am-5pm, 5th December, Trinity House, London
In 2013, BITUG are continuing the tradition of holding our Big SIG event at Trinity House, opposite the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. We'll be running three parallel tracks, one dedicated to HP, including having Product Management in attendance to present the NonStop Roadmaps, and two based around the loose themes of modernisation and migrations. There will be sessions from VocaLink, IBM and for the first time we'll be welcoming Amazon, who will be giving a tour through their AWS cloud service landscape.
Andy Warrington will be giving a talk on the experiences and challenges encountered on a project to consolidate two Business Applications from a 4-Node NS Series server whilst simultaneously migrating to a single NB54000C Blade server, including the impact and harmonisation of day to day procedures.

The Big SIG is free for all BITUG members. Lunch and drinks will be provided (free of charge) in the Trinity House Library, which will also feature the Vendor Fair, where you can chat to representatives from HP and all the major NonStop solution providers.

For more info visit www.bitug.com

Do you ever feel like your stranded on a NonStop Island

Do you ever feel like your stranded on a NonStop Island

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 587 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.