Tandemworld eNewsletter for October 2014

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Tandemworld eNewsletter for October 2014

Tributary Systems introduces new LTO 6 Tape Technology

Tributary Systems, for 18 years the OEM supplier of tape products for all HP NonStop Servers, along with our partners at NonStop, are pleased to announce the availability of LTO 6 Tape Devices for NonStop NS and NB systems running the J-Series operating system.

The LTO 6 is available in three models:

·       - M8801A Rack Mount 24 Cartridge ACL w/FC interface

·       - M8802A Table Top 24 Cartridge ACL w/FC interface

·       - M8805A Table Top Single Cartridge w/SAS interface

 M8801A/M8802A 24 Cartridge ACL            M8805A Table Top Single Cartridge

Important features the new LTO 6 Tape Drives offer include:

·       - Dependability: Sets new standards for data integrity and reliability with a simple and robust design based on inherently reliable Linear Tape Open (LTO) time proven technology

·       - High Capacity: Stores up to 6.25 TB per LTO 6 data cartridge assuming 2.5:1 compression

·       - Reliability: Protects your data with a simple, high integrity, data path including read and write dynamic random access memory

·       - Security: Fully supports ESKM (Enterprise Secure Key Manager) versions 2.1 and 3.0

·       - Compatibility: LTO 6 drives read and write to LTO 6 and LTO 5 media, and read-only LTO 4 media

·       - Speed: Minimizes interruptions with high speed and data rate matching that squeezes optimal performance from your NonStop Server

And remember, the LTO consortium of HP, IBM and Quantum has announced that this technology will continue at least through LTO 10, to be released sometime in the early 2020’s, so the tape path you’re on now will continue for years to come!

Contact your local HP NonStop Sales Representative to order the new LTO 6 Tape Drives, they are in stock and ready for shipment now.

Tributary Systems continues to enhance and develop the flagship backup virtualization solution: Storage Director®

Do you ever feel like you’re stranded on NonStop Island when you’re trying to manage your systems in the enterprise?  Forget talking to “Wilson”; instead consolidate your backup storage environment across all platforms with:

The Storage Director product by Tributary Systems is a policy-based data management solution that connects “any host to any storage technology” and applies appropriate protective, management and archival services to data in a unique and business-savvy way.

Tributary Systems is an HP Converged Infrastructure Ready Solutions Partner!

With Tributary Systems' Storage Director, enterprises can apply data policies down to individual data volumes on host platforms (such as HP NonStop), based on business criteria and importance to business resiliency and restoration.

In enterprises with multiple host platforms – HP NonStop, HP Open VMS, Windows and VMware are running HP Data Protector, IBM zOS mainframes, IBM AS/400s (now IBM PowerSystems), among others – Storage Director enables sharing storage technologies otherwise dedicated to each host platform.

Such storage technologies can include existing enterprise storage disk, HP StoreOnce, EMC Data Domain, and Quantum DXI data de-duplication devices, physical tape, or any combination of storage technologies dictated by individual data management needs.

Storage Director is currently deployed in production environments backing up HP NonStop, IBM Mainframes, and IBM AS/400 (now IBM PowerSystems) Servers simultaneously.

Such a unified approach improves storage performance, enables consolidation and can lead to real savings of time, power and most importantly staff.

Storage Director offers numerous compelling features for NonStop customers:

·       Virtualizes and consolidates data backup to a single storage target in any heterogeneous datacenter

·       Designed for high availability computing environments and meets or exceeds data backup requirements for speed, capacity, compatibility and reliability

·       Full tape library management capabilities, allowing not only tape drive but also back-end physical tape library connection

·       Tape stacking, caching, data management, replication, monitoring and alerting capabilities are provided

·       Capability to be a pass through device provides seamless integration of disk, tape and fully supports HP StoreOnce, EMC Data Domain and Quantum DXI de-duplication technologies

·       Utilizes AES 256 bit encryption and supports LZ compression in cache

·       Non-disruptive to existing backup environments and NonStop applications

·       Fully supports NonStop native tape format

·       Supports iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NAS attachment to storage devices

·       Supports NonStop host IOAME/VIO/CLIM FC attachment

·       Employs a user friendly web-based GUI

Another important capability Storage Director provides is the ability to meet physical tape, de-duplication and remote site replication. This is a fully tested configuration which allows NonStop customers to use the replication features inherent in data backup systems.

Tributary Systems is committed to continually upgrading and enhancing Storage Director!

For more information on Tributary Systems’ Storage Director, visit www.tributary.com.

HP and Gravic entered into a strategic partnership by signing a Commercial Agreement to offer Gravic Shadowbase sales and support globally, directly through the HP organization. HP now licenses, services, and supports our leading-edge Shadowbase software solutions for NonStop and other servers. Our solutions address data replication for business continuity, heterogeneous data integration, application integration, as well as complementing existing HP solutions, including HP NonStop RDF, HP NonStop AutoTMF, and HP NonStop AutoSync. By providing a single point of purchase and support for these advanced replication solutions, HP and we are improving the overall customer experience. Our customers will benefit from the global reach, industry expertise, and 24x7 support available from HP. The product will be sold by HP under the name, HP Shadowbase.

“We’re responding to our customers who need advanced replication solutions to address their highest levels of application uptime requirements,” said Ajaya Gummadi, Business Continuity Product Manager, HP NonStop Systems. “We now have an innovative solution with HP Shadowbase that will help our customers keep their businesses continuously running.”

Shadowbase makes Gravic’s advanced data replication and data integration software solutions directly available to HP customers, some of the world’s largest enterprises. Customers include major banks, financial and brokerage firms, insurance companies, stock exchanges, electric utilities, healthcare, and telecommunications companies. Gravic shares common core values with HP, has a marquee reference customer base, and is committed to continuously enhancing its products. Database replication and integration services are a vital part of the fabric of today's mission-critical enterprise computing world. Customers around the globe urged us to partner with HP as the provider of their most important and trusted computing platforms, and we are pleased to report that HP Shadowbase is the result.

Note that if you are an existing Gravic Shadowbase customer, including those that license Shadowbase through a reseller, nothing will change. You will continue to receive your sales and support directly from Gravic or your local reseller.

For more product information on HP Shadowbase:

·        read the HP data sheet, HP Shadowbase Suite for HP NonStop and Other Servers,

·        read the HP brief, Make your Business ‘Nonstop’,

·        read the Mission Critical Computing Blog, When planned or unplanned downtime has to be zero—the HP Shadowbase product suite keeps you running,

·        or contact your HP NonStop Sales Representative.

Gravic helped organize and presented at the Mid-Atlantic Tandem User Group (MATUG) Meeting held in September at the Renaissance Airport Hotel, Philadelphia, PA USA. The meeting consisted of approximately 45 attendees drawn from local customers, HP NonStop personnel, vendor companies, and consultants. Plans for next year’s meeting were discussed, including possible locations. Please let us know if your company can host next year’s fall meeting in the greater Philadelphia, PA to Washington, DC corridor area. See photos and more information regarding the meeting.

Gravic attended The Payments Knowledge Forum (PKF) at The Institute for Civil Engineers, in Westminster, (Central London), UK in September. The PKF drew over 200 participants from Europe as well as Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and Mexico. The event was divided into multiple focus areas and included an executive level track as well as more technical/eduational presentations. Gravic delivered an educational presentation on Matching Your Business Continuity Solution to Your Business Risk.

Gravic also presented at the Canadian Tandem User Group (CTUG) Fall Conference at HP Headquarters in Mississauga, Ontario on October 9. Gravic’s presentation was titled HP and Gravic Partnership Delivers HP Shadowbase Advanced Data Replication Solutions for Business Continuity, Data and Application Integration, and Audit Compliance Requirements. The purpose of this presentation was to outline the wide range of HP Shadowbase products and services now available to HP NonStop customers through the HP pricebook. Please contact us if you would like to review any of our presentations and/or have us present them to your staff, or if you are interested in learning more about this partnership.

Please Visit Gravic at these Upcoming Events

Please Visit Gravic at these Sites

Very soon, many of us will be gathering in San Jose for the NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp. Not a Boot Camp along the lines of what other vendors provide, although some presentations by HP developers will likely dive deep into the code, but in general, this is the time to hear more of HP’s and the NonStop Vendors’ plans for NonStop directly from the source. For me, it’s a time to hear confirmation (one way or the other) of what I have picked up from numerous sources that helps me better develop story lines for the coming months.

It’s no secret that I have been a big supporter of user events over the years and have devoted considerable time to the cause – it wasn’t just my time with ITUG, but something I like to do still. These past couple of weeks have seen me on the road where I was able to participate in both MATUG and CTUG events and where I was able to present on behalf of one of my clients, OmniPayments, Inc. Through the years, OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia, has been every bit as strong a supporter of user events worldwide and I was only too pleased to step on this occasion and represent him and his company.

In conversations with Yash that took place after the events, I asked him about the value he derives from such participation and just what the opportunity to network with the NonStop community represented. “It’s an opportunity to provide information about the company and its products and as we have been successful over the past two years, about our wins,” said Yash. “We continue to be as successful as we are because we provide License, Support and Services to implement the projects we land, all at a very good price without recurring charges – a model we have developed after listening to so many customer and competitive presentations at these events.”

Yash then spoke of how OmniPayments “have supported user events globally for many years and that yes, you will see us at Boot Camp and on the Security Cruise. But equally as important, markets are changing – emerging markets want the same degree of reliability as mature markets and security continues to be a concern. What we are becoming aware of is that the choice of vendor comes down to just how much experience they have in a market together with their willingness to work with them, the customer.”

Finally, Yash confided that, “With so many discussions about mobility, security, big data and clouds, of course customers want to know that their choice of vendor is knowledgeable in these areas but it’s still very much a case of being a partner prepared to work through local issues important to them and user events prove to be another great opportunity for us to get our message out to as many IT professionals as possible.”  

This year, being on the road and enjoying time with the community happened when the major news were coming from HP – it was going to split into two companies, HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I covered this in the post of October 6, 2014, Finding our way …If as yet you have not read this post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View then check out this link:
http://itug-connection.blogspot.com/2014/10/finding-our-way.html

In this post I confess that I have always taken with a liberal number of grains of salt that there was synergy between a consumer, PC company, and a business, enterprise-system company, but I was prepared to let that slip on by for the sake of better story telling. There were so many ways to write about value that a company as big as HP provided but it was getting harder and harder to keep a straight face. Yes, the addition of support for x86 brought some synergy but anyone who has looked at the Intel roadmap for Xeon knows all too well that there’s a swag of different Xeon chips covered by the roadmap and to the naked eye, it was easy to get lost among the numerous pages that comprise the roadmap – different charts for consumers, small business and the enterprise.

In private emails to former associates from my ITUG days, I went on to note that companies like HP have to determine their own destiny and when they get as big as HP is today, they can’t really follow others or copy game plans of peers – they can’t emulate IBM, for instance. It’s way, way, too late. What they can do is look at their product portfolio and say, whoa, is this really what we need to grow? Furthermore, I wrote, will we see a boon for NonStop? Possibly; and the arrival of NonStop support for x86 will produce a complementary product line (a full line too, by all counts from top end systems all the way down to Moonshot) and that will surely benefit NonStop as from 2015.

As I closed my musings last month I said that I would be looking to catch up with as many of you as I could and now, knowing the value such events provide for solutions vendors like OmniPayments and having just witnessed a major turning point for HP, with Boot Camp only weeks away, I will repeat my closing comments from that last musing. If you plan on attending, look for me at the event as I will be only too happy to find time to chat and yes, of course, let me know that you read this musing!  

Pyalla Technologies, LLC
Email:             richard@pyalla-technologies.com

Check out (copy and paste to your browser):

Real Time View at http://www.itug-connection.blogspot.com/

…. And check out the Group on LinkedIn, realtime.ir

ATMmarketplace at
http://www.atmmarketplace.com/blogger.php?id=130763

buckle-up at http://www.buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/

…. And check out the SubGroup on LinkedIn, Pyalla Track Days

Prior to the recent September Viking NonStop User Group (VNUG) conference held in Balsta, near Stockholm, Sweden, I made a swing through Norway to visit with several key customers in the region. I had never been to Oslo before, and spent an extra day and a half sightseeing within the city and surrounding area. Although the day started off with a drizzle, blanketed with fog, and a bit chilly (by my standards anyway), by mid-morning it had all blown away and gorgeous sunshine illuminated and warmed the countryside. Apparently, this weather is common, and is perfect for sightseeing.

Since I was there to work, after all, I delivered a presentation on the key issues affecting application availability when catastrophic disasters occur, and how to mitigate them using best-in-breed solutions consisting of an HP NonStop hardware platform married with Shadowbase software. If you are interested in having this material presented to your team, please contact us at +1.610.647.6250 or SBProductManagement@gravic.com.

High Performance Switching and Secure Data Storage

Third Data Corporation

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.

Hellenic Bank Public Company Ltd, is the second largest bank in Cyprus and a member of the Euro Banking Association.  Hellenic Bank faced an operational challenge; they had two operating groups, one in Cyprus and one in Greece.  Both groups relied upon the proven reliability of NonStop systems for their Financial Banking System (FBS) and Retail Banking System (RBS), but each group used different banking software.  Significant inefficiencies were imposed on Hellenic Bank by having to train employees in two different packages, and having to support and maintain those separate systems.  Worse still, management realized both (green screen legacy) packages were becoming obsolete. 

·        Third party banking solutions were considered, but rejected because Hellenic Bank wanted its own software.  They wanted complete, in-house control over ongoing maintenance and enhancements.  They judged this to be the best way to assure the optimum match between their operational needs and their banking package on a future-facing, ongoing basis.

The application recognizes the client PC’s IP address and passes it back to the Banking System, for use in both access control and routing of approval messages, etc.

With the addition of a clickable function bar (shown below) users now have a much more intuitive method to operate the banking package, and to navigate within it

[User Functions]  The user can set 10 favorite Banking System functions for easy access.

[ Sign +]  The application allows the user to click on the button [Sign+] when presented with a screen containing a customer account.

The application parses the AppViewXS screen using JavaScript to pick up the desired customer unique identifier. This is in turn passed to the signature Verification System which is activated presenting the required customer signature information.

Hellenic Bank also used the functionality provided by AppViewXS to add drop down menus and inquiry lists, to specific screens.

Hellenic Bank used the AppViewXS option of fetching screens from the Banking System without displaying them to the user to pass data to the client PC for generating customized formal documents which could not be generated via the Tandem spooler.

Hellenic Bank has now been using AppViewXS for a few years.  Mr. Thomas Stylianou, whose trust, support and forward thinking led the bank to select AppViewXS in the first place has passed away, but his legacy continues on.  AppViewXS continues to meet or exceed the bank’s expectations for stability, strength and flexibility.  Alkis Sergiou, of Hellenic Bank, says they are, “..quite happy in terms of its reliability and service.”

For further details please contact Dave Stewart today on +44 (0)7831 775115 or email him on dstewart@brightstrand.com.

www.tandemworld.net

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

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