Tandemworld eNewsletter for September 2014

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Tandemworld eNewsletter for September 2014

My head is in the clouds

NTI is fortunate to have a lot of customers distributed around the world. Everyday we work with our Customers to plan and implement their DR solutions. These days most Tandem sites either have a DR site in place or are planning to eventually roll one out. Active/Active data replication enables their businesses to resume “sub second” with zero loss of data.

With all of the Customers that we work with to implement DR solutions, I still run into Tandem sites where they need coverage but can’t afford the investment in duplicate hardware and duplicate operational sites. It’s expensive to set up the backup location (buildings, equipment, people, etc.). Some are in the middle of a multi-year implementation and are exposed until everything is rolled out.

Here is an idea…. Let’s imagine that your Tandem-2-Tandem data replication could also be pointed to a cloud vault. If your production Tandem node could replicate to the cloud then you would not need a second Tandem to hold your data. The vault would have to be easily reachable, ultra-secure, persistent, distributed around the world, and nearly limitless in capacity. If all this were possible then a single Tandem node could protect its transactional data. If the Tandem node failed then your data would still be safe and available.

The cloud vault would have to be quick to setup. Developed properly you would be able to quickly download the software to the production Tandem node, configure the node, and point it at the cloud. With a few keystrokes you would be protecting your business with sub-second accuracy. You would not have to invest in a second Tandem. You would not have to work through the logistics of setting up a remote data center. You could point, click, and protect.

Of course, having your data protected in the cloud does not solve all of your recovery problems. You would also need the ability to point your cloud vault at the recovery site and quickly reload your Tandem node. While you would still have to deal with the logistical headaches of rebuilding or relocating your data center, you would have confidence knowing that you can accurately reload your data and be back in business.

What if that replication service was uniform and affordable? What if it did not matter what size your Tandem node was, or how many cores it had, or how much volume you wanted to replicate, or what the Tandem application was? A node is a node is a node.

Just a thought… these days my head is in the clouds….stay tuned for more in the coming months.

DRNet® is world class NonStop Data Replication technology.

·       Real-time Active/Active Data Replication

·       Real-time Tandem to OPEN Data Replication

·       Real-time File Synchronization

·       Refreshingly Real-Time Support from Real Engineers

Jim.McFadden@network-tech.com

+1 (402) 968 3674

TANDsoft will be represented at CTUG (9 -10 October) in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
 

Last month I wrote of how there were just a few weeks to go before a number of regional user group meetings kick-off, and now here it is, and I’m on the road looking forward to both MATUG and CTUG and to a final quick “splash and dash” pit stop at home before heading to the NonStop Bootcamp. There’s nothing I know of that would deter me from spending time with real NonStop users and it certainly gives me a buzz every time I get to participate.

Should you be attending any of these events, make sure you come on by, even if to just say “Hi!”, as I really do look forward to such interactions. You probably all know of just how much of my time I give to user groups but it’s something I have been doing for several decades now and see little chance of me backing down any time soon. For me, it remains a crucial litmus test for the health of a product – if nobody wants to talk about it, then it’s time to move on! 

In 1977 when I returned to Australia after a time in the UK, Canada, and the US, it wasn’t a year before I created a national user group in support of the company I joined. It’s now faded from history but I so enjoyed my time working for The Computer Software Company (TCSC) and thought its products so special that gathering the community together for a mix of social and technical session just seemed the right thing to do. This too gives you a little insight to just how long I have enjoyed tilting at windmills, as the sole product of TCSC was a 3^rd party OS for IBM mainframes – at a time when IBM still provided the OS for free!

This month we have seen a major sea change take place. Obviously, the news of Larry Ellison of Oracle dividing his CEO role into two parts made headlines everywhere, but when you put it into the context of other changes we have seen, it does signal a sizable shift. It was only a short time ago that a localized earthquake hit Sonoma and shook up the Napa / Sonoma wine industry, but CEO changes in Silicon Valley have a far reaching, global impact.

As Bloomberg reported on September 19, 2014, in the story Ellison Becomes Oracle Chairman as Catz, Hurd Split CEO Job  “Ellison’s departure as CEO also signals a broader changing of the guard in the technology industry, as a generation of founder-CEOs who ushered in the personal-computer and business-software era leave their posts. Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977 and has run the company ever since, rose alongside Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates.”

Earlier in the week there had been rumblings in the media as analysts anticipated less than stellar financial results from one of the original four-horsemen of Silicon Valley (a reference to investors in the dot com era tracking just the financial performance of Oracle, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco) and it proved to be true. According to the same Bloomberg report, “Oracle’s sales growth has clocked in at less than 5 percent for 12 consecutive quarters. The company has struggled to sign up new customers and has turned to selling more hardware and industry-specific technologies to existing customers.”

By comparison, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to read that the new four horsemen of technology are Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, but for how much longer, I wonder. And talking of surprises, with the many references to there being a technology leadership sea change, there wasn’t any references made to former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. Perhaps that’s for the better. In the meantime, there was just as much speculation going on about what HP plans to do next and it involved possible further acquisitions.

As I wrote in a private email update for my clients a short time ago, seeding these speculations were comments by HP CEO, Meg Whitman, after this quarter’s financials were released. This was further fueled when online publication, Seeking alpha, came out with the story on September 10, 2014, that “CEO Meg Whitman says Hewlett-Packard is again in a position to consider takeover options, a near-record cash pile gives it the means to do a deal and the worst sales forecast among computer hardware peers provides the motivation, so Bloomberg begins speculating about possible targets.”

And the Bloomberg targets?  “One possible candidate is cybersecurity firm Imperva, particularly in the wake if the hacking of J.P. Morgan, Home Depot and celebrities’ phones.” Perhaps a little better known were the other two candidates – Teradata and Tibco Software. “Teradata has more of an ‘old-school’ approach to big-data management but H-P could use it as a platform to make other acquisitions and build out its own offerings, HighMark Capital's Todd Lowenstein says. Tibco Software is now reviewing its strategic options, and Morningstar's Peter Wahlstrom thinks it could draw H-P's interest.”

However, the week ended with the news of the acquisition of a software company called Eucalyptus! According to a post on ZDNET, “Eucalyptus, an open source software vendor for hybrid cloud deployments,” and likely “a deal that gives the company a leader for its Helion business unit.” Furthermore, their CEO, Marten Mickos, will be the general manager of HP's cloud business and will report to HP chief, Meg Whitman, taking that responsibility away from Martin Fink who will continue as CTO and the boss of HP Labs.

I like following the industry as much as I like attending user group meetings and through the years I have happily speculated on the future of NonStop. Oracle, Teradata, Tibco – all struggling? Interesting – and much of this has to do with Big Data and Clouds where new, up and coming companies (including clearly Eucalyptus) are capturing significant analyst mindshare. And for a very good reason – computing is heading the way of other infrastructure services (think power generation and delivery) and yes, there’s business gold buried underneath all that data (think our behavior is every bit as important – and telling – as what we say).

It’s still very much all about transactions. We transact so much in our everyday life that we shouldn’t be surprised that so many companies know so much about us – living “off the grid” is really not an option. Fortunately for us, NonStop remains in the middle of all of this stuff and shows few signs of losing its stronghold on the most important transactions of all – financial. When you look at Target, Home Depot, even the raid on ATMs earlier this year, the NonStop systems weren’t breached and indeed, in at least one instance I know about, mitigated against even greater exposure and damage.

Guards may change with companies falling out of favor on a regular basis but four decades on, we still run NonStop and for that, I have a lot more to say – so yes, look for me at the upcoming user events as I will be only too happy to find time to chat. And with that, I will wrap up this month’s musings and get back on the road!

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/

comForte Lounge at http://comfortelounge.blogspot.com/

Realtime.ir at http://realtime.ir.com/

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

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

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

 BrightStrand International provides an array of NonStop Services to its customer base. Its consultants have the skill and experience that make it the premier service deliverer in the NonStop sector. Services are tailored to individual customer needs to reduce costs and risk whilst getting the best from the environment.

·       Systems and Operations Management

·       24 x 7 Cover

·       Performance and Tuning / Capacity Planning

1.      Transactions per second.

2.      Max transaction per second.

3.      Average transaction per minute.

4.      Max transaction per minute.

5.      Total transaction in one hour.

6.      Max peek transaction in one hour.

Everyone in the payments chain needs an agile, flexible cost effective solution for fraud and the challenges it presents – Sentra Fraud Detection from Insider Technologies is that solution.

Insider Technologies were delighted to announce the product launch of Sentra Fraud Detection at the Payments Knowledge Forum (PKF); formerly the Base24 European User Group in London on 29th and 30th September.

The new product was also unveiled at the Retail Banking Forum in Bratislava, Slovakia on the 12th and 13th October. “Reaction from the banks has been swift and dramatic” said John Bycroft, Sales & Marketing Director at Insider Technologies. He continued “We certainly seem to have struck a seam; combining our 25 year experience and expertise in monitoring high volume transaction systems with modern data mining and machine learning techniques, allows banks to taken a quantum leap forward in protecting themselves against fraud”

Sentra is a proven platform for the alerting, monitoring and information management of systems, applications and transactions from Insider Technologies. Its GUI driven architecture has been used to monitor fraud by our global blue chip customers for more than 25 years. In the latest release of Sentra, Insider Technologies has significantly added to the flexibility and functionality, using new and innovative technology to allow an enhanced, user friendly, focused toolset to prevent, detect and manage fraud as the transaction occurs.

For more information, see www.insidertech.co.uk and click on the link for more information.

More Insider Technologies Product News

Several major enhancements have been made to version 4.8 of our HP NonStop Management software product, Reflex 80:20, incorporating areas such as:

Additional information returned from the File and Process Status Agents, providing a complete list of opens, file opens, stack traces and segment information, as well as data from four-digit file codes and SQL/MX information..

New features within later H and J-series have been incorporated into the Hardware Statue Agent.

Individual % Busy values can be set against individual processes, as well as allowing specific processes and processes running against specific objects to be monitored in Dashboard, including the monitoring of PFS and Heap memory.

The Email alerting functionality has been updated so that the email subject line can now be configured to include the original EMS Event text.

Several new Measurement serverclasses have been introduced to allow Measure metrics to be sent to a Sentra environment for reporting, monitoring, alerting, in-depth analysis and historical analysis.

Reflex Console can display events, where (based on user configuration), new events can appear at the bottom or at the top of the display.

Further information can be obtained via enquiries@insidertech.co.uk, or by visiting www.insidertech.co.uk/

Insider Technologies Limited, Spinnaker Court, Chandlers’ Point, 37 Broadway, Salford Quays, Manchester, M50 2YR, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 161 876 6606.

Quality Certified to ISO9008 / 2000 and TickIT plus (DNV).
 

XYPRO's Instructor Led Education Classes 2014

2014 XYGATE Classes
October 20-24, 2014 Class Open
Register for the next General XYGATE Learning Class 

XYPRO provides formal instruction for all XYGATE Security products. Classes for up to eight (8) students are offered at XYPRO's education
facilities in Simi Valley, California. Classes can also be held on-site at your facility and be customized to meet your unique requirements 

XYPRO offers both General XYGATE Learning and Advanced XYGATE Instruction 

General XYGATE Learning is for those just getting started with NonStop and XYGATE security or those who wish to hone their XYGATE skills in a broad range of HP NonStop Security fundamentals using the XYGATE Suite of security solutions. 

Periodically, XYPRO will offer Advanced XYGATE Instruction classes. Advanced instruction is also available on request. Topics may include, but are not limited to XYGATE production configuration deep-dives, XMA SYSLOG and SIEM appliance filters, user-exits, expanding storage for XMA, user impersonation, file hashing,  XYGATE Encryption Library (XEL) implementation and XYGATE Intercept Library (XIL) implementation. 
 

Stay Connected with XYPRO

In my most recent post to ATMmarketplace.com, A screening near you and cash will fly! I write about these navigation / infotainment centers, noting how Mercedes Benz, even as it pursues modernization, may be thinking about eliminating navigation systems, replacing them with cellphone-based systems. “Rumor has it that the ‘floating’ navigation screens in new Mercedes cars look like tablets for a reason,” said the magazine. “In the future, they may be replaced with docks for your iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, or other 4G-enabled tablets.” For families with more than one car, this will simplify future car swaps as one nuisance will clearly be eliminated.

Read the full blog post here.

NEW - comForteLounge Blog

Where we are in The World...

Join XYPRO at these upcoming Events in 2014 & 2015

Stay Connected with XYPRO

 Availability Digest Explores the Darknet

OmniPayments Introduces “The Smarts Behind EMV Smart Cards”


Enclosed within the recently distributed September/October 2014 Connection is the “The Smarts Behind EMV Smart Cards: Part 1 – Online Transaction Processing.” Written by Yash Kapadia, CEO of OmniPayments, Inc., “Smarts” introduces smart-card technology, including card structure, card data, terminal capabilities, encryption support, and processing flow. Part 1 pays special attention to online transactions using smart cards.
Since most card-payment networks include one or more HP NonStop servers, “Smarts” is of special value to HP NonStop customers and third-party partners.

A smart card, also called a chip card or an integrated-circuit card (ICC), includes an embedded computer chip that employs cryptographic and risk-management features. In conjunction with a smart-card POS or ATM terminal, these features are designed to thwart skimming, card-cloning, card-counterfeiting, and other fraudulent attacks.

A decade or more ago, a consortium of card issuers comprising Europay, MasterCard, and Visa (EMV) began the specification of smart cards, formally known today as EMV cards. EMV card technology has been adopted by most of the countries on all continents in the world. Excluding the U.S., there now exist 2.3 billion EMV cards and 37 million EMV terminals worldwide. However, the United States is the laggard. Representing almost half of all payment cards and terminals in the world, the U.S. still runs its payment-card services on outdated magnetic-stripe technology. “Smarts” explains how and why the U.S. attitude toward smart cards will change in 2015.

Part 2 of “The Smarts Behind EMV Smart Cards” focuses on Offline Transaction Processing and will appear in The Connection’s November/December 2014 issue. Highlighted will be the procedures for securely authorizing smart-card transactions offline without direct issuer involvement.

The OmniPayments financial-transaction switch offers a comprehensive solution for financial institutions to acquire, authenticate, route, switch and authorize transactions across multiple input channels such as ATMs, POS (point-of-sale) terminals, kiosks, IVR (interactive voice response) units, mobile devices, and the Internet. It provides a full set of functionalities to support payment transactions. As OmniPayments routes transactions to the card-issuing institutions, each transaction must be validated against an often complex set of rules before its execution can be authorized. The authorization process consumes valuable processing resources and requires the continual maintenance of authorization rules and parameters. OmniPayments offloads this complex task from the transaction-acquiring and card-issuing institutions with a powerful Transaction Screening rules engine that can preauthorize transactions, thereby minimizing the time and bandwidth typically required to obtain transaction approval.

OmniPayments supports EMV protocols and other EMV requirements necessary to bring the enhanced EMV security capabilities to the financial payment industry.

With successful implementations at many customer sites, OmniPayments is just one member of the Opsol family of solutions for the financial industry. Opsol Integrators specializes in NonStop mission-critical applications and offers customers all the requisite functionality to manage credit/debit-card transactions. OmniPayments is easily expandable to provide additional functionality when needed.

OmniPayments supplies complete security functions for every financial transaction that it handles, 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. For further information, visit www.omnipayments.com. Contact Yash Kapadia at +1 408-446-9274 or at yash@omnipayments.com. Visit our booth at the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp in San Jose, California, USA (16 – 19 November).

 With our latest release of Protect-UX, CSP delivers a new, higher level of visibility, management and compliance for your OSS environment.  

Protect-UX delivers a unique range of functionality, and the new release introduces several improvements over the previous releases.

-        File Integrity Checking

-        Compliance Reporting

-        Auditing and Real-time Alerts

-        User Management and Session Control

-        Protect-UX File Permissions Management

Find out more  at www.cspsecurity.com and www.protect-ux.com

High Performance Switching and Secure Data Storage

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www.tandemworld.net

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

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