Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2014

Moving to assemble from build; DataExpress proves NonStop customers like smart vendors!

It always proves interesting when you come across catchy headlines featuring the latest findings from a well-known industry analysis and research company. As everyone in the IT industry can attest, there’s always something being expressed that supports their own assessment of what’s happening when it pertains to technology. Most recently, a widely read newsletter out of Australia, The Rust Report, included statements made by the biggest research firm of all, the Gartner Inc., and it left little to the imagination as to how CIOs were prioritizing their budgets.

In the Rust Report feature of September 7, 2015, Modernization and digital transformation projects are behind growth in enterprise application software market editor Len Rust opens with, “‘The majority of spending is going towards modernizing, functionally expanding or substituting long-standing business and office applications with cloud-based software-as-a-service’, said Bianca Granetto, research director at Gartner.” Furthermore, under the sub-heading, Modernization of Core Enterprise Applications, Rust writes of how, “In a recent Gartner survey, 45 percent of respondents with knowledge of their organization’s software strategy indicated that one of the current top five IT project priorities is ‘application modernization of installed on-premises core enterprise applications’ and a further 41 percent indicated that ‘extending capabilities of core enterprise applications’ is a top five priority.”

Part of the reasoning for the increased uptick in spending on modernization is the drive to breaking down the application siloes developed over the past couple of decades and to some extent, this came about following research published by Gartner and others that strongly recommended enterprise application software be purchased on the basis of best-of-breed. With little consideration for the likely end-game of such a strategy, the results are now very clear to see – additional layers of expensive middleware is being introduced to move data, and sometimes business logic, to multiple systems in order to ensure consistency.

The popularity of SOA and Web services, off the back of universal presence of the Internet, supporting the externalizing business logic as a service was seen as a quick-fix for presenting a mixed bag of applications and systems in a consistent and readily consumable manner, whereby today, it’s perhaps the most recognized solution to the problem of breaking down application silos. However, what happens when we do get past the breaking down of these silos? What will application modernization mean, once we have completed the quick fixes – is the world of applications about to change again? Surely enterprises have all the business logic they need in order to succeed in business!

In reality, industry trends suggest that this is not the case as technology supports a movement towards a more insightful and predictive model, drawing heavily on data analytics for better understanding of behavior – the transition from simply being able to make actions visible and respond accordingly to where eventual actions can be influenced and indeed steered towards outcomes more advantageous to the enterprise. When you consider the NonStop vendor community today and how they go about developing solutions, there’s a lot more building going on than creating.

The “smarts” of any implementation are in the design and the decisions taken to populate functions with appropriate routines – “assembling a solution” has now become the norm, rather than cutting code. Utilizing open source frameworks, populating with trusted code stubs and indeed complete code routines is accelerating the development of solutions even as it aids in overall quality and reliability (when the right sources are selected), and the NonStop community is not immune to such actions, as isn’t most of the industry.

“There’s no question that the pervasive nature of the Internet has changed much of our thinking when it comes to secure, managed, file transfer such as we provide today with DataExpress,” said DataExpress CEO, Billy Whittington, “Nor is there any question about the impact that SOA has had on application modernization but as we look further afield then the movement to open source looks to be unstoppable as even major vendors like IBM and HP have become strong proponents of open source. There is definitely a trend developing whereby the creative process of vendors has more to do with assembling than coding along similar lines as to what users face when it comes to build versus buy. For DataExpress, plugging the gaps in our feature list allows us to consider pulling from the open source but, like many of our customers, we still have to be judicious about the code we chose to include in DataExpress. The upside however is that we can respond faster to customer requirements even as we have the opportunity to share features between our NonStop and Open Platform instances of DataExpress.”]

As Rust concluded in his op-ed column, “Gartner predicts that by 2020, 75 percent of application purchases supporting digital business will be ‘build,’ not ‘buy.’ Gartner’s research shows that many organizations already favor a new kind of ‘build’ that does not include out-of-the-box solutions, but instead is a combination of application components that are differentiated, innovative and not standard software or software with professional services (for customization and integration requirements), or solutions that are increasingly sourced from startups, disrupters or specialized local providers.”

For the NonStop community to shy away from such developments, or discount in any way NonStop vendors “building” new solutions in this manner, is both short-sighted and to some degree, naïve. We all want to see NonStop systems thriving in enterprises today and be the focal point for running mission-critical solutions so when it comes to modernization think not only of what needs to happen now (and to continue to pursue modernization of current business logic) but look further out and consider how best to embrace insightful and predictive computing every enterprise will want in the coming years.

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Gravic published the article, Tape Backup for Disaster Recovery? Really? in the September-October issue of The Connection. Tape or virtual tape backup/restore for periodic backups is prudent (after all, it is easy to sometimes purge the ‘wrong’ file). However, when used for disaster recovery, in the always-on, never-stop world we live in, it often doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, some businesses are using this technique for mission-critical applications. This article discusses why tape backup/restore for business continuity is a risky approach for many businesses, and how they should shed these risks by beginning the move to continuous availability. Data replication is an ideal solution for ensuring business continuity, as it eliminates many risks and costs associated with tape backup/restore, significantly reducing outage times and amounts of lost data in the event of a failure. For additional information, please download our white paper, Choosing a Business Continuity Solution to Match Your Business Availability Requirements.

Gravic helped organize the Mid-Atlantic Tandem User Group (MATUG) Meeting held on September 17 at the Hewlett-Packard EDS HQ in Herndon, VA USA. Gravic presented on Winning the Battle Against Internet Banking Fraud by Leveraging HP Shadowbase Streams Real-Time Data and Application Integration. Please contact us if you are interested in discussing our presentation’s content or having us present it to you or your colleagues. The successful meeting was comprised of over 50 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.

A recent article in The New Yorker magazine (July 20, 2015) revealed that the Northwest Coast of the United States is long overdue for a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami along what is known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The Zone is a part of the famous Ring of Fire and was first discovered only 45 years ago. Scientists have determined that the last massive earthquake in the area, a magnitude 9.0, was in January of 1700, long before the U.S. became a country and when few inhabitants were there to experience it. Over three hundred years later, the population has risen into the millions along with the thousands of companies that employ them and thousands of vulnerable data centers. Think Microsoft, think Boeing, think Starbucks, think Amazon.

“The Big One – Are You Ready” considers the issue of how companies in disaster-prone geographies make plans to continue business in the event of a predicted (but when?) disaster. With regard to the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the odds are roughly one in three that a big earthquake will happen in the next fifty years. The odds during the same timeframe of a magnitude 9.0 or greater are one in ten. In response, does a company within the Zone make plans now for its ability to survive the inevitable? Or does it assume that it has years left to take precautions? That’s the challenge facing all companies whenever it comes to disaster planning. For those in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, scientists warn that any delay may lead to destruction.

In addition to “The Big One – Are You Ready,” read the following articles in the Availability Digest’s current issue: http://bit.ly/1LrDUQ3.

Upgrades Can Take You Down – Failed software upgrades are a major cause of outages. This Digest article reviews several major outages caused by failed upgrades and discusses two significant takeaways – the need for thorough testing and the value of a successful fallback plan.

Multifactor Authentication – Multifactor authentication brings a great deal of additional security to applications. It can drastically reduce the incidence of online fraud because stealing a victim’s password no longer will be enough to support a malicious logon.

IT Disaster Recovery Planning for Dummies – This book carries on the Dummies series tradition of being easy to read and complete in detail. In it, Author Peter Gregory provides IT management with the knowledge required to develop a disaster-recovery plan (DRP).

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - Our article highlights some of the numerous @availabilitydig tweets that were favorited and retweeted in recent days.

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.

Join Digest Managing Editor Bill Highleyman at the upcoming NENUG Fall Meeting on 19 October in Andover, Massachusetts USA. Dr. Highleyman also will speak at the OpenVMS Boot Camp in Nashua, New Hampshire USA (27 – 30 September).

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 710 members and counting. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.

Well, what may have initially been whispers has grown into a full-blown yell! HP CTO, Martin Fink, will be attending this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp. More of that in an upcoming post to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, even as this publication reaches you. We all should be familiar with Martin’s history with NonStop so that we appreciate where he is now headed. His efforts inside HP Labs is leading us closer to The Machine, but it’s not a straight forward, drop everything, rip it all out and replace kind of initiative, but rather, one I suspect we will see eased into the marketplace and so I for one am keen to hear exactly what he says at TBC and what will then follow in Randy Meyer’s presentation immediately after Martin’s talk.

I will not revisit here what I will include in my blog post to Real Time View – but check out the site for the most recent post at:

www.itug-connection.blogspot.com

As many members of the NonStop community I talk to, I am looking forward to this year’s TBC, but in the meantime I am really enjoying all that I encounter at the regional user group events I have been attending. As summer comes to an end I would have participated in both the N2TUG and the MATUG events and I can only add that I wish I could have attended more. Indeed, it would be remiss of me not to give a nod to the upcoming CTUG event where the special guest will be Tandem Computer’s founder and first CEO, Jimmy Treybig. Sure would like to hear from him if circumstances were a little different.

N2TUG in Dallas and MATUG in the suburbs of Washington D.C. were events I drove to in the company command center and having run up some 8,000 plus miles as I turned into the driveway, I have used up my time away from the office. From here on it’s going to be time spent behind the desk, writing and presenting (webinars) as TBC approaches. With one eye on the weather as winter is near and with the likelihood of snow arriving, it’s also pretty much the end of the road trips as far as 2015 is concerned for the company command center I rely upon so much; it will be a case of back to driving the company SUV instead of the RV.

However, returning to the topic of whispers, it would also be remiss of me not to mention what I have recently heard about OmniPayments. On one LinkedIn group, and I have to be honest, I can’t recall which one it was, I talked of the whispers growing around the continuing success of OmniPayments in Latin America. As I now hear it, yet another deal has been awarded to OmniPayments and this time it’s for a new switch that will include the deployment of NonStop systems for the first time at this customer’s site. And yes, these new systems will be the latest NonStop X systems on which OmniPayments will install its OmniHub solution in support of switching financial transactions.

What should really please the NonStop community is that by my back of the envelope calculation, over a very short time period, as a solutions provider OmniPayments has been responsible for the sale of some 4 or 5 (maybe even 6) new NonStop X systems, including the latest entry, the NonStop X NS3 systems. These numbers also include some additional NonStop X systems deployment in-house at OmniPayments in support of OmniCloudX on NonStop X, where OmniPayments product offerings are provided on the basis of a SaaS from out of a cloud built on top of NonStop X.

Seriously, by the time TBC rolls around and we return to the San Jose Fairmont I expect we will have heard a lot more about these wins by OmniPayments and the whispers will have been replaced by real-world case studies provided by OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia. I for one will rarely hold back on promoting any wins that are supported by the sale of new NonStop systems into customer data centers where previously NonStop didn’t have a presence! This is essentially why I write as often as I do as the story of NonStop really is all about the recognition that its capabilities remain unmatched by any other platform.

Whenever we talk in whispers it’s normally because what is being conveyed is secretive, and very often, confidential! We simply don’t want anyone to overhear what it is we are communicating. At other times we whisper when we are not sure whether what we have heard is true or not, and possibly nothing more than wishful thinking. All too often, what has transpired with NonStop at one customer site or another is only talked about in whispers as the customer involved isn’t all that confident that their decision to continue with NonStop (or to introduce NonStop) will not be considered a wise decision by the CIO’s peers. Whispers can be a sign of nervousness.

However, after more than four decades of continued success, it sure would be good to hear that the whispers have ceased with customers being more proactive in their support of NonStop – we all know who the big NonStop users are today. The biggest banks; the biggest American drug and pharmacy retailers, the biggest Telcos and some of the most prestigious auto manufacturers! Use GM’s OnStar and talk on your mobile phone even as you catch an amber alert notification and depending on your location in the U.S. there’s every chance you will pass through at least one NonStop system – isn’t that something we should be shouting about?

It will all take time before the whispers die down and we more boldly promote what NonStop platforms we have installed. It’s a sure-fire way to convince others in our industry about the merits of NonStop that in turn, will lessen any lack of faith that may persist. With Martin Fink returning to NonStop community events and solutions vendors cutting new deals in short order, I can’t wait to hear more. And so, the countdown to TBC has started – will you be taking time to be a part of the 2015 celebration?

Score a new customer for TANDsoft, Inc. The NonStop interception specialist’s latest client, a U.S.-based retail store chain, has purchased TANDsoft’s FileSync for the OSS environment. FileSync is one of TANDsoft’s most popular flagship products. Of special interest to the customer was FileSync’s FS-AppendOnly feature, which works with very large, unaudited files that must be synchronized every few minutes. Changes made to a file are “appended” to the end of the file. When FS-AppendOnly checks for changes since the last synchronization, it needs only to look at the end of the last changed data update.

For another TANDsoft customer with large transaction log files that required frequent synchronization, FS-AppendOnly reduced the processing time from seven minutes with whole file synchronization to less than five seconds with AppendOnly.

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 all Guardian and OSS files as well as SQL/MP and SQL/MX catalogs, schemas, tables and partitions. TANDsoft customers use FileSync for system migrations, disaster recovery, upgrades, and backups. It works closely with all NonStop real-time data replication products to provide a comprehensive solution for maintaining duplicate system and application environments.

The new TANDsoft customer will install FileSync on three HP Integrity NonStop servers within its OSS environment:

The FileSync solutions suite also includes FS-Data Deduplication and FS-Incremental, both of which seamlessly integrate with other NonStop file synchronization products and can be used not only in conjunction with each other but also in conjunction with FS-AppendOnly.

FS-Data Deduplication significantly reduces bandwidth requirements and the size of backups by streaming to the backup database only changed data, not entire files.

FS-Incremental minimizes the time by synchronizing only files that have changed or are new since the last incremental synchronization.

In addition to FileSync and FS-AppendOnly, TANDsoft solutions – all certified on NonStop X - include the OPTA2000 virtual clock- and time-zone simulator; the OPTA suite of interception and trace utilities (OPTA-Trace Online Process Tracer and Analyzer, Recycle Bin, Low Pin Optimizer, and EMS Alerts Online Startup and Termination Capture Utility); 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 and the Enscribe-2-SQL Data Replicator, all of 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, a seamless sensitive data intercept API for Enscribe, SQL/MP, and SQL/MX.

For information about TANDsoft solutions, contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234.
TANDsoft will participate as an exhibitor at the Canadian Tandem User Group (CTUG) Fall Conference on October 21st in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp in San Jose, California, USA, from November 15th thru 18th. www.tandsoft.com.

It is wildly incorrect to state that all migrations are painful and take forever. A migration from BASE24 to the OmniPayments Financial Transaction Switch is pain-free, avoids all disruptions to customer services, and averages a migration schedule of only four months. Also attractive is the OmniPayments pricing model. 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.

Several large customers now count on OmniPayments to support their debit/credit card authorization systems. They migrated from BASE24 to OmniPayments with ease and with no negative impacts on their clients.

OmniPayments is a comprehensive architecture by which financial institutions acquire, authenticate, route, switch and authorize transactions across multiple input channels such as ATMs, POS terminals, kiosks, IVRs and the Internet. It supplies a full set of functionalities to support payment transactions. Based on a modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), OmniPayments consists of several service modules. The critical payment components are built on NonStop for the highest availability. OmniPayments supports both active/passive and active/active architectures.

At the heart of OmniPayments is its Payment Engine, which supports ATMs, POS terminals, transaction authorization, stand-in authorization, settlement, and card management, among many other functions. An OmniPayments purchase includes a popular Preauthorization Engine, used by financial institutions as a powerful fraud blocker that preauthorizes millions of transactions far more effectively than its complex, compute-intensive competitors. The Preauthorization Engine also is sold separately and seamlessly interfaces to other providers’ switches.

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, and 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 programmers are skilled at rapid project turnarounds, meeting deadlines, and enhancing OmniPayments to address a customer’s specific requirements.

OmniCloudX is a SaaS cloud platform on NonStop X that hosts numerous instances of OmniPayments on an attractive, pay-for-use basis. Each OmniCloudX customer pays only for the amount of CPU resources, storage, and networking that it uses. Pricing options begin at $5,000 USD per month. OmniPayments also supplies the IT staff needed to manage the transaction switches running in its cloud, thereby allowing participating merchants to focus on their core businesses.

OmniPayments and OmniCloudX on NonStop X supply complete security functions for every financial transaction handled, including encryption-at-rest and encryption-in-flight. Available around the clock, OmniPayments and OmniCloudX will survive any single fault, require no downtime for maintenance or upgrades, and support a range of disaster-recovery solutions. Both expand easily to provide additional functionality when needed. Additionally, OmniPayments and OmniCloudX can manage multiple devices, can host application interfaces, and can interoperate with third-party products or other systems if required. Like OmniPayments, OmniCloudX supports EMV smart-card technology.

OmniPayments is High Capacity. OmniPayments is Reliable. OmniPayments is Cost-Effective.

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 OmniPayments in its exhibit spaces at the Canadian Tandem User Group (CTUG) Fall Conference on October 21st in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp in San Jose, California, USA, from November 15th thru 18th. Yash also will be in attendance at the Payments Knowledge Forum in London, UK, on October 5th and 6th.

If you have not RSVP’d for our MOMI Education Class on November 14^th (the day before the Boot Camp), please do so ASAP. Space is limited for this all-day FREE event: Breakfast, Lunch and snacks included.

Join us for Customer-driven training as we show the latest release of MOMI, explain characteristics of MOMI, and educate you on recent MOMI features.

Since 1999, BlackWood Systems’ MOMI has been the superior Real-Time tool for NonStop monitoring, diagnosing and troubleshooting System operations:

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