Welcome to the TandemWorld Newsletter for April 2004.
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Contents
Sionet International ship SIMPLE
Integrated Research announces the sale of PROGNOSIS in Hungary
Reflex 80:20 Extensions
"Insession Technologies One Provider, Infinite Possibilities"
Need more 9s?
HP Education Update
Regional User Group News
EBUG News
Employment
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Sionet International ship SIMPLE
Sionet International is pleased to announce First Customer Shipping to a major European Financial Institution of SIMPLE (Sionet International Managed Password and Logon Environment for hp NonStop™ Server environments). SIMPLE is a NonStop™ Server utility that will provide hp NonStop™ customers with a managed and auditable environment of privileged users and passwords, including issue, use and change.
About SIMPLE:
Security procedures require that privileged passwords are retained securely until their use is needed in exceptional circumstances for specific system actions, either to recover elements of a failed subsystem, or whole systems. They are generally required quickly and require secure and validated delivery; these delivery requirements can often be in conflict with each other, resulting in extended outages, or financial penalties.
The SIMPLE utility offers the following features:
·	Single seat Password and User Management 
·	8 Character random alphanumeric Password Generation known only to password user 
·	Authenticated single use password issue to designated valid NonStop™ system users 
·	Primarily used for privileged Userids/passwords, but not restricted to them 
·	Password propagation to Userid files 
·	Time lapse and usage control 
·	Audit of Password: 
o	Issue 
o	Use 
o	Denial 
o	Expiry 

For further information contact by Email or call +44 (0) 141 204 4046
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Integrated Research announces the sale of PROGNOSIS in Hungary
Hungarian ATM service provider calls on PROGNOSIS for card clearance
Giro Bankcard (GBC), the Hungarian-based ATM and Point of Sale (POS) transaction clearance company, has purchased PROGNOSIS systems management software to maintain the performance of its HP NonStop operational systems. 
Majority owned by two of Hungary’s largest banks, K&H Bank and HVB Bank, GBC was initially created in 1992 as an independent authorization and switching center that enables the mutual acceptance and clearing of bankcards issued by different financial institutions. 

GBC based its IT infrastructure on ACI’s BASE24 software running on the high-availability HP NonStop (then known as Tandem) platform. GBC IT manager Zsolt Zala says the system was designed to handle several million ATM and POS transactions monthly.

"PROGNOSIS gives us the added flexibility of being able to monitor both BASE24 calls and NonStop system metrics from the same window, giving us a dashboard view of the environment unlike any other product we’ve tested."

NonStop heritage 
The BASE24/HP NonStop system was selected on a business tender and became a cornerstone of GBC’s business policy from its inception. 
"Our systems process in excess of two million POS transactions monthly, and we project POS volumes to exceed ATM transaction volumes by midyear," says Zala. "We also have different customers with different transaction volumes and business requirements, so the flexibility of the system was key."

Zala says GBC issued a tender for an integrated management and monitoring tool to work across BASE24 and HP NonStop, specifically providing the real-time transaction monitoring needed to keep abreast of any problems with the high-volume service delivery systems. 

"Every second our systems are offline or slow down for any reason severely compromises the level of service we’re able to give our customers. With a real-time management tool like PROGNOSIS we can see at a glance where any problems have occurred, drill-down to the root cause of the problem, and fix it before it can affect our customers." 

Legacy shortcomings
GBC was previously using an in-house-developed application to monitor its systems, but this had very limited functionality and couldn’t provide the real-time, drill-down features that PROGNOSIS offered.

"Our own application was essentially an event management tool, similar to most system "monitoring" tools out there. It gave us no NonStop monitoring options and no real-time transaction management," says Zala.

"PROGNOSIS is an ideal product for technical and business monitoring on the HP NonStop/BASE24 environment. It helps us raise service levels and availability in a business-critical environment, and to improve customer satisfaction using Web-based technology to deliver real value to end-users. It doesn’t only give us peace of mind when we go home at night, but helps to boost our reputation as well."
For further information please visit our website. 
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Reflex 80:20 Extensions
Insider Technologies Limited recently held a ‘Reflex User Group’ meeting, which included some of ITL’s major financial institution clients being in attendance.
During the User Group, presentations were held by the CEO: Steve Tanham and the Operations Director: Gerry Murphy. 
The theme of the Operations Director’s presentation was: "Reflex 80:20 Extensions", which presented to the audience the various Reflex extensions developed over various releases, either due to ongoing development by ITL or made on behalf of clients. 
In essence, the contents of the "Reflex 80:20 Extensions" presentation were as follows...
"Reflex 80:20 has been extended over many years and management of the HP NonStop platforms is made easier with Reflex 80:20 interfaces being provided for the leading Enterprise Management regimes: HP OpenView, TIVOLI and BMC. Other notable extensions include: alerting via e-mail, paging and mobile SMS/GSM.
Recent product extensions include: Measure ‘On Demand’, OSS monitoring, BASE24™ XPNET Autodetect and monitoring, TIM / Perfmon reporting, improved Dashboard performance metrics.
For users who wish to move away from OMF, Reflex 80:20 is supplied with utilities to convert large amounts of OMF configuration information into the Reflex 80:20 database. From there, users can then avail themselves of Reflex 80:20’s rich product set, to ensure your system is optimally managed and to detect and resolve any problems before they impact your business or your customers. 
ITL have released the ‘EMS MQ Gateway’ product to convert original IBM WebSphereâ MQ EMS events into unique, fully tokenised EMS events. EMS event templates for the HP NonStop platform are automatically re-generated."
The overriding design principle of Reflex 80:20 is based on a ‘listen rather than interrogate’ approach and therefore all of the software extensions included result in less than 1% of CPU utilisation and most importantly, the product does not interfere with the response times of live applications.
For copies of the presentation, or more information contact Bernadette Doyle on +44 (0) 161 876 6606 or visit the company's website
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"Insession Technologies One Provider, Infinite Possibilities"
For more than a decade Insession Technologies has supplied proven solutions for the HP NonStop™ computing environment.
Whether you need to test it, monitor it, migrate it, web-enable it, secure it, back it up, scale it or integrate it—Insession Technologies
has the proven software, services and solutions to make it possible.
See how one provider can deliver infinite possibilities visit our website at www.insession.com.
Come and visit Insession Technologies at the European ITUG in Madrid, June 7-9, booth no 4 and join us for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at Auditorium Hotel on
Tuesday, June 7th, at 8:30 onwards following the HP Welcome Reception. We look forward to welcoming you to what we believe will be an exciting conference.
Contact: Email or call +1923 812721 for any product enquiries.
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Need more 9s?
Need more 9s? Customers can achieve tremendous improvements in NonStop server availability with “system splitting” as detailed in the new book Breaking the Availability Barrier: Survivable Systems for Enterprise Computing, written by former ITUG chairman Dr. Bill Highleyman and his colleagues Paul J. Holenstein and Dr. Bruce Holenstein. 
The book describes techniques available today that can be used to extend the time between system failure from years to centuries, often at little or no additional cost. The authors have a combined experience of more than 80 years in the implementation of fault-tolerant, highly available computing systems. Their experience ranges from the early days of custom redundant systems to today’s fault-tolerant offerings. 
Jim Gray, the well-known database and availability expert, comments, “Wow! What a great book. Very readable, very direct.” 
Terry Shannon, industry analyst and author of the Shannon Knows High-Performance Computing newsletter, writes, “:Arguably the most comprehensive book on fault-tolerant systems ever authored by experts.” 
To view a complete table of contents, excerpts from two chapters, and ordering information, Visit Us
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HP Education Update
HP education services are pleased to announce the delivery of our second S Series system. This system will allow us to deliver a greater number of courses and to make enhancements to existing courses; for example, our performance classes can now run over two systems. It also allows us to better replicate your live environments by enabling us to utilise a greater number of comms protocols.
In addition, we have recently schedule some new courses, including a number of OSS and Application Development courses. Please see our website for full details.
Following the success of our partnership with BITUG to bring you the opportunity to take accreditation exams, I am pleased to announce that all of the exam prep classes are now scheduled and awaiting delegates.
For any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me Mobile 07947 451 212 Email 
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Regional User Group News
GTUG Conference
6 -7 May, 2004
http://www.gtug.de 
BITUG Education Day
15th June 2004 OSS Overview - Contact BITUG
19th August 2004 OSS & Java SIG - Contact BITUG
OZTUG Conference

26 - 27 July, 2004
http://www.oztug.org 
2004 ITUG European Conference
7-9 June * Conference & Exhibition
7 June * Pre-Conference Seminars 
http://www.itug.org/events/euro/2004/index.cfm
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EBUG News 
The EBUG conference will run from Tuesday May 18th to Friday May 21st. For more information Go There
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Employment
Sales Executive ref djb/fts More Info.
For other non Tandem / HP NonStop roles please send your CV via email or consult our sister websites
www.tandemworld.net www.sftworld.net www.as400world.net 
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