Tandemworld eNewsletter for March 2010

New Resources Available From NuWave

As the latest addition to NuWave's website, we've added a resources page full of fun tools and educational content.

This is where you can view past webinars, learn about Web services and SOA, and get all the information you need on SOAP/AM software.

You can even sign up for a virtual meeting with a NuWave employee to get a personalized view of how your company can get a high return with SOA.

Just go to http://www.nuwave-tech.com/resources/ for access to online tools, webinars, case studies and more.

Introducing a new NonStop software distributor in Australia and New Zealand

Kapiti Technologies is a software and hardware company servicing our region. One of our staff members, Kelvin Nixon, has been involved with ‘Tandem’ from the 80s and has maintained relationships with software suppliers from those days, as well as getting involved with some relatively new suppliers for our region.

We currently have the distribution rights with 3 companies for NonStop software:-

Blackwood Systems

MOMI - System performance monitor and operations utility

Insider Technologies

Reflex 80/20 - Comprehensive monitoring for both Guardian and OSS

RTLX Reactor - real-time monitoring of the transaction flow information created by ACI’s BASE24 and BASE24-eps ATM/POS applications and the HP NonStop EMS subsystem.

Multibatch - Complete Batch Scheduling for both Guardian and OSS

Sentra - Comprehensive monitoring for Windows, Unix and Linux platforms

Netweave Integrated Solutions

Netweave - Middleware solution allowing disparate systems, LANs and WANs to communicate as well as a range of other enterprise software products - and we are looking for more products.

If you are interested in further information on these products, or there are any other products you would like us to investigate please contact us at info@kaptek.co.nz

If you just want to talk about ‘Tandem’ days feel free to contact Kelvin on +6421564966 or knixon@kaptek.co.nz

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Kapiti Technologies is an HP Business Partner

Ban Bottlenecks® - Remember Memory? Turning A Page...

Page faults or swaps are always a bad sign. Sometimes they can’t be avoided. Sometimes they are an indication that the system’s hurting in a bad way. A page fault means that something that should have been in memory (with nanosecond access) requires a hardware fault, OS procedure, and perhaps a disk I/O taking milliseconds.

We categorize page faults three ways:

· Initialization page faults, when a process is starting and needs to load program and data,

· Transaction page faults, when a process’ transaction path allocates and de-allocates memory, and

· Forced page faults, when a system is out of memory and in-use memory must be forced to disk to make room for another program or process.

Can we help you understand your system, and correct problems before they hurt? Absolutely! Check our website and Jon’s blog for more information. Look for our most recent article in the Connection.

assist@banbottlenecks.com

1.415.256.8369

www.banbottlenecks.com

Pathway Systems Management added to HP Virtual Lab support

Continued investment in leading edge technology allows HP Education Services UK&I to bring technical training to your location, removing the need for you to include travel and accommodation costs in your training budget. Both customised onsite courses and even full remote training using HP’s high quality technical courseware can be arranged to suit your diary, minimising time away from your home and office. With more equipment coming online month-by-month, regular additions to our current schedule ( http://tinyurl.com/yj3pag9 ) should be expected.

NEW for March is U4194s – Pathway System Management for HP NonStop Systems will provide the practical, hands-on experience you need to configure, modify, monitor and maintain a pathway system.

Today courses supported by HP Virtual Labs include:

· HB940s - OSS Accelerated Commands and Utilities

· HH321s - Introduction to NonStop NetBatch

· U4147s - Concepts & Facilities for NonStop

· U8636s - TACL Programming for NonStop

HP Education offers RAIL remote instructor-led training (http://tinyurl.com/yjzoh8s ) using a combination of HP Virtual Rooms and HP Virtual Labs to deliver the same consistently high quality content you’d expect from us. To find out more use the links to check our schedule or call +44 (0) 1344 363311.

Gravic, Inc. - A New Case Study

Download our New Case Study:

Using Shadowbase Solutions for

Application Modernization with Zero Downtime

Our latest case study describes how a major industrial distributor seamlessly modernized its fifteen-year old standalone NonStop order-processing application by turning to today’s Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and leveraging Shadowbase data replication technology.

All changes were made without incurring any significant downtime in the company’s 24/7 operation. Sales associates were given PCs and a familiar Windows environment (replacing their cumbersome green-screen dumb terminals), the stand-alone application was integrated with other systems in the enterprise, and query functions were offloaded from the NonStop system onto a more friendly open server environment by using Shadowbase software to replicate the NonStop database to a SQL Server database, keeping it fully synchronized as the NonStop’s database of record was modified.

Click link to download from the Gravic website: www.gravic.com/shadowbase/downloadform/

Please Visit Gravic at these Upcoming Shows:

SunTUG Connect Florida Road Show

Florida HP Technologies User Group

Embassy Suites

Tampa, FL

March 19-20

NENUG Spring Meeting

New England NonStop User Group

HP Headquarters

Andover, MA

April 15

EBUG 2010 Annual Conference

EMEA User Group of ACI Worldwide Products

Hotel Puerta America

Madrid, Spain

April 27-30

VNUG Conference

Viking NonStop User Group

Gallofsta Country Manor

Stockholm, Sweden

May 26-27

Hewlett-Packard Technical Forum & Expo 2010

Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino

Las Vegas, NV

June 21-24

Connect Worldwide NonStop Symposium & Expo 2010

Fairmont Hotel & Resort

San Jose, CA

September 27-29

For additional information about Gravic’s products and services, including free whitepapers on how Shadowbase data replication solutions can solve your company’s business continuity, data integration and synchronization, and real-time business intelligence challenges, please visit: www.gravic.com/shadowbase.

NonStop - A Running Commentary
March, ‘10

The opinions expressed here are solely
those of the now self-employed author

Barely a month into my new “career” and just as I announced that I was turning “pro” I wrote a column for the October 2009 issue of Tandemworld. After nearly four decades in IT I was changing course to pursue a career where I would be working for myself, and where my new boss couldn’t be any better! I was going to build a company pursuing something I just liked to do - writing stories.

While developing storylines for vendors I still have kept up the social networking and I routinely engage in discussions on LinkedIn groups “Real Time View,” a group focused on community interests, and “Pyalla Technologies,” a group focused on business issues. A few weeks ago I agreed to become a manager on the “BASE24 and BASE24EPS Community”, and I will kick off a couple of discussions shortly.

Now, six months later, how has my company developed? Have I been able to build a business around writing, and have I been able to capitalize on the body of articles and stories I have posted to blogs, community groups, and discussion forums? And am I enjoying my new career?

I have to admit, I do enjoy my new career immensely, and I want to thank my clients for their support and encouragement. I have provided writings to companies in the SOA and Manageability marketplaces, and I’ve been asked to write about communications and networking, my first love and where it all started.

I have been very fortunate to get the chance to join the board of the Australian start-up, Infrasoft. Made up of former InSession developers who came up with the plan to develop products that would help NonStop users migrate their networks from SNA to TCP/IP. In my new role I have the task of helping market the company through blogs and any other avenue that I can find.

Today, my white papers and articles are beginning to surface and I expect many of you have already seen a number of them. The interesting development, and coming as a bit of a surprise, has been the interest shown in my work by companies in the solutions marketplace. I find it extremely exciting to see solution providers recognizing the value proposition of the NonStop platform! The years spent entrenched in middleware and infrastructure products, working with applications vendors has opened my eyes to a whole new set of opportunities.

The pursuit of a “converged infrastructure” as is the strategy across all of HP’s divisions these days, is bearing fruit. The ease with which I have seen Unix application ported to NonStop is validating that this strategy is gaining traction. Even vendors committed to Microsoft’s.Net framework have successfully completed migrations to NonStop.

Coming as it has in support of the “common standards, uncommon advantages” message from NonStop, these successes further foster the interest of solutions providers. After all, it is in their interests to maintain a single code base and if they can now support the NonStop platform, so much the better.

In turning pro, I have to acknowledge how beneficial my work with social networks has proved. I continue to look for additional opportunities and rarely I’ m not concerned about my ability to come up with something new to say. However, In putting this column together what amazes me is how well connected the NonStop community has become – whether it’s comments posted to blogs, email exchanges, or discussions launched on LinkedIn, the NonStop community is very much alive and very active in support of the platform. These are the folks that have a working solution, and see that the best platform for their solution is a NonStop!

Social networking may raise concerns among some in the community and it’s not as well-entrenched in some Geos, as it is in others, but for me it has become one of the most important instruments in developing my business. There may come a time when social networking becomes one of the most important and influential vehicles in recruiting new talent into corporations, and weighing the potential contributions future candidates may make to any business. For me, it has led to a change of careers and if you get active and persist you too may end up working for someone you really enjoying spending time over coffee … yourself!

Richard Buckle

Founder and CEO

Pyalla Technologies, LLC

www.pyalla-technologies.com

richard@pyalla-technologies.com

_______________________________________________________________________

Real Time View blog: http://real-time-view.blogspot.com

Buckle-Up blog: www.buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com

LinkedIn - Real Time View user group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1878133&trk=hb_side_g

LinkedIn - Pyalla Technologies User Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2396887&trk=hb_side_g

Availability Digest Reveals Biannual List of “Never Agains”

Never Agains, those annoying system outages that make front-page news despite best efforts to contain them, are once again highlighted in the Availability Digest’s biannual list of technology oops! Outage victims include the London Stock Exchange, Cisco, the countries of Nigeria and China, WestJet Airlines, and TD Bank.

Also in recent issues:

· The Bank of New York and Fifth Third Bank use synchronous replication for Zero RPO.

· Haiti’s cell-phone system failed during the country’s devastating earthquake. How many of those trapped in the rubble tried to make calls for help but couldn’t and died as a consequence?

The Availability Digest is adding to its website a “Useful Links” page. Companies, groups, and individuals with products, services and publications focused on mission-critical systems are invited to submit a complimentary link for inclusion. Contact admin@availabilitydigest.com with your link and a brief description of up to 100 characters, including spaces.

The Digest, published monthly and free to subscribers, covers topics on high- and continuous-availability architectures.

GreenHouse develop a new product: OBI

Nowadays auditors demand data integrity checks: Change of critical files has to be reported on a regular basis. The most important critical files are executables.

OBI checks all security related file attributes of executables on a regular basis, and reports the changes. Critical security related changes get additional highlighting.
Checked file attributes are the:
- last modification time stamp
- EOF
- file code
- primary owner (*)
- license flag (*)
- PROGID flag (*)
- SAFEGUARD PRIV-LOGON flag (*)
- SAFEGUARD TRUST flag (*)
- original fingerprint
- current fingerprint
- attached library file (*)
(*) critical security attributes

OBI reports the changes to the OUT file, e.g. the SPOOLER, and user written ENFORM queries can be used to produce customized reports.
GreenHouse customers, using the management GUI iWAMS (integrated Web Administration Management Suite), can make use of the iWAMS-OBI module, which allows an easy evaluation of the OBI data base, and a reporting in form of PDF documents.

Please contact us at: Info@GreenHouse.de

TANDsoft Releases OPTA2000 Version 4.1

One system clock, multiple current times, multiple time zones. That’s the beauty of TANDsoft Inc.’s OPTA2000, a virtual clock and time-zone simulator for all HP NonStop servers, applications, and environments. TANDsoft recently released Version 4.1 of OPTA2000. New enhancements include support for both SQL/MP and SQL/MX applications as well as an expanded intercept engine that uses Dynamic Link Libraries.

Using intercept technology that has been a speciality of TANDsoft’s for almost two decades, OPTA2000’s intercept libraries provide virtual system times arbitrarily offset from current time. For time-zone simulation, the libraries create virtual times offset from a system’s actual time by an amount expressed as a deviation from GMT time (Greenwich Mean Time). For clock simulation, the virtual times can be offset to whatever time is required for the testing, maintenance, etc., of an application. No application modifications are required, and a single server can host thousands of applications, all running in their own virtual system time.

TANDsoft’s “best of breed, best in price” philosophy offers highly competitive value for OPTA2000 as well as for other TANDsoft solutions. They include FileSync and our new Enscribe-2-SQL and TMF-Audit Toolkits. For more information, visit www.tandsoft.com. Or call us at +1 (514) 695-2234. Free trials are available.

MOMI – TACL-ing the NonStop Blade

Congratulations to NonStop users migrating to the Blade platform! MOMI has been assisting companies throughout the world in their migration. Did you know: BlackWood Systems does NOT charge a re-licensing fee when MOMI customers under Yearly Software Support upgrade their NonStop hardware! We simply transfer the existing MOMI license to the new NonStop and allow MOMI to run on both Systems simultaneously for a limited period of time while the migration is being made.

Take a look at MOMI when you make the move to a new NonStop. This economic, easy-to-use Performance Monitor and Operations Utility is assisting companies in all industries with real-time monitoring, troubleshooting and diagnosing of System performance. MOMI swiftly obtains useful information, does not severely utilize your System resources or impact the running System, and requires no special training to operate!

www.blackwood-systems.com

Integrated Research releases PROGNOSIS monitoring solutions for HP StorageWorks XP Disk Arrays

Integrated Research today announced support for HP StorageWorks XP Arrays, delivering end-to-end insight from host to the XP Array subsystem – and back again. The product has been developed initially with a focus on delivering storage monitoring solutions for customers struggling to get end-to-end visibility between their XP Arrays and NonStop systems.

PROGNOSIS XP Array Storage Analytics provides infrastructure monitoring that identifies contention points all the way from disk sector to application process. This depth of monitoring enables business applications to be mapped to storage sub-systems and allows disparate performance management teams to unite in identifying performance bottlenecks.

Product development was demand driven by Integrated Research’s HP NonStop customers who asked for the same critical insight into XP Array performance, capacity and availability as they currently have for NonStop. PROGNOSIS XP Array Storage Analytics now enables customers to make informed investment choices, identify stranded storage and right-size cache. The insight PROGNOSIS provides also helps customers manage service level agreements, reduce costs and improve budgeting and capacity planning through better storage management.

A demo is now available at http://go.prognosis.com/demo-xparrays.html.

Tandemworld & LinkedIN

Tandemworld have created a Group on LinkedIN through which you can view the latest Tandemworld eNewsletter.

Please view this at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2602432&trk=hb_side_g

Tandemworld within EMEA

Tandemworld specialise in the recruitment of HP NonStop / Tandem specialists.

We Currently have a number of Highly skilled NonStop / Tandem professionals seeking new projects and assignments

within the EMEA Region.

Do you have Project Work that you need assistance on? Hardware upgrades to perform?

These professionals are available on a short or long Term Basis (1 Week to 1 year +) at Very Competitive rates.

We can also supply Permanent employees and other technical resources e.g. IBM, Unix, Unisys DEC/VMS etc.

If you have a requirement for Contract or Permanent Resources or require further information please contact us :-

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

info@tandemworld.net

www.tandemworld.net

To place article(s) within our future eNewsletters please Email us.

For Future Sponsorship opportunities please Email us.

User Groups

Registration Open! for a NonStop Event in September in San Jose

Connect, in partnership with HP and its partners, is pleased to offer an event dedicated to NonStop practitioners. The event will feature HP executive keynotes, over 80 technical sessions and hands-on labs and a partner expo ALL focused on NonStop!

Call for papers now live! If you are interested in speaking submit your abstracts today!

Why attend?
• Hear the future of NonStop from HP executives
• Participate in comprehensive technical sessions
• Unique opportunity to meet the developers
• Access to pre-conference seminars the day prior to the event
• Network with NonStop specific community
• Get involved in Special Interest Group (SIG) and Advocacy meetings
• Network at myCommunity Lounge
• Talk one-on-one to partners and HP at the Expo Hall

Bottom line, if you are a NonStop practitioner, then this is a must attend event.

Register Now!

Content, content, content!
Content tracks will be built around Platforms (including Blades and Manageability), Security, SOA and Application Development, Database SQL/MX, Business Continuity and Business Solutions. Within those sessions we’ll discuss user experiences, architecture, functionality, best practices, adoption, product updates and more.

Additional information will be forthcoming. In the meantime, mark your calendars and plan to join us for this unique opportunity! Visit the website frequently for updated information.

BITUG

Mark your diaries - BITUG's Dates for 2010

14 Apr Management and Performance SIG

21st-24th June HP Technology Forum and Expo, Las Vegas

07 Jul Availability SIG

27^th-29^th Sep NonStop Summit Connect Event, San Jose

06 Oct Migration and Solutions SIG

01 Dec Education Day

02 Dec Big SIG

www.bitug.com

EBUG
User Group of ACI Worldwide Products in Europe, The Middle East, & Africa
2010 Annual Conference
Hotel Puerta America
Madrid, Spain
April 27-30, 2010

Further information will be available at www.ebug.org.uk

VNUG, May 25-27, Stockholm, Sweden www.vnug.biz

Looking for a Solution or an answer to a particular problem ASK Tandemworld. We will contact the vendors for you and find a suitable solution that meets for current and future needs.