Tandemworld eNewsletter for August 2013

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Tandemworld eNewsletter for August 2013

The BrightStrand International hp NonStop Server Health Check Service has been created in order to provide users of hp NonStop Servers with a situation report as to the status of their hp NonStop systems and service environments.

The service has been designed by BrightStrand, to assure customers that they are getting the optimum from their current hp NonStop Server environments.  The Health Check will provide a guide to assist customers in making improvements to various service areas.  It can also be used as a tool to aid the decision-making process in such key areas as hardware purchasing, system migration and Service Level Agreement (SLA) planning. 

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

comForte's TOP dramatically improves productivity and flattens learning curve for HP NonStop developers and administrators

Successful software-hardware solutions last decades, whilst failures are cast-aside in a few years or months. Many HP NonStop customers have applications that have been in use for two decades or longer.  Long-term success brings its own problems: an experienced pool of expert developers and system administrators often locked into a tool-set that also dates back a few decades.  This tool lock-in provides a barrier to new staff and prevents experienced staff from benefitting from some of the productivity gains of the last 20 years.

On the HP NonStop platform, most system administrators and developers rely solely on the command shell (“TACL”) for tasks such as file browsing, file editing, getting a list of processes and so forth.  While this is effective for certain tasks, other tasks are much easier done using modern, GUI-based tools which are tightly integrated with the Windows platform. For example, using TOP, users can compare and merge  two folders on different disks or systems with a few mouse-clicks and immediately see what files are different, then drill down to use a file compare tool to view the line-by-line differences. This is invaluable for systems that run in active-active or hot stand-by mode, when configuring new servers or applying customisations to new third-party software releases. Without TOP, such a task becomes a laborious exercise in copying file details and then comparing them manually, before typing any remediation commands. The folder comparison is a small part of TOP’s functionality, but the productivity gain is typical of all areas covered by TOP.

comForte’s TOP product provides a modern alternative to the terminal-based tools still used by many NonStop server end-users, providing a rich user interface for both common and esoteric tasks.

comForte’s MR-Win6530 terminal emulation is used by many Fortune 500 companies world-wide, and is also delivered on the console of each HP NonStop system. Now, MR-Win6530 is built right into the TOP product. Thus, for the technical users on the NonStop, using TOP in collaboration with MR-Win6530 provides the best of both worlds – the flexibility and familiarity of the command line with the productivity gains of a GUI.

For more information, please watch the following short videos on YouTube to see how TOP can improve the productivity of system administrators and developers.

For a free trial copy please simply send an informal e-mail to sales@comforte.com or go to the TOP product page on the comForte web site, search for ‘Downloads’ and click on “TOP Software and Manuals”.

HP NonStop [Tandem] Security Group on LinkedIn - join the discussion.

Stay connected and follow the discussion: 

comForteLounge BlogSpot

comForteLounge LinkedIn Group

comForteLounge Twitter

comForte on YouTube

+++

comForte near you in 2013

comForte is travelling far and wide to be at an event near you.

Come and join us at these events in 2013:

VNUG, Stockholm, Sweden, Sept 4-5, 2013

DUST, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, Sept 10, 2013

EBUG Knowledge Forum, London, UK, Sept 23-24, 2013

GTUG, Frankfurt, Germany, Sept 23-25, 2013

PCI US Community Meeting, Las Vegas, USA, Sept 24-26, 2013

InNUG, Goa, India, Oct 3-5, 2013

PCI EU Community Meeting, Nice, France, Oct 29-31, 2013

CONNECT Advanced Technical Boot Camp 2013, San Jose, USA, Nov 3-5, 2013

PCI AP Community Meeting, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Nov 19-20, 2013

BITUG BIG SIG, London, UK, Dec 5, 2013

Gravic Shadowbase is the featured video on the Partners tab of the new HP NonStop web page. The footage, produced by HP and featuring Bill Holenstein, Senior Manager of Product Delivery, was shot at last year’s Mission-Critical Innovation Awards Celebration in Frankfurt, Germany, where Shadowbase won as the best in the New Application category. Video: tinyurl.com/kkkmb38.

Please follow us at Gravic Shadowbase @GravicSB and you will be the first to have access to our latest white papers, case studies, articles and news. We look forward to utilizing this medium to its fullest potential in communicating with all of our customers, HP personnel and groups, TUG/RUG user groups, and fellow vendors. We welcome your tweets!

·        Stuff happens

Even though you may already have a business continuity plan in place, it may not be adequate, well-tested, or well-supported. Worse, it may be providing you with a false sense of security and will fail when called upon. Your business’ data must be available at all times from anywhere, and it must be current. Your IT infrastructure must be continuously available, with an adequate business continuity solution for planned and unplanned circumstances. If you rely on active/passive architecture, does it really provide sufficient availability? Avoid taking this risk by utilizing other replication technologies, such as sizzling-hot-standby and active/active architectures. Synchronous replication may be utilized for the highest levels of availability with no data collisions and zero data loss. You may want to consider moving to one of these higher level replication architectures. To read: Why Your Business Continuity Plan May be Inadequate.

Interested parties may contact us at +1.610.647.6250 or SBProductManagement@gravic.com to discuss their specific situation and to learn more about the solutions we offer.

CTUG Fall Conference, Toronto, Canada, 18-19 September

The EBUG Knowledge Forum, London, England, 23-24 September

Connect NonStop Advanced TBC, San Jose, CA, 3-5 November

BITUG BIG SIG, London, England, 5 December

For more information, please visit: www.gravic.com/shadowbase.

1.      Determine all non-compliant issues in a consistent manner.

1.      A formalized reporting structure that combines:

Find out how CSP can help you meet the auditors requirements – before they even arrive. Visit www.cspsecurity.com for more information.

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.

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.

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.

Musings on NonStop!

August, ‘13

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

Last month I wrote of intersections and this month I saw my fair share of intersections. Out on America’s interstate highways! August sees many folks away from their offices on vacation, but just as often, attending events. The catalyst for our most recent road trip was an event in Atlanta as well as the need to check out the viability of New Orleans as a possible future venue, given how many folks were talking-up the value of the location of late.

I am often asked why I like to travel and why it’s seldom that I fly anywhere these days. Expressed as simply as I can put it, for a writer, there’s little ongoing inspiration coming from sitting in a home office, looking at the same old furniture. Inspiration comes from meeting people and visiting new places. As for flying, I suspect many Americans are somewhat jealous that I can drive to most cities in less than three days, as the fun of flying has well and truly passed me by. Reaching into to grab my luggage off a carousel while on a trip to Singapore some years ago, my fellow passenger sighed, looked across at me, and remarked “don’t you just love the romance of travel!”

On the other hand, on the highways you begin to get a feeling for just how much data is out there – arterial highways loaded bumper to bumper with eighteen-wheelers every one of which sporting a communications dome on its roof. At night it’s not hard to pick out those with keyboards and screens updating drivers with a constant stream of information, be it highway conditions, the weather, or how much further they have to drive. As for passenger cars, rarely does one pass these days without the shark fin antennae visible on the rear of the roof pulling in entertainment from satellites overhead.

Giving the collection of magazines piled high on the kitchen counter after we returned home; it was a column in the September, 2013, issue of the magazine, Motor Trend that stopped me in my tracks. The story, “Your car’s contribution to the ‘Big Data’ Cloud” talked in more detail about what I had observed, but went much further when it came to what was really happening. “The government’s $2-billion, million-plus-square-foot Bluffdale, Utah, data storage and analysis facility opening this month is equipped to handle yottabytes of data.”

OK, so we have yottabytes and as the columnist then points out, “Yotta signifies 10 to the power of 24 – that’s the largest numerical prefix coined to date, and it equals a million exabytes.” However, that’s not the only item of interest as the columnist explains how “The typical new car today generates 15 gigabits of information per hour – a number that’s climbing as sensors proliferate. A little back-of-the-napkin figuring suggests that 250 million such vehicles would produce around 2000 exabytes (0.002 yottabytes) per year, most of which never leave the car. But that’s changing.”

This, mind you, doesn’t include the flow of data coming into the car for entertainment purposes nor does it include the latest in watching over our personal health. As the columnist also observed, there are now products that “monitors for heart rate, blood glucose levels, and the like (that) can be tapped to warn a driver of an impending blackout and summon help”. Big Data doesn’t get much bigger than this and it’s just early days for the auto industry, as legislators begin to demand even more information be collected, stored, and available for analysis even as insurance payouts (particularly for fraudulent whiplash claims) continue to climb.

Big Data, and indeed Big Data Cloud, as in the magazine headline above, will impact every NonStop system deployed today. Of that I have no doubt. Whether it’s HP itself automatically collecting a whole lot of information in real time about the performance characteristics of individual components or simply other systems in the data center capturing meta-transactions (transactions about transactions) necessary for producing more accurate (and usable) business analytics.

In the upcoming issue of The Connection (Sep – Oct, 2013) I write of just how many NonStop vendors are either building Big Data related products or have investigations under way. Last week I wrote that Attunity would be attending the HP Vertica Worldwide User Conference in Boston and of how Lawrence Schwartz, VP of Marketing, Attunity, would be hosting a “Birds of a Feather” breakfast round table. It’s not over and it would be worth checking the web site Attunity.com and look at the blog for Schwartz blog updates – the first one now posted “Birds of a Feather” Breakfast Summary: Best Practices for Loading Data to HP Vertica.

While you are on the Attunity web site and reading the blog posts, look for the most recent post from April Healy. Known to most of the NonStop community for the time she spent with GoldenGate (and as the wife of former ITUG Chairman, Scott Healy), April Healy touched on a topic dear to my own heart - sailing. Look for the post A Sailor’s Reflection on the Big Data Lake and yes, that really is a photo of the yacht she and Scott now sail. More importantly perhaps, it includes some of the information she shares in the upcoming feature to The Connection.

For the NonStop community perhaps the best quote in the feature was taken from the July 8 – 15, 2013, issue of Time magazine that included the feature story, Big Data, Meet Big Brother. Reporter, Fareed Zakaria, makes the very important observation that, “We are living with the consequences of two powerful, interrelated trends. The first is digital life. Your life today has a digital signature. Where you eat, shop and travel; whom you call, e-mail and text; every website, café and museum you visit even once is all stored in the great digital cloud. And you can't delete anything, ever … The second is Big Data. Today, data is so readily available and computers are so fast and powerful that experts can analyze entire data sets, every last piece of information, to find needles in haystacks.”

Attunity is not alone when it comes to vendors within the NonStop community participating in the Big Data space. I can firmly predict that by the time 2014 HP Discover rolls around many more will be providing products, and very likely, also leveraging Cloud computing. To me, the two are very much siblings and there will be many instances where Clouds are tapped to hold Big Data frameworks. The mechanics and timing here matter less than the fact that the NonStop vendor community is already aggressively pursuing the creation of products.

As I wrote last month, just having NonStop middleware and infrastructure vendors openly discussing the challenges that (these initiatives represent) is encouraging and heartwarming – NonStop remains a platform warranting continuing investments. For this, the NonStop community should be extremely thankful.  

Richard Buckle
Founder and CEO
Pyalla Technologies, LLC
Email:             richard@pyalla-technologies.com

Following my blogs? My web publications? My discussion Groups?

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, Real Time View

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

…. And check out the Group on LinkedIn, comForte Lounge

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

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

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

For those interested in additional information on better positioning NonStop in the enterprise, please contact CAIL at  -  info@cail.com  or call  800-668-5769  /  905-940-9000  or visit  www.cail.com

Availability Digest Challenges You to “Try Doing This Today”        

 So much is made of the remarkable computing capabilities we enjoy currently that we forget how extraordinary were the accomplishments of the 1960s and 1970s. “Try Doing This Today” reminds us with examples of how PDP-8s, IBM 360s, Honeywell H200s and similar technologies sent men to the moon, computerized our stock exchanges, revolutionized race-track wagering, and made possible other complex, continuous availability systems at a time when memory was measured in kilobytes and processor speed was measured in megahertz.

Also in the August Digest:

Malicious Apple Chargers – Now we have to worry about the chargers.  Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently discovered an unlikely back door into Apple devices. Their demonstration of how easy it is to build an Apple device charger that can infect an iPhone or iPad   generated a rapid response from Apple, which quickly released an upgrade to close the security flaw.     

Software Reliability Models – It has been a while since the Digest published a “Geek Corner” article.  If you qualify as a math geek and relish the thought of content that some of your colleagues will studiously avoid, “Software Reliability Models” will be a good read.  Guest author Dr. Terry Critchley offers his expertise on the use of defect density as a basis for the prediction of software reliability.

@availabilitydig – the Twitter Feed for People Obsessed with Outages, Failover Faults, 9s, and Redundancy – A challenge every issue for the Availability Digest is to determine which of the many availability topics out there win coveted status as a Digest article. We always regret not focusing our attention on the topics we bypass. With our new Twitter presence, we don’t have to feel guilty. This article highlights some of the @availabilitydig tweets that made headlines 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 for achieving high availability. 

Find out more about us at www.tandemworld.net

www.tandemworld.net

+44 (0) 20 8304 7979

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