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Who are the real challengers in the
payments space?
o much of the UK’s traditional banking and payment
infrastructure sits astride a very old and creaking rocking-horse. One
that may look very nice in the corner of your living room, but chances
are you’re a bit afraid it may no longer take your trim weight for more
than a second or two.
UK Challenger Banks are taking a different route,
and are leveraging EU Passporting to bring you & I better banking. The
names Atom, Revolt, Starling and Monzo are not necessarily high street
names that you see every day, but the young and flexible millennials are
adopting them in their droves.
The modern generation don’t really understand why
anyone would want to go to a bank; in the same way we look back at the
lost art of letter-writing, the clunky-ness of a fax machine, or the
single-use capability of a waist-mounted pager.
Banking and Payments are changing rapidly and
variety of Alternate Payment Methods shows how much power has now
transferred to the consumer.
On the news this week was Barclays whose mobile App
can now offer you the ability to control your spontaneous spending at
certain merchants, like betting shops. Wow, really? Some of us have
been offering this merchant control feature to our clients for years
already. This and many other great features come ready-built inside the
OmniPayments solution.
If you want to know how OmniPayments can help you
engage with all these new payment methods, and offer flexibility to your
customers contact
Sales@omnipayments.com or click
here to read on.
BrightStrand International
Would like to wish all our Clients , NonStop(tm) Users and friends a
very Happy Festive Season and New Year.
oh and No Smoke....
No smoke, no mirrors, no snake oil.
Just NonStop Services to suit you
www.brightstrand.com
Gravic Presents at BELUG, INNIG, and MATUG Events
This month we attended and
presented on HPE Shadowbase at BELUG and INNIG (Brussels and Amsterdam),
and MATUG (Baltimore).
During the European events,
we enjoyed meeting with the customer base at the local HPE offices, and
reviewing our latest feature and solution enhancements, along with
discussing our future product direction. In particular, we discussed how
best to manage the replacement of RDF (now in the ‘Mature’ product
state) with HPE Shadowbase, and presented examples of how to do this
using the low-risk HPE Shadowbase Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM)
approach.
The attendees were also
keenly interested in our latest HPE Shadowbase Compare enhancements,
(including our new Repair feature), which allows both the source and the
target databases to remain online for updating while the comparison
takes place (it manages any ‘false positive’ mismatches due to
replication latency). It also can be used to compare any two NonStop
files or tables, regardless if they are being replicated or not (Enscribe
or SQL). Since it works with any data replication engine
environment, it can be used to validate and verify that the two
databases match, and if not, will identify the discrepancies. The Repair
feature is available when comparing NonStop SQL databases (MP or MX),
and can be used to repair the discrepancies that are found.
We enjoyed connecting with
everyone on a more personal level, along with sharing our various
experiences and challenges. We appreciate the interest and feedback we
received on our presentation, HPE Shadowbase Use Cases and Product
Update. We hope the attendees enjoy their new Shadowbase socks! Special
thanks to Ad Klijn, Bart Wever, and Ton Vrowe for coordinating the
meetings, and for their hospitality while on site.
At
MATUG, we also reminded the audience to consider migrating to HPE
Shadowbase as their go-forward solution for the additional features it
offers. We recapped a few slides from the TBC (Connect Technical Boot
Camp) regarding the announcement of end-of-sales for specific J-series
hardware platforms, and how HPE Shadowbase provides ZDM capabilities to
assist customers in migrating to NonStop X with no risk and little to no
application downtime (contact
us for more
information). We are grateful to John Vollers and Pat Boland for helping
us plan and manage the MATUG meeting. We would also like to thank the
other vendors that supported, attended, and presented, along with the
consultants and customers that attended. Congratulations to Andrew Kim
of Navy Federal Credit Union for winning our Beats earphones prize!
Read Published Article “NonStop Impressions from an Under-30
Perspective”
We hope that you enjoy
reading Paden R. Holenstein’s article,
NonStop Impressions from an Under-30
Perspective in the final printed issue of The Connection, the
November/December issue. Paden has worked in HPE Shadowbase Marketing
for over two years, and writes about his experiences attending and
presenting at various regional and international tradeshows.
All of Us
at Gravic Wish You and Your Family
a Joyous
Holiday
Season and
a Happy New Year!
To speak with us about your data replication and data integration needs,
please call us at +1.610.647.6250, or email us at
SBProductManagement@gravic.com.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise directly sells and supports Shadowbase
solutions under the name HPE Shadowbase. For more information, please
contact your local HPE Shadowbase representative or
visit our website.
Please Visit Gravic at these Upcoming 2019 Events
|
APAC MCS Boot Camp—Bangkok, 24-26 February |
|
SunTUG Sunshine Summit—Tampa, 1 March |
|
EBITUG—Edinburgh,
14-15 May |
‘ITUGLIB
team needs your input’
Sadly, your support team at ITUGLIB is at the point that our beloved NS
2000 (‘HPITUG’) is at the end of its support life. We have been working
with HPE to understand how they might be able to help, but it seems
certain we won’t be able to solve the problem the same way we did nine
years ago with a generous donation of hardware. We are currently
looking at all of our options, which include the possibility of a TNS-V
solution.
Because of this, and to continue to provide services you want and need,
we’ve opened an Online Survey on Connect’s web site. Since ITUGLIB is a
service provided by members, for members, we want to know some key
things such as what you depend on, how you access it, and what your
future needs are.
When
you have a few minutes over the next couple of days, please go to
http://bit.ly/ITUGLIB18 and take
the survey. We estimate it should take less than 15 minutes of your
time.
We
will be paying very close attention to the results of this survey to
help us make sure that whatever choices we make, they’re done with our
membership’s needs in mind. Please take a few minutes to take the
survey for us!
Green Screen, in
2018, seriously?
It's
hard to say what is most surprising. To be sitting in the last throes of
2018, writing an article about green screen applications. Or to have
recently found myself deep in the bowels of 3270 and 6530 terminal data
streams writing code to automate the testing of them. More accurately,
that should really read 'porting code' - since my firm, Ascert, has had
a TAL screen handling and testing library since I first joined (and
worked on it) back in 1997. Even then, I think most of us assumed it was
the last chance saloon for a technology that would soon go the way of
the dinosaurs, disco, and flares. But time and the future makes fools of
us all I guess. Especially those whose predictions of the death of the
mainframe have proved somewhere between premature and wildly inaccurate.
At least the cause of this
peculiar turn of events is simple to explain – a customer needed it.
Rather less easy to explain is why this wasn't just one isolated
customer, but a steady stream of requests from different sources over a
period of months. Having barely had a single conversation over testing
this style of application for the last 20 years, all of a sudden it was
a hotter topic than contactless EMV testing, or Open Banking APIs. Being
more of a practitioner than an analyst though, I parked my curiosity as
to this resurgent interest and got on with the far more solvable task of
understanding what was required and cracking on with delivering it. In
so doing, I unwittingly uncovered some pieces that could help explain
what was going on...
The first, and perhaps most unexpected piece, was
that far from declining, according to at least one recent study
mainframe use is actually growing again! It seems that the mass
migration of applications away from mainframe data centers, that began
with the client-server boom of the early 90s and continued through the
cloud hosting and serverless computing trends, may have reached its
zenith. Those applications, which could (arguably should) belong on
cheap and widely available commodity infrastructure, have moved. Those
which remain are too critical, risky, or expensive to consider
migrating. Whether you consider IBM and HPE NonStop applications as
classic, well engineered solutions built to last, or bygone relics that
you are stuck with maintaining, the big iron systems we are left with
today simply aren't going anywhere. There's no choice but to embrace the
challenge of streamlining the management and testing of them within our
modern, probably agile, practices.
Truthfully, I'd rather have
avoided the word 'agile' for the entire article if it were possible –
just mentioning it can be riskier than announcing you're a Red Sox fan
before noticing you're in a Yankees bar. But as the second of those
pieces I stumbled upon, there's no way around it. Fortunately we're
going to stay on the firmest of ground, because in amongst Scrums,
Sprints and the plethora of other ethereal terms, there is one whose
value is beyond reproach: Continuous Integration, or CI for short.
To read the entire article please visit:
https://testing.ascert.com/news/modern-test-automation-for-legacy-applications
Andrew Mould
Managing Partner, Ascert LLC
(415) 339-8500
info@ascert.com
www.ascert.com
Check Out NuWave's Short Clips on YouTube
Although
webinars can be informative, we don't always have time to tune in or
even to watch them on demand.
So
NuWave is now tailoring their YouTube channel to include short clips for
your convenience.
Check it out at
www.youtube.com/nuwavetech
Availability Digest Flips Pancakes
Jacob Goodman is a mathematician at the
City College of New York. While folding towels for his wife one day,
Goodman decided to restack the towels in the order of size, smallest
towel on top. This wasn’t as easy as Goodman initially thought. He was
forced to flip over a few towels at a time, reassess his progress, then
flip over a few more until the towels were ordered to his satisfaction.
Goodman’s math-oriented brain led him to consider a curious problem. Was
there a general formula that could calculate accurately the number of
flips required to order any number of towels? Although towel flipping
was one option, Goodman decided that the formula would be more
interesting if it could be applied to pancakes. Thus was created the
Pancake Problem, a deceptively difficult conundrum with some real world
parallels to reordering disorganized data. Even Bill Gates was
intrigued. His only academic paper is on the topic of pancake flipping.
“The Pancake Problem” is one of several articles in recent issues of the
Availability Digest. In addition to this story, read the articles below
as well as others.
Swapping Replication Engines with Zero Downtime Migration – Part 2 – In
Part 1 of this article (October 2018 Availability Digest), we explained
how an existing data replication engine can be replaced in a two-node
scenario with a new version or with a different replication engine
without requiring an outage. As we pointed out, it is important to avoid
requiring different replication engines to communicate with each other.
Interoperation between different versions is dangerous, error-prone, and
can produce faults. Here in Part 2, we examine eliminating the
versioning problem by using additional nodes. We also look at protecting
the standby system while the replication engines are being switched.
Google Cloud Adds Dual Region Support – A challenge that companies face
as they move data to the cloud is ensuring the data stays close to the
application in order to reduce latency. Companies also require
redundancy in the event of a catastrophic failure. Moreover, access to
this data must be low latency. To address these requirements, Google has
introduced a new dual-region storage option. Data is written to a single
dual-region bucket, and Google automatically replicates this data to a
backup bucket. In the event of a region failure, Google transparently
handles the failover to the data in the backup bucket. Customers can
pair specific Google dual regions, and data will be replicated
automatically between these regions. The data is distributed redundantly
across a multi-region that can span the U.S., the European Union, and/or
Asia.
Object Storage – When Digest Managing Editor Bill Highleyman first began
his career in Information Technology, dinosaurs roamed the earth; and
data was stored in files. A file had a file name by which it was
accessed. Each record in the file typically had a unique field that
could be used as an index to access the record. Then came relational
databases. These SQL databases allowed data items that had a
relationship of some sort with each other to be stored together in the
database, and they could be accessed based on that relationship. Now
there is a new guy in town – objects. Object storage is a computer data
storage architecture that manages data as objects as opposed to other
storage architectures like file systems that manage data as a file
hierarchy and block storage that manages data as blocks within sectors
and tracks. In this article, we look at objects and how they are stored
and retrieved.
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. Popular
seminars are devoted to achieving fast failover, the impact of
redundancy on availability, basic availability concepts, and eliminating
planned downtime.
The Digest provides a variety of technical writing, consulting,
marketing, and seminar services. Individuals too busy to write articles
themselves often hire us to ghostwrite. We also create white papers,
case studies, technical manuals and specifications, RFPs, presentation
slides, web content, press releases, advertisements, and so on.
Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at
www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability
Forum on LinkedIn. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.
Boot
Camp Recap
As
always, NuWave had a great time at TBC. We got the chance to present on
integrating existing NonStop applications with R3 Corda; to meet and
dine with our customers, partners and friends; and to give away a lot of
Amazon Echo Dots!
We enjoyed hearing about all of the exciting things
that HPE is working on, especially around blockchain--we are having fun
riding that wave! If you missed our Corda presentation at Boot Camp, you
can view it on
NuWave's Resources page,
along with many other videos and NonStop content.
To hear more about our trip to San Francisco, check
out our 2018
NonStop Technical Boot Camp Recap on
our News & Events page.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to you all, and
we look forward to seeing you in 2019!
Learning from the
Marriott International Data Breach
The
Marriott data breach highlighted several critical deficiencies in their
cybersecurity mindset, plan & resources. Marriott International has
admitted to an ongoing breach in its network since 2014 with nearly 500
million records stolen.
These included social security
numbers, passport numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, credit
card numbers and other identifiable information.
The breach occurred in 2014, yet it was undetected for four years. It is
being reported that the attackers not only stole encrypted data, but
also the… [click
here to read the rest of the story].
ANNOUNCING:
CSP AUTHENTICATOR+
CSP announces an exciting multi-factor authentication
solution for NonStop systems, CSP Authenticator+, which supports both
primary and secondary authentication for NonStop.
Primary authentication methods such as RADIUS, Active
Directory, Oracle ID Manager, Open LDAP and RSA cloud are supported.
User Rights Synchronization will also be
supported, making it easier than ever before to integrate a NonStop
system into the corporate authentication platform.
CSP
Authenticator+ can provide authentication services via Safeguard
Authentication SEEP, or Pathway and Non-Pathway servers. Almost any
application, including TACL, can now easily support multi-factor
authentication (MFA). Secondary authentication
methods supported include RSA SecurID, Email, Text Message, Google
Authenticate and RADIUS. You can now enable
MFA logins for different applications, making them more secure!
CSP Authenticator+ Key
Features:
·
Primary and
Secondary authentication
·
Support for
multiple authentication factors, including RADIUS & SecurID (RSA) tokens
·
Standardized
authentication across platforms
·
Configurable for
all or selected users
·
Certified for the
latest RSA release
·
Support for
virtual addressing
CSP Authenticator+ Workflow
For
more information on CSP solutions visit
www.cspsecurity.com
For
complimentary access to CSP-Wiki®, an extensive repository of NonStop
security knowledge and best practices, please visit
wiki.cspsecurity.com
We Built the Wiki for NonStop Security
®
Regards,
The CSP Team
+1(905) 568 - 8900
LUSIS A LEADING FINTECH
COMPANY LOOKING TO LEVERAGE THE POWER OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND
DATA SCIENCE
LUSIS
is a leading French software and IT services provider that launched more
than 15 years ago. The company is well known for offering advanced
software solutions to the global retail payment industry for critical
online transaction processing but it also provides FX brokerage
platforms and other trading related services. After launching a
dedicated Artificial Intelligence department, it has now started to
create AI based trading strategies. We asked Fabrice Daniel Head of the
AI team at the firm to tell us more about these and some of the other
FinTech solutions it now offers.
What range of FinTech products and services does Lusis offer for
Capital Market applications?
Lusis offers a wide range of
FinTech products and services for Capital Markets:
• FX trading; which is our core
competence
• CFDs, Options Futures and
Equities
• Advanced systems and tools
including algorithmic trading, market making, backtest engine and
trading strategy alerts sent to mobile applications
Our product is based on a
microservice architecture providing high capacity, high availability and
great flexibility. We are hardware and middleware independent with the
ability to support cloud-based deployments.
Lusis are experts in
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. How much impact do you
expect these technologies to have in the FX trading environment?
We spent 5 years using data
science approaches to analyzing and improving our trading platform. In
June 2017 Lusis created a dedicated Artificial Intelligence department
because we think AI will change end to end trading, automatic trading,
portfolio management and it will impact everything that is related to
Capital Market applications. We are especially focused on Deep Learning
because of its incredible power and flexibility for problem resolutions.
Unlike the other Machine Learning approaches, for
instance random forest, Deep Learning includes architecture as a
concept. Today you are not just managing the number of neurons and
layers of the model, and you don’t just select a feed forward, recurrent
or convolutional model. Many approaches are now using more and more
hybrid models mixing different types of Neural Networks to create more
complex architectures with “building blocks” working together, each
resolving a part of the problem.
You have developed solutions that use AI for the creation of trading
strategies. How hard was that?
These allow the creation of
models capable of discovering patterns by themselves in time series
(market prices) to determine future moves. Doing this seems very
straightforward and simple to do. However, there are many challenges in
this task making it very difficult to achieve.
To read the complete article visit:
https://www.lusispayments.com/news
Brian
Miller
Lusis Payments, North America
(415)
829-4577
Brian.Miller@lusispayments.com
Tributary System: HPE OEM
Tape Supplier
By Glenn Garrahan, Director HPE Business, Tributary
Systems
NonStop professionals are well aware of Tributary
Systems’ flagship product, Storage Director. This is an advanced, cost
effective, secure software defined, policy-based and tiered enterprise
backup virtualization solution. It enables data from any NonStop (or
other) host, OS or backup application, to be backed up to any storage
device, medium or technology, including on-premise and Public Cloud. In
fact, Tributary Systems has entered into strategic partnerships with
both IBM and Hitachi, allowing Storage Director to support both IBM
Cloud Object Storage (ICOS) and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).
Tributary Systems’ Storage Director is, to the best of our knowledge,
the only solution that offers this connectivity to all NonStop NB, NS,
and NonStopX servers.
Along
with developing Storage Director, TSI has been supplying HPE NonStop
with Backup/Restore Solutions for over two decades, and today we are the
exclusive OEM supplier of all Tape products and Library
Management software.
There are currently three LTO 6
Tape drive types available for all NB, NS and NonStop X servers:
HPE M8801A/M8802A LTO 6 FC ACL
The M8801A and M8802A ACLs (Automated Cartridge
Loaders) are capable of storing 24 LTO 6 cartridges. Each cartridge has
a capacity of 6.25 TB (assuming 2.5 times compression), for a total unit
capacity of approximately 150 TB.
HPE M8805A LTO 6 FC Tape Drive
The HPE M8805A LTO 6 represents HPE’s
sixth-generation of LTO single play, manual load tape drive technology
capable of storing up to 6.25TB per cartridge.
Remember that all LTO 6 drives are backward
compatible; they can read and write to any LTO 5 cartridge and read-only
any LTO 4 cartridge. These drives are ideal for use with NonStop X
development servers; recall that tape is still the lowest cost per TB
storage media. Looking on the web, one can find HPE LTO 6 cartridges
priced as low as $22.58 for 6.25 TB, or only $3.60 per TB.
So contact your HPE Sales Rep to order an LTO 6
drive, and you can get additional information at:
www.tributary.com
Plus for additional reading on Storage Director,
see CIO Review Magazine’s article at:
https://storage.cioreview.com/vendor/2018/tributary_systems
As
always, if you’d like additional information about Tributary Systems’
products, visit
www.tributary.com, or call Matt
Allen at 817-786-3066 (office) or 713-492-7434 (cell).
And from all of us here at TSI, have a safe and happy Holiday Season,
and a wonderful 2019!
Ask TandemWorld
Got a question about NonStop ?
ASK Tandemworld
Keep up with us on
Twitter @tandemworld
We are currently seeking skilled resources
across the EMEA region,
contact us for More Info
www.tandemworld.net
NWSI
For
those of you that have moved away from NonStop(tm) Tandemworld has
another division catering for other technologies around the NonStop(tm)
Systems
More
will be posted here and on the dedicated NSWI website soon.
Bookmark
www.nonstopworldinternational.com
Find out more about us at
www.tandemworld.net
Sponsored By
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