NonStop ™ Newsletter for February 2019

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Contents

Multi-Factor Authentication on Nonstop Made Easy!

 Are you Still on Track?

No.......................

Gravic Presents HPE Shadowbase Updates and Use Cases at SunTUG

HPE’s Spaceborne Computer Survives a Year on ISS

ETBC

HPE Technology Partner, XYPRO, secures fault-tolerant payment infrastructure

It's time to incorporate REST into your applications

JC Penney

Visit the XYPRO events calendar to see where we will be and sign up for free webinars

ASK TW

 

   
 

Multi-Factor Authentication on Nonstop Made Easy!

 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is increasingly becoming one of the more critical security requirements on the NonStop platform. MFA provides superior ID verification measures over easily compromised single-password methods. There are also compliance requirements to contend with, such as PCI DSS requirement 8.3, which now calls for organizations to strengthen their access control security with MFA. By changing the terminology of requirement 8.3, two forms of authentication are now the minimum requirement.

Ultimately, any remote user or non-console admin user that has access to the cardholder environment must use Multi-Factor Authentication. From legacy Pathway applications to the latest RESTful interfaces, effective MFA must be provided for users and applications that have the potential to access sensitive data. 

Introducing CSP Authenticator+™

The new CSP Authenticator+™ supports both primary and secondary authentication for NonStop. It provides a  RESTful interface which supports multi-factor authenticated logins on NonStop systems. CSP Authenticator+ resides on the NonStop Platform and uses an OSS “bridge” to connect to the RESTful interface of the CSP Authenticator+ web server.

Primary authentication methods such as RADIUS, RSA Cloud, Active Directory, Oracle ID Manager and Open LDAP are supported. User Rights Synchronization will make it easier than ever before to integrate a NonStop system into the Enterprise ID management platforms.

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. Secondary authentication methods supported include RSA SecurID, Email, Text Message, and Google Authenticator . You can now enable MFA logins for various applications, making them more secure! 

CSP Authenticator+ Workflow

CSP Authenticator+ Key Features Include:

·        Primary and Secondary authentication support

·        Browser-based user friendly interface

·        Standardized authentication across platforms

·        Configurable for all or selected users

·        Certified for the latest RSA release

·        Support for virtual addressing

 

CSP - Compliance at your Fingertips™

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

 

Visit us at these upcoming shows to learn more about our exciting solutions for NonStop and beyond:

         SunTUG - Tampa Bay, FL

         March 1, 2019

         ETBC - Edinburgh, Scotland

         May  13-15, 2019

        

Regards,

The CSP Team              

+1(905) 568 - 8900

 

 


 Are you Still on Track?

For those of a certain age group, or for those with a sense of history, you may have been aware of the NonStop Open System Interconnection / Message Handling System (OSI/MHS) subsystem.

Insider Technologies developed “ActionView.400”, the OSI/MHS X.400 monitoring product which was shipped with the older Tandem/HPE NonStop platforms and since December 2018, has been marked by HPE, as obsolete.

However, we support customers in the Government and Military sectors where the monitoring and tracking of X.400 and SMTP/MIME emails is essential to ensure that SLAs are met and every message can be accounted for – for the military especially, a pretty critical requirement one would think?  

Insider also has customers in message tracking arenas for BASE24, XML, MQ, including solutions for “WayPoint”, aka Store-and-Forward mechanisms (SAF), BAM, XML, JMX, again, across multiple platform and vendor environments - all monitored via a single Sentra interface.

A description of two types of our message tracking solutions follows but to start with…

Sentra Architecture

Architectural design for monitoring and tracking email/MTAs across multiple platforms and MTAs.

1) X.400/SMTP Message Tracking

The manual monitoring of these types of protocols requires highly skilled engineers who understand the infrastructure and flow of the messages amongst large-scale global networks.

To assist with their monitoring requirements, our multi-vendor and multi-platform enterprise monitoring solution – Sentra – provides them with an invaluable addition to their toolset.  

Note: Sentra does not interrogate the message content; it is purely concerned with tracking the delivery of messages through their global mail delivery systems.

Government and Defence Message Tracking

Challenge: 

·        Track Government and Defence mail systems processing >100,000 messages per day.

·        Provide an interface so that individual mail items can be tracked and queried.

·        Measure delivery response times for mail.

·        Alert on other attributes such as mail ‘deleted before read’.

·        Interface to a billing system.

·        Monitor the infrastructure that the application executes on.

Solution:

·        Use Sentra’s centralised software installation and management facilities to deploy tracking software to >200 remote, multi-vendor platforms and multi-vendor MTAs.  

·        Relay SMTP and X.400 email data from the remote nodes to the standard Sentra facilities for storage and analysis.

·        Create service level rules to prove timely delivery of mail.

·        Issue an alert when as SLA has not been met. 

·        Alerts viewed by engineers via a tailored Sentra web console.

Outcome: 

·        Proof that Customer Service Levels are being met.

·        This data helps to influence charging tariffs.

·        Pro-active fault resolution.

·        No lengthy analysis, as all provided via a single web interface


Sentra Hypervisor for MTA

Top-level example for an MTA infrastructure based at Insider.

Drill-downs available to show message flows per platform and per SMTP/MTA agent. This is an extremely simple example compared to our Government and Military configurations.

Graphical Message Tracking

Graphical message tracking results allow you to see clearly, what happened to any given message without having to look inside it. In the example below, you can view the path the message has taken and obtain individual diagnostics.


 

Message Tracking Results

Drill-down from any point in the diagram to get detailed diagnostics from the MTA.

Message Diagnostics

Highlighted alert detail.

2) WayPoint (SAF) Message Tracking

Payments, messages can be sent across multiple platforms.  

Each message contains a particular id that is stored within Sentra, where its inbuilt correlation engine will track the required journey.

A series of XML agents are deployed to key monitoring points (WayPoints) within a payment / messaging processing infrastructure to monitor the message flows and calculate transaction volumes and trends, payment volumes and trends and end-to-end processing times.

Based on the Sentra stored data, rules can be configured to monitor service level compliance and abnormal processing volumes. Trend charts, alerts, queries can be created via the Sentra browser interface.

Note: A single Sentra installation provides this fully encompassed monitoring and tracking solution.

 

Without Sentra WayPoint Tracking

Messages stored on each platform, with no waypoint tracking to determine for example, where the message is; if it is meeting its SLA delivery time; if there is any corruption.

 

With Sentra WayPoint Tracking

 

Sentra Correlation Engine

I trust this article will illuminate you as to how we at Insider Technologies are pretty creative in providing in-depth tracking solutions for all types of messages, across any vendor and any platform; not just on HPE NonStop.

  hello@insidertech.co.uk

+44 (0) 161 876 6606


No Smoke ......

No smoke, no mirrors, no snake oil.

Just NonStop Services to suit you.

www.brightstrand.com

 


Gravic Presents HPE Shadowbase Updates and Use Cases at SunTUG

 

Gravic is presenting HPE Shadowbase Updates and Enterprise Use Cases at the SunTUG Sunshine Summit in Tampa on March 1. We describe newly released and upcoming features in the HPE Shadowbase data replication product, including:

·        New Repair feature in the HPE Shadowbase Compare (for SQL) product

·        New SBDDLUTL utility to simplify replicating NonStop Enscribe data to various SQL target environments

·        Support for IBM DB2 as a source

·        Improvements to simplify migration from RDF or other products to HPE Shadowbase software

·        Additional HPE Shadowbase feature support for BASE24™

·        Upcoming new uni-directional and bi-directional HPE Shadowbase Zero Data Loss (ZDL) capabilities

We also describe how HPE Shadowbase works in several common enterprise use case scenarios:

·        Business Continuity – active/passive through sizzling-hot-takeover to fully active/active replication architectures

·        Data Integration and Synchronization – big data/OLAP and feeding a data warehouse

·        Application Integration – real-time fraud detection and building a real-time business intelligence system

·        Zero Downtime Migration – eliminating planned application downtime and minimizing the risks associated with hardware and software changes

To speak with us about this presentation or about your data replication and data integration needs, please contact us, 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

SCTUG—Santa Ana, 2 May

ETBC European NonStop Technical Boot Camp—Edinburgh, 13-15 May

LATUG Conference—Bogota, 23-24 May

ATUG Meeting—Atlanta area, 18 September

CTUG Conference—Toronto, 25-26 September

Connect HPE Technical Boot Camp—San Francisco, 3-6 November

 


HPE’s Spaceborne Computer Survives a Year on ISS



In August 2017, SpaceX delivered an HPE supercomputer to the International Space Station. The effort was part of a year-long NASA experiment to determine whether a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system could operate within a harsh environment for a year, roughly the time it takes to travel from Earth to Mars. The verdict? An unmitigated success!

Most hardware designed for space is hardened, thereby increasing both weight and cost. Instead, HPE’s Spaceborne computer tested the concept of software hardening. Spaceborne’s hardware is straight out of the factory and is a two-server HPE Apollo system. The system has performed virtually problem-free in zero gravity, with irregular cooling and electric power, and with varying levels of radiation.


“HPE’s Spaceborne Computer Survives a Year on ISS” 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.

China Infiltrates U.S. Companies - In 2015, Amazon began evaluating a startup company called Elemental Technologies. Elemental specialized in multiscreen video, and Amazon believed that the technology would help with its streaming video service known as Amazon Prime Video. However, Amazon uncovered troubling issues with the Elemental servers that customers installed to handle video compression. Amazon had Elemental send several servers to a security company for testing, which revealed on the motherboards a tiny microchip that was not part of the original design. Investigators found that the chips allowed attackers to create a doorway into any network to which the altered servers were attached. From where did the chips come? China.


CenturyLink Takes Down 911 Service – A U.S. nationwide outage of telcom company CenturyLink’s network lasted almost two days as staff scrambled to pinpoint the root problem. It turns out that the disruption was caused by a faulty third-party network management card in one of CenturyLink’s data centers. The incident is an example of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome, a concept borrowed by computer scientists from the Disney film Fantasia. In the case of CenturyLink, one of its networks sent out packets of bad information. The packets were replicated and resent over and over. Eventually, the system bogged down and crashed.

Swapping Replication Engines with Zero Downtime (Part 3) – This 3-part series focuses on swapping a data replication engine for another replication engine without the need for downtime. Part 1 explained how the engine swap can take place even with different engine versions from the same manufacturer or with an engine from a different vendor. Part 2 described how such a zero-downtime migration (ZDM) can be enhanced by adding one or more additional nodes. In Part 3, we examine swapping engines while maintaining consistent, complete, and up-to-date databases.


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 join our 805 members at the Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. Follow us as well on Twitter @availabilitydig.


 


ETBC

European NonStop Technical Boot Camp

special early bird registration now open

www.BITUG.com/etbc-2019

 


HPE Technology Partner, XYPRO, secures fault-tolerant payment infrastructure

 

XYPRO security software is an integral part of every HPE NonStop system, included in the HPE NonStop operating system.

These include XYPRO’s XYGATE User Authentication (XUA) and XYGATE Merged Audit (XMA) products— both fundamental to every NonStop customer’s security needs.

For example, XUA brings industry-standard, secure authentication to the NonStop environment, and XMA enables the NonStop platform to deliver cutting-edge data logging and real-time alerting mechanisms based on user activity.

Companies with mission-critical business requirements have put their trust in HPE NonStop and XYPRO security solutions for decades. In one example, a leading Japanese enterprise relies on HPE NonStop servers to process millions of payment transactions every day for its customers purchasing products and services.

Read More


It's time to incorporate REST into your applications


If you are not using Web Services with your NonStop applications, you are missing out on a lot of its benefits, including application reusability and interoperability.  And if you are using SOAP web services, it is time that you look at migrating to REST to take advantage of its benefits over SOAP.

Here are three quick reasons you should consider using REST.

  • Easier to GUI enable NonStop applications using RESTful API

o   Most  client developers prefer to use REST. In fact, many of the younger developers don’t even know what SOAP is.

o   All the latest popular client side frameworks such as node.js and Angular support REST as the native interface.

  • Interoperate with other enterprise applications and devices

o   Most of the new enterprise web services are exposed as RESTful API’s. That includes applications developed on platforms like Windows,

Linux, Java or IBM mainframe.

o   Mobile and browser apps interact better using RESTful API’s.

  • Performance

o   Unlike SOAP, REST uses JSON, and does not carry the verbose overhead of XML.

o   By leveraging the HTTP protocol and URI structure, RESTful API message definitions are greatly simplified

o   REST’s simplicity makes it more scalable for Internet applications


Learn more about how to adopt REST for your NonStop applications by attending our upcoming webinar:
How to quickly Implement RESTful applications using LightWave
Wed, Mar 13, 2019 10:00 AM - 11000 AM EDT
Click this ink to register:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7380957083157128195

Product Information: LightWave Product Suite
https://ticsoftware.com/Solutions/Modernize/LightWaveRESTSuite.aspx
  
Read our blog:  
Overview of REST
https://ticsoftware.com/blog/index.php/what-is-rest-web-service/

For more information, please contact Sales-support@ticsoftware.com or visit our website https://ticsoftware.com


Introduction

Ever wondered how JCPenney managed to migrate their old Base24 system to their new modern robust and streamlined OmniPayments payment gateway solution?  OmniPayments wasn’t their original first choice; other major names were higher on the list, but for reason or another, could not rise to the challenge. 

This article describes how JCPenney achieved just this; and in a matter of months. It describes the steps they took to make their choice, and why they eventually settled on OmniPayments.  They now feel their new solution is superior in many ways to the old one.  The new solution provides a much improved and flexible solution that can process their payments transactions much faster, with higher volume at a much lower cost. The new solution enables business monitoring capabilities, and an infrastructure perspective that was not available to JCPenney with the previous solution.

JCPenney is extremely satisfied with the product architecture, performance and support as evidenced by the following quote:



The expression that best summarizes how JCPenney feels about this Payments system upgrade in their own words is “we achieved the impossible”.

The Trigger

In the spring of 2016, the vendor of the legacy Payments solution at JCPenney, ACI, informed JCPenney that the existing old version of their Base24 product will no longer be supported as of March 2018. In order to move to a newer version, JCPenney would need to upgrade both the software as well as the hardware.

This requirement essentially imposed not only a major, and in some way risky platform change, but also required a significant rewrite of the environment.

Due to the foreseeable effort to do the rewrite, JCPenney decided to “open up the field” to other providers. Thus, initiating a new evaluation process that included several other solution providers.

Vendor Selection

 

The selection process looked at a total of eight providers. One of the most critical criteria for JCPenney was risk. How did they resolve that question?  Read on here.

 


Visit the XYPRO events calendar to see where we will be and sign up for free webinars

  

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SunTUG – 2019 Sunshine Summit

March 1 – 2, 2019  

The DoubleTree by Hilton, Tampa, FL

 

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eBITUG Edingurgh

May 13, 2019 - May 15, 2019

The Sheraton Grand Hotel, Edinburgh, Scotland

 


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