Tandemworld eNewsletter for Jan 2014

FileSync 3.1 from TANDsoft, Inc. is now available for shipping to new and current customers. This latest version of FileSync, one of TANDsoft’s popular flagship products, offers data deduplication, which significantly reduces bandwidth requirements and the size of backups by streaming only data that has changed within a file or database. Redundant data is not transmitted.

FileSync automatically monitors, replicates and synchronizes source files, program environments, application environments, configuration files, programs – anything non-database that needs to be kept current across the network. It supports qualified expressions and referential integrity as well as the synchronization of SQL/MX catalogues, schemas, tables, partitions, and indices. In addition, FileSync supports the SQL/MX filter, SQL/MX 3.x, and all earlier SQL/MX versions.

The new data-deduplication feature allows FileSync to improve synchronization / replication times for large files. Only changed data, not entire files, are sent to the backup database. FileSync deduplication – or client deduplication - takes place at the system hosting the primary database. The FileSync deduplication algorithm detects what changes have been made to an already replicated file and transmits only the unique data. In addition to reduced backup sizes and bandwidth requirements, FileSync deduplication decreases disk loads, increases Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and reduces Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

FileSync supports a wide variety of file types, including all Enscribe files – audited, non-audited, structured and unstructured; all OSS files; NonStop SQL/MP Catalogs, Tables and Partitions; NonStop SQL/MX Catalogs, Schemas, Tables and Partitions; program source and object files; and configuration and TACL files.

TANDsoft customers use FileSync for system migration, disaster recovery, upgrades, and backups.
The software works closely with all NonStop real-time data replication products to provide a comprehensive solution for maintaining duplicate system and application environments.

Visit http://tandsoft.com/files/products/FileSync.html for more information on FileSync and its new data deduplication feature.

TANDsoft’s “best of breed, best in price” philosophy offers highly competitive value for all TANDsoft solutions. In addition to FileSync with data deduplication, they include: the OPTA2000 virtual clock- and time-zone simulator; the OPTA suite of interception and trace utilities (OPTATrace Online Process Tracer and Analyzer, Recycle Bin, EMS Alerts Online Startup and Termination Capture Utility, Low Pin Optimizer); Stack Monitor, which alerts developers to the impending threat of a stack overflow; Command Stream Replicator, which logs and automatically replicates TMF-audited/unaudited FUP, SQL/MP and SQL/MX DDL structure and other environment changes to target systems; AutoLib, which automatically loads a user library or a DLL for executing processes; the Enscribe-2-SQL and TMF-Audit Toolkits and the new Enscribe-2-SQL Data Replicator, all of which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques; E2S-Lite, which permits efficient, low-cost Enscribe modifications without the need to change a program’s source code; and SDI (Sensitive Data Intercept) for Enscribe and SQL/MP.

TANDsoft products require no application source-code modifications, are available for all HP NonStop servers, and support major third-party applications. Free trials are available. For information about TANDsoft solutions, contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Our Enscribe to SQL Migration Forum on LinkedIn is at 180 members and counting. TANDsoft will exhibit at SunTUG on March 7, 2014. www.tandsoft.com.

This year may indeed be considered a watershed year for NonStop. The timeless architecture of NonStop will be reborn supporting the most popular chip technology in the world – the Intel x86 architecture. It will even see the glue that holds NonStop – the very fabric recognized for years as the special sauce within NonStop – embrace InfiniBand (IB). When I think of what I may be writing in a year’s time, as we begin 2015, I have to believe we will have witnessed numerous new opportunities for NonStop some of which will prove to be pleasant, indeed, unexpected surprises.

As I prepared to write this month’s Musings, I took a quick tour of this site and paged back through previous issues until I came to January, 2009. Five years ago, these Musings were published under a slightly different heading: NonStop - A Running Commentary. At the time, I was still part of the GoldenGate organization even as I was coming off two years of participation on the board of IBM’s mainframe user group, SHARE. I still find it amusing that someone with the public credentials tied as firmly to NonStop as there were, that I had would be welcomed by IBM users. But I was, and the reception was particularly warm, so much so, that I am still in contact with past and current presidents even now.

Five years ago, however, I wrote that the coming year would hold many surprises and the economy will turn the tables on many of our plans. I observed how capital budgets would likely disappear and we would all face doing a whole lot more just to stay in business with a lot less. Legislation, and regulatory mandates, are all going to take a huge toll on what we could and could not do – with security topping the list. Now, it’s 2014 and who would argue that considerable government intrusion remains or that security isn’t once again top of the list!

Putting 2008 into perspective was the lead article of January 2009. Submitted by Jim McFadden of NTI, it opened with “2008 was definitely a roller coaster year for everyone. The year started out pretty typical. World financial markets were strong. Our jobs were secure. We all had established plans in place to grow our businesses. Life was great! Then the world financial markets crashed. Housing, banking, credit, savings, and employment all took a major hit. By September we were hiding under our desks, scrambling for a safe place to be.”

Dramatic? Yes, but I do think it captured the sentiment we all shared as we turned the corner and began 2009. For me, speculating about change and of tables being turned, the year proved to be a major turning point in my own career. As 2009 came to an end I found myself living the life of an independent contractor as I operated a small business and somewhat fearful of what lay ahead in the years to follow. Turns out I had little to worry about.

Sitting through the presentation by Yash Kapadia, CEO of OmniPayments, during last year’s NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp (TBC), I was particularly impressed with his win in Columbia with NonStop where a very public Unix system was replaced by NonStop. Wins like this are worth publicizing and most of us are now aware of OmniPayments achievements. Following the presentation I was able to sit down with Yash but the discussion quickly turned to HP’s plans for NonStop to support the x86 architecture.

What followed in that brief exchange I covered in a post To a needy mother, a fingerprint’s as good as a PIN to the industry blog, ATMmarketplace (check it out on AMmarketplace.com if you haven’t already). "With the x86 architecture in the plan, this changes the game for NonStop users and prospects everywhere. They will have options and this will be a new experience for them," Yash told me. "We are ready — HP ensures application compatibility and while we trust, we plan on taking up the chance to test and to validate out solution."

The sense of relief if not outright enthusiasm coming from Yash was unmistakable – specializing in the switch business he is seeing continued success with NonStop central to his marketing – so much so that the centerpiece of his TBC presentation had to be the declaration of the Opsol Price Guarantee! “For existing HP NonStop customers, we will be below or will match 50% of your total operational cost,” said Yash throwing down the gauntlet to all solutions vendors in the payments marketplace.

Every now and then, it takes measure like this to grab market attention and by all accounts, in the markets Yash is active in, the requests for proposals (RFPs) are coming thick and fast! Yash has enjoyed early success from the new low price-point of the NS2100 and with the starting prices likely to drop even further with the first shipments of NonStop on the Intel x86 architecture, he believes, “for the markets we serve, this will be taken as very good news!” Yash is on a course to re-write the cost of solutions on NonStop and there are customers and prospects alike pleased with his fresh take on value pricing.

The sense of game changing that x86 supports elicits from vendors didn’t just come from Yash at Opsol / OmniPayments. Readers who follow my posts to the IR web publication, realtime.ir.com should have picked up even more on this topic. Game changing situations occur rarely in our industry but when they do, they trigger considerable user interest. So when Integrated Research’s (IR) General Manager – Products & Alliances, John Dunne acknowledged in the post As business prizes value, NonStop embraces x86; IR is preparing to capitalize on opportunities that arise! that, “There were concerns that Itanium would be the undoing of NonStop” there were few who would have disagreed.

However, Dunne then added, “With the architecture moving to a mainstream chipset, as is the case with the x86, NonStop won’t fall off the ‘chipset cliff’ as Itanium reaches end of life and is discontinued.” Chipset cliffs, game-changing, and indeed, as HP VP and GM of Integrity Servers Randy Meyer summed it up in his TBC presentation, NonStop continues to demonstrate that it “is a timeless architecture.” When I later asked Meyer to sum up the top two or three major newsworthy achievements of 2013, he simply said the announcement of NonStop support of x86 dwarfed everything else.

Delivering on the plans this year will likely dwarf everything else coming from HP NonStop development. Execution always looks simple on whiteboards and in slideware. There will be challenges but there will also be opportunities and in recognizing this, will energize the NonStop community in ways we may not have seen in decades. Yes, 2014 will most likely be a watershed year for NonStop and to be as immersed in NonStop as I am, is something that I would not have predicted five years ago. If he hasn’t done it already, perhaps it’s time to tell Jim McFadden that it’s now safe to come out from under his desk – just as it’s time for all of us to advocate the positive about NonStop (and it’s future) to all and sundry!

Attend the main NonStop Community event in Europe 2014! This conference & exhibition is presented in the tradition of ITUG Europe for the third time by GTUG and Connect Germany. It takes place every two years with a focus on NonStop (2012 in Dresden, 2009 in Darmstadt).

This is your chance to meet your fellow NonStop users and learn the latest on NonStop from users, HP and solution partners. The organizers are going to put together a strong international agenda, featuring keynotes from HP and others, as well as user and vendor presentations while also offering educational and networking opportunities for users of other platforms. Further more workshops will provide detailed insights in actual NonStop topics.

Enjoy the comfortable conference facilities at the luxury Hotel Atlantic Kempinski, located in the heart of Hamburg next to „Außenalster“. Discover the Hanseatic Spirit of Hamburg and get a glance of the tradition, present and future of this magnificent city.

A number of social events will provide a relaxed and inspiring environment for networking with your peers in the NonStop Community.

Stay connected with comForte

We have posted our latest Newsletter on our website and we invite you to read up on our company and product news. The comForte Newsletter is available online at http://www.comforte.com/ecomaXL/get_blob.php?name=cF_Newsletter_November_2013.pdf.

And there is more, join the security discussion in the HP NonStop [Tandem] Security Group on LinkedIn.

Last but not least, follow us on ...

comForteLounge BlogSpot

comForteLounge LinkedIn Group

comForteLounge Twitter

comForte on YouTube

comForte's SecurData product suite gains traction around the world

An increasing number of comForte customers around the world see the benefits of a solution such as SecurData which allows organizations to monitor and log access to sensitive data (SecurData/Audit) and which provides a tokenization solution on HP NonStop (SecurData/Base and SecurData/24 for BASE24-classic users). Numerous proof of concepts, imminent go-lives and customers in production worldwide are impressed by the robustness and performance of the solution.

One of the main drivers for the growing demand is PCI but also customers realize in general that it's a good practice to properly protect their data at rest.

In case of PCI, PCI requirement 3.4 demands PANs to be "rendered unreadable anywhere it is stored" by encryption, tokenization or other suitable mechanisms. SecurData/24 provides a fully compliant solution for the protection of PANs in BASE24-classic, enabling processors to take complete control of their sensitive data, lowering compliance costs and significantly reducing the risk of data breaches – all without any changes to the BASE24 application.

We put together a series of whiteboard sessions on this topic which will help you understand why you might want to start looking at options and then explains the solution comForte is offering.

In Part 1, we explain why you should care about tokenization of PAN data

In Part 2, we take a look at how you can get PCI 3.4 compliant using SecurData/24 from a high level.

And lastly, in Part 3, we'll show you how SecurData/24 works in detail.

Visit www.comforte.com/securdata24 to learn more.

New Articles Posted on NonStop Innovations

If you haven't seen the latest articles on the NonStopInnovations blog, you're missing out!

In the past month, we've interviewed nearly half a dozen movers and shakers in the HP NonStop space in order to cover all of the latest product releases and news in the space.

The CEO of CS Software talks about their new NonStop product called CS-PDFGEN in the article titled "Generating PDFs From Your NonStop Server".

And Tributary Systems' Chairman and CEO covers their new virtual media manager solution for HP StoreOnce, their new partnerships, and an upcoming announcement in "Shawn Sabanayagam on Tributary's Latest Innovations".

In February, keep your eye out for articles on these topics:

A product called TANGO from Lusis Payments and their new US headquarters
The future of a new NonStop company called WebAction and x86 (this article will be a follow-up to the NonStop Innovations Deep Dive published in the Jan/Feb issue of The Connection)
TANDsoft's CEO on FileSync 3.1 and Enscribe-2-SQL Data Replicator

Third Data Corporation provides numerous products which can reside on HP Nonstop and other HP and Non-HP hardware platforms. In addition we provide custom high performance software design and development for our clients.

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.

SecureStore – If you are security conscience trying to become compliant (PCI, HIPAA, etc) then you know that you can not leave sensitive data readily viewable. SecureStore does three things for you. The data is encrypted so that you can become compliant. The data is compressed so that your hardware costs are reduced. As part of disaster recovery your data is sent to multiple locations so it will be available when you need it. As a bonus for those having trouble with Guardian 4K limits there is no record size. It supports Big Data with up to 18 Exabytes. It can also integrate with SQL systems (SQL MX/MP, Oracle, Postgres etc).

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.

NxWeb – A high performance web server which provides support for NxLib applications. It also can be used without NxLib. It provides for secure connections, virtual domains, full http support and interfaces to pathway and IPC communications.

NxFile+ – NxFile+ provides compression and encryption to Enscribe structured files. The files are configured through a GUI interface and the results are provided seamlessly to your applications, typically without any code changes. In addition this provides for dynamic key changes on the fly so data stored at-rest may have its encryption keys changed as required. Because the records can be compressed prior to encryption, it’s also possible to have records which significantly exceed the 4k record size limitations.

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.

NxUndelete – Files accidentally deleted can be a real problem. Even when a backup is available, it is frequently a significant effort to retrieve it from a backup tape. NxUndelete implements a recycle bin function on the the HP NonStop system. Files deleted may be easily recovered using its GUI interface.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 611 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

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

In 2013, with CSP’s help and technology, Bankart achieved those goals. Bankart leveraged CSP’s unique product suite to meet their compliance and security objectives with real-time alerts, file integrity monitoring, access and session control – all managed and controlled through a simple but powerful set of GUI management tools. Upon request by Bankart, CSP was able to readily extend its solutions to include Base24 OMF logs, and add these to the information and event stream available to their security and application monitoring team.

Get the full case study at www.cspsecurity.com and find out how CSP can help you.

In business since 1999, Lusis Payments recently expanded its footprint to North America. Based in France, Lusis has an office in the United Kingdom and has recently opened an office in San Francisco with an additional satellite in Omaha. Lusis is a European software and service provider that initially addressed the European market and currently has customers throughout EMEA, Asia Pacific and the Americas. Lusis offers state-of-the-art software solutions to the global retail payments industry for mission-critical online transaction processing.

To introduce you to its North American operations, Lusis has prepared a company and product overview, which features customer success stories, as well as information about the company and its TANGO payment solution.

ITP Software Systems have released the new scanner for TAL. The representation in the OLAP HyperCube Repository is integrated with COBOL and SCOBOL.

There are not many developers around who master TAL. ITP-PANORAMA is now helping them to make changes faster with higher quality.

You will not believe it before you have seen it. So, mails us a day and time for a free Webinar.

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Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 611 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

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