Tandemworld eNewsletter for January 2015

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Tandemworld eNewsletter for January 2015


Contents

REAL help from Real people when you need it

Protect-UX for OSS steals the show at TBC

Ban Bottlenecks® - 25 Years of “No-Surprises” OLTP

DataExpress continues to invest in support of industry standards
even as it prepares for the arrival of NonStop X

Take the PANfinder Challenge!

OmniPayments Introduces the OmniCloud as Host for Affordable Financial Transaction Switches

SECURITY REVIEW !!

Musings on NonStop! - January, ‘15

Gravic Presents at InNUG HP Business Critical Dialog Meeting

NuWave Welcomes New Team Member

 

Register for the GTUG "PanEuropean NonStop HotSpot 2015" - April 27-29, 2014 in Munich, Germany

 

High Performance Switching and Secure Data Storage

Celebrating Our 15th Anniversary!

comForte's Limited Edition 'HP NonStop for Dummies' Book!

NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2015

Availability Digest Encourages You to Take a Software Sanity Check

comForte at events near you in 2015

 

TIC LogWatch Makes It Easy to Monitor Application Logs

 

Leading HP NonStop solution providers, comForte and TCM

 

What Excited Me about NonStop in 1984 Still Excites Me in 2015

 

Online Version

Current Subscribers 14997


REAL help from Real people when you need it

It’s Friday afternoon at 3pm. A storm moves in and some of your ATM’s start to go offline. The EMS log starts to fill up with warning messages. Operations raise the red flag. All of a sudden the comm link between the primary and backup datacenter goes offline. You are worried about surviving a datacenter outage. You need some immediate help. Maybe just a friendly calming voice to guide you thru the mess, but you need to hear that voice. What do you do?

·     Should I call the tv station and ask when the weather will clear up? Funny but probably not…..

·       Should I call my telco and ask when the comm lines will be back? Waste of an hour on the phone….

·     Should I call my ATM provider and ask for help? Probably not. They will just point a finger back to the Tandem…..

·     Should I call HP and ask them to diagnose and repair my data replication solution? Definitely not. HP are GREAT at NonStop but they don’t have a clue about data replication and data recovery. This is complex stuff and not for rookies.

So who should you call? You should call the engineers who designed and built your DR solution.

If you had DRNet then you pick up the phone and call our Real Engineer number for instant help.  At NTI we have a unique business model. In a time where everyone is offshoring support, and dumping you into a front end frustration system, NTI continues to place the highest importance on connecting our Customers with Expert Engineering assistance on the FIRST CALL.

We call it our Real Engineer model. Our Expert Engineering staff is involved in design, development, implementation, and long term support of all of our worldwide customers. If you have a critical problem you call our Real Engineer number. Someone from our expert staff answers the phone (7x24). In an instant you will be talking with a smart person, who understands the intricacies of Data Replication, and who can instantly reach out to other engineering experts for instant solutions.

Refreshingly Real-Time Support from Real Engineers. Nobody else in our industry does this. Nobody else in our industry offers the level of support that NTI does.

Our business is pretty simple. We protect your valuable data with world class software and Real Engineers.

DRNet® is world class NonStop Data Replication technology.

·       Real-time Active/Active Data Replication

·       Real-time Tandem to OPEN Data Replication

·       Real-time File Synchronization

·       Refreshingly Real-Time Support from Real Engineers

Jim McFadden

Jim.McFadden@Network-Tech.com

 


Protect-UX for OSS steals the show at TBC

CSP received  an over-whelming response to our new OSS security solution “Protect-UX” at the Technical Bootcamp in San Jose and at BITUG.  OSS security is a growing issue, and Protect-UX offers the simplest and most effective solution.

If you couldn’t make it (and you missed two great events), then find out more about how Protect-UX can help you make sense of OSS security online at http://www.cspsecurity.com/protect-ux-landing-oss.php.

And, if you have five minutes, check out our new video on Protect-UX for OSS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC5YFSWHGsU

Bill Simpson

Director of Product Management

Computer Security Products, Inc.

200 Matheson Blvd., West - Suite 200

Mississauga, Ontario

L5R 3L7

+1 905 568-8900 X 278

E: bills@CSPsecurity.com

W: www.CSPsecurity.com

 


Ban Bottlenecks®

25 Years of “No-Surprises” OLTP

 

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of helping our clients stay out of trouble. Frankly, it’s very rewarding work to help them achieve years of 100% availability. Happily our clients appreciate the “no news is good news” results that we give them.

There are lots of traps that a system and its caretakers can fall into. Complacency is one: “Now that it’s in production we don’t have to worry about it.” “It’s been running fine for years.” “We just upgraded so we should have plenty of capacity for the foreseeable future.” I can give you counter-examples for each of these situations where the common wisdom wasn’t true.

Over those 25 years we have refined our tools and techniques such that there’s very little if anything that we miss when we review a system. For example, just this month across our client base we reported:

·        Java processes “pegging” IPUs

·        Disks about to run out of space

·        An MQ instance driving a disk to 100% busy for hours

·        Unexpected MX/ODBC usage

·        Memory leak exhausting paging space

·        Unexpected 1GB drop in available memory

·        A new all-time peak of over 10MM transactions in single day, and poor service levels from authorizer back-ends after Christmas

·        Increase in Expand traffic starting in July, with an unexpected daily spike

 

If your New Year’s resolution is to change from reactive system management to proactive management:

Contact us for a free proof of concept!

assist@banbottlenecks.com

1.415.256.8369

www.banbottlenecks.com

 


DataExpress continues to invest in support of industry standards
even as it prepares for the arrival of NonStop X

 

Last month we wrote of how we have started down the path to greater visibility of our company and its products. If you missed it, this does include seeding numerous vendor and industry blogs with updates on what we have been up to – the successes we have achieved as well as the richer feature list we provide in our products. Does it come as a surprise that security is now such a big deal, and perhaps the most widely discussed topic on social media? Newsflash:  business doesn’t like their data being compromised and will do almost anything to avoid being named in the press as a result of a security breach!

In commentaries provided to December posts to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, we provided opinions about NonStop today and what we expect to see with the general availability of the NonStop X family of servers. In particular, we said, “as some of HP’s traditional product lines are showing signs of being in decline, NonStop may very well plug the gap and see much greater customer acceptance with their new initiatives.” For what else we said on this topic, Read more …

And check out the recent addition of the blog label DataExpress to read about all that we have said over the past quarter.

Last month we referenced the development we did following requests by customers for our NonStop implementation of DataExpress (DXNS) to support PGP. As a result, we now have DXNS PGP - a Guardian based interface to the OpenPGP compliant GNU Privacy Guard (abbreviated GnuPG or GPG) port for Tandem NonStop OSS. For the complete story, a new data sheet is now available, Read more …

Government agencies and regulatory authorities will continue to mandate that businesses, whether they are financial institutions or not (just think EPA and the FDA), keep them well informed about their transactions and operations and this will require files to be provided at predetermined times. Failure to report for some of these industries can trigger massive fines and here’s the second newsflash: Governments will only continue to create more agencies and authorities that demand even more information be provided, and the amount of sensitive information being communicated will only increase in the coming years!

 The ability to “set and forget” is just one major benefit that comes with using DataExpress to manage the movement of these files, safely and precisely at the time mandated. No slip-ups by operators and no missed deadlines by business managers – once configured and the requisite triggers set, it will all happen automatically with confirmations for each and every file moved created to meet the needs of the business’s auditors. This really is all about peace of mind and when so much else within the data centers is in a perpetual state of flux, such peace of mind is a godsend for all CIOs.


Contact Info:

1401 Shoal Creek, Suite 250, Highland Village, TX 75077
email:                   sales@dataexpress.com

Sales:                    972-899-3476
Corporate:          972-899-3460

 


Take the PANfinder Challenge!


Ever wondered if you had any readable/unencrypted payment card data hiding away in the deepest darkest corners of your NonStops? Are your systems clean as a whistle and locked down tighter than an Alchtraz inmate or are they bristling with credit card numbers in the clear, leaving your company ripe for a hugely damaging and costly breech?


Well take the PANfinder challenge and we'll let you know - for free!


That's correct, for absolutely no charge at all we'll give you a 'no questions asked', one month PANfinder 'universal' license suitable for every one of your NonStop servers.


The only small print: we'll tell you how many readable PANs (payment card Primary Account Number) you have on your systems and how many different files they're in, but we won't tell you where they are - you'll need to buy the full version of PANfinder if you want that info!


If your free (but still very valuable) PANfinder scan comes back totally clean: that's awesome news. You'll have saved your company potentially billions of man-hours - that's what it could have taken to manually search every file in your Guardian environment (right down to log, trace, saveabend, cpu dump and data replication queue files which you may be unaware even exist) looking for unencrypted card numbers. You can also let your management team know that should hackers manage to access your NonStop network, there are no valuable card numbers to be found - fingers crossed you'll also get a pay rise (or at least a pat on the back) for the exemplary level of security on your NonStop systems.
If your PANfinder scan comes back 'dirty', then you may want to set that email priority to red, because your company may not be handling its customer card data with as much care/security as it should be...

Download the FREE PANfinder Challenge software at www.4techsoftware.com - or ask your comForte representative.

 


 OmniPayments Introduces the OmniCloud as Host for Affordable Financial Transaction Switches

 

Most retailers that use Point-of-Sale (POS) terminals for payment-card transactions obtain their terminals from a bank with which they maintain a merchant account or from a company that is associated with such a bank. These entities operate financial-transaction switches that connect the POS terminals to the institutions that issue cards (Visa, American Express, Discover, MasterCard, etc.) in order that transactions can be approved or rejected. The transactions aren’t free, and merchants typically are charged a fee for each transaction processed. 

Many large retailers have opted to purchase their own transaction switches in order to avoid transaction fees.  Over time, the benefits of switch ownership more than offset the fees otherwise paid.  However, mid-size retailers that would like to have their own switches cannot justify the cost and management of the HP NonStop servers that are a mainstay for financial-transaction switches. Some retailers have opted to employ less reliable networks of Linux or Windows servers to reduce expenditures. To lower costs without compromising the high availability required of financial transactions, OmniPayments, Inc. has introduced OmniCloud.  Running on the new NonStop X, OmniCloud delivers financial-transaction switching services for multiple retailers at a very affordable price and at a high transaction capacity.   

OmniCloud is the next generation of the popular OmniPayments financial-transaction switch, with numerous instances of OmniPayments running in a NonStop environment.  OmniPayments offers a comprehensive solution for retailers to acquire, authenticate, route, switch and authorize transactions across multiple input channels such as ATMs, POS (point-of-sale) terminals, kiosks, IVR (interactive voice response) units, mobile devices, and the Internet. Based on a modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), OmniPayments and now OmniCloud consist of several service components, of which the critical payment elements are built on the NonStop platform.  The components are called business logic modules (BLMs), and they interact to satisfy business needs in a variety of financial environments.

OmniCloud is operated on a pay-for-use basis. Each OmniCloud customer pays only for the amount of CPU resources, storage, and networking that it uses.  OmniCloud provides backup systems so that a system outage will be recoverable immediately by switching the retailer to another system in the cloud, perhaps even at a different physical location. OmniPayments, Inc. supplies all of the IT staff needed to manage the transaction switches running in its cloud, thereby allowing a merchant to focus on its core business.  Also supplied are complete security functions for every transaction handled, including encryption-at-rest and encryption-in-flight. OmniCloud uses tokenization to comply with PCI-DSS specifications. The use of tokenization eliminates the need to pass sensitive information in unencrypted form to different interfaces.

Available around the clock, OmniCloud will survive any single fault, requires no downtime for maintenance or upgrades, and supports a range of disaster-recovery solutions. It is easily expandable to provide additional functionality when needed.  Additionally, OmniCloud can manage multiple devices, can host application interfaces, and can interoperate with third-party products or other systems if required. Like OmniPayments, OmniCloud supports EMV smart-card technology. 

OmniPayments is the product arm of Opsol Integrators Inc., a leading HP NonStop System Integrator for telco and financial services. Founded in 1995, Opsol later established OmniPayments, Inc. to focus additional development efforts on the OmniPayments solution. Those efforts now extend to the OmniCloud. 

For further information, visit www.omnipayments.com. Contact Yash Kapadia at +1 408-446-9274 or at yash@omnipayments.com

 


BRIGHTSTRAND SECURITY REVIEW

Today, the task of building and maintaining IT systems is more complex than ever before. The need for business continuity, an increase in critical transactional links to other systems and personal privacy requirements, to name but a few, all place security into focus. This is all in an environment of increasing regulation by government and industry organisations.

Businesses now have to ensure that their investments in security are delivering on the promised protection of their IT environments. Does the business make best use of security products and services ? Does the business follow best practices ? Is exposure to risk minimised ?  

Customers are finding that a Security Review from an independent third party is now welcome before they are exposed to a searching Security Audit.

This is where BrightStrand International can help. We have skilled and experienced NonStop Security consultants who can undertake detailed Security Reviews to ratify that your security is sound or to identify situations where it can be improved. BrightStrand can then work with you to apply any necessary changes to meet today’s stringent Security standards.

 

BrightStrand continues to deliver a full range of services that include:

           

·       Systems and Operations Management

·       Performance and Tuning / Capacity Planning

·       Database Design and Administration

·       Communications Subsystems

·       Web Services

·       Security Reviews

·       IBM WebSphere MQ Series environments.

·       NonStop Integrity and Blade Migrations

·       System Healthchecks (Pre or Post-Migration)

·       Specialist Consultancy

·       Disaster Recovery and Service Continuity Planning

 

All, or some of these elements can be brought together in a Fully Managed Service that can be tailored to the particular needs of the customer – including remote bridging, hosting or operations support, adding further value to the BrightStrand quality services.

Call Dave Stewart today on +44 (0)7831 775115 or email him on dstewart@brightstrand.com for more information.

 

 


Musings on NonStop!

January, ‘15

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

 

Looking out at the western sky there’s quite an amusing scene; in one area the Canadian Geese are flying their regular southerly route while others are passing them, heading back up north, yet others are flying west to east – days with very cold wintery conditions are routinely interspersed with much warmer weather and the geese simply look confused. With no consensus in evidence, it seems that flying in any direction is appropriate.

Seeking directions is important to anyone in IT, as the downside from mistakes becomes all too visible all too quickly – imagine being among the last to buy Wang, or Data General or even Sun computers! Sometimes, it is the input from well-placed executives that influence us the most, and oftentimes it’s just a casual conversation with a trusted salesman. At other times, it’s a brief exchange with a consultant. No matter who provides the information, our decision to elect on what is communicated always comes down to equal measures of our own understanding of the market together with our confidence in the credibility of the source.

A short time ago Justin Simonds, Master Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, posted a comment to the LinkedIn group, Tandem User Group, in response to the discussion that began with the posting of discussion
A twofold test ... with no prizes awarded (unfortunately) but of value all the same ... Within this comment were a couple of pretty solid observations about NonStop and the direction Simonds expected to see the new NonStop X head – in terms of both application usage as well as vertical markets. Speaking for himself, he pointed out, he mused on what he could see eventuating for NonStop X and I will leave readers to read the complete comment themselves. However, here’s a very brief and illuminating summary:

 

  • Node.JS is a great start and puts NonStop as a contender for the new and expanding JavaScript development arena.

 

  • Also tight integration with Linux for composite type applications, where portions of a service run on Linux and portions run on NonStop with NonStop overseeing the service.

 

  • NonStop in the SaaS area is where I see NonStop in (a) cloud. Opsol is doing a lot of work in that area and I believe there should be more.

 

  • I would like to see NonStop in Healthcare (back in healthcare), back with a strong 911 offering and energy. We had some excellent ideas back in the ZLE days and with some of the new datastreaming partners such as WebAction …

Some of the items here may come as a surprise to the NonStop community, but to anyone who was present at 2014 NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp, almost all of these vendors and products formed the basis for presentations, either in part or in whole. Much of the above too has been covered in posts to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, in particular, to the post For NonStop users, this is our season! as well as Niches open and niches close and yet the versatile NonStop prevails! And yes, some of the vendors interviewed at the time for the above posts have been referenced again in Simonds’ comments so the excuse to revisit some of those vendors seemed only reasonable and indeed, fair.

“When the idea to do a very deep port of Node.js to NonStop X was first discussed internally, we knew that it would be a very complex undertaking but with the help we received from HP, it has the potential for opening entirely new doors to NonStop X sales,” said InfraSoft Managing Director, Peter Shell. “NonStop X is a new system and with our Node.js product – what we have elected to call bomBora – we are adding a brand new, very modern, development platform that we are sure will come as a surprise to even the most fervent devotees of JavaScript.” While the focus will be on helping HP to attract new solutions to the NonStop X system, in time there will be users who will be influenced internally, I suspect, to look at programming NonStop X in JavaScript – and no, this is not a language solely for those just wanting to serve up web pages.

I am hearing a lot more about the tighter integration between NonStop and Linux and according to one very highly placed NonStop executive I interviewed recently, such hybrid configurations are being tested ever so quietly by current NonStop users. For those with solutions dependent upon Pathway and indeed Pathway/ACS in a follow-up discussion with InfraSoft’s Shell, he confirmed that with the InfraSoft’s product maRunga, supporting the reach of Pathway into Linux is something we expect to see develop real traction with NonStop users pursuing hybrid NonStop – Linux configurations.

As for Simonds’ comments about NonStop in a cloud and about OpSol, I was able to pull more information from OmniPayments, Inc. President, Yash Kapadia. “Our motivation to consider offering OmniPayments as a SaaS from out of a Cloud service built around NonStop was very straightforward,” said Yash. “When you sell to markets that are extremely price sensitive you need to have a variety of product offerings and having the option to sell OmniPayments out of the Cloud allowed us to go into deals with a very low entry price.”


According to Yash, who is very bullish about what he has accomplished to date, “We can support a customer completely from our Cloud offering or simply add our Cloud offering as a D/R site. Furthermore, our customers can use our Cloud offering simply for a pilot implementation as they await the delivery of their own NonStop system.” And yes, Yash was quick to add, “We had work to do to satisfy the ‘provisioning’ of a customer’s OmniPayments configuration but as our payments products are based on SOA, the inherent application virtualization on HP NonStop made this task easier. What was the real challenge was the pricing model we would take to market and we are pleased to find our models are proving attractive at this time.”

Finally, it only made sense to check in with the folks at WebAction, the last vendor on Simonds’ list that I have referenced above. After they too read the comments, they responded by acknowledging how, “At WebAction we agree with Justin that there are verticals where NonStop X should make it easier for HP to establish a greater presence,” said WebAction Cofounder and EVP, Sami Akbay. “We are especially interested in these new growth areas. When it comes to the NonStop community, where we excel is in quickly correlating and aggregating multiple streams of data – including what is being posted to logs on the NonStop application – so that developing patterns or trends can be quickly recognized and then acted upon.”


In responding to my questions based on what I had read from Simonds, it’s reasonable to think that Simonds has predicted the direction NonStop will be taking reasonably accurately – and that’s a reflection on just how well he knows the customers and prospects the NonStop sales team are working with. We still may flap our wings too much and squawk a lot but as a community, NonStop users and vendors appear to be headed in the right direction and for that, the entire NonStop community is relieved.

All the same, I have to believe that there will be a flood of information flowing by the end of March, as early adopters of NonStop X come forward and I for one will be pouring through the emails, blog posts and LinkedIn comments just to see how accurate Simonds really is but I will not be surprised at all if he has really nailed it this time! 

 

Richard Buckle
Founder and CEO

Pyalla Technologies, LLC
Email:             richard@pyalla-technologies.com

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

Check out (or 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 at http://blog.comforte.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

WebAction.com at http://webaction.com/blog/

…. And check out the group on LinkedIn, Data Driven Apps

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

 

 


Gravic Presents at InNUG HP Business Critical Dialog Meeting

 

In December, attendees enjoyed two HP Shadowbase presentations at the 2014 InNUG HP Business Critical Dialogue Meeting held in Jaipur, India. The purpose of these presentations was to outline the wide range of HP Shadowbase products and services now available to HP NonStop customers through the HP pricebook. The three day event commenced with a morning series of technical presentations on HP hardware and software capabilities and an afternoon/evening series of keynote presentations offered by HP and other industry experts. The next day and a half featured two parallel tracks: an HP NonStop agenda and an HP-UX agenda.

Gravic presented at both tracks. In the HP NonStop track the audience was introduced to the HP Shadowbase data replication products and tools now available through HP. This presentation was titled, Continuous Business – Always-On: HP and Gravic Partnership Delivers HP Shadowbase Advanced Data Replication Solutions for Business Continuity, Data and Application Integration, and Audit Compliance Requirements. And in the HP-UX track our presentation, HP Shadowbase: Better TCO for Business Continuity, introduced the HP Shadowbase products and tools now available through HP which are available on Solaris, Unix, Linux, and Windows platforms in support of Oracle, SQLSRVR, DB2, MySQL, Sybase, and a variety of other databases accessible either natively or through ODBC connectivity.

Overall, the 2014 InNUG BCD was well attended by customers, industry experts, vendors, and of course HP. Many opportunities were available over breaks, meals, and during evening entertainment for casual conversation and interaction between the customers and the vendors. We look forward to attending the next InNUG meeting later this year.

Please contact us if you would like to review any of our presentations and/or have us present them to your staff, or if you are interested in learning more about this partnership. To speak with us about your data replication and data integration needs, please visit us at www.gravic.com/shadowbase, email us at SBProductManagement@gravic.com, or call us at +1.610.647.6250.

 

Please Visit Gravic at these Upcoming Events

 

SunTUG Sunshine Summit Tampa, FL, 6-7 March, 2015

 

GTUG Conference Munich, Germany, 27-29 April, 2015

 

MENUG Meeting Dubai, 4 May, 2015

 

HP Discover Las Vegas, 2-4 June, 2015

 

 

Please Visit Gravic at these Sites

 

Gravic Website  http://www.gravic.com/shadowbase

 

HP Website:  http://www.hp.com/go/nonstopcontinuity

 

Twitter  https://twitter.com/GravicSB

 

LinkedIn  http://www.linkedin.com/company/gravic-inc./shadowbase-data-replication-305119/product

 

Facebook  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gravic-Shadowbase/116969767814

 

 

 


NuWave Welcomes New Team Member

 

NuWave Technologies is proud to announce and welcome our new regional sales director, David Ross. He is based in London and is now heading up NuWave's NonStop EMEA sales division. If you haven't met David, imagine a smart, friendly chap, who is incredibly enthusiastic about both NonStop and sales. David began his HP NonStop career in 1988 as a sales account director for Tandem, which of course became Compaq and then HP during his tenure. Since then, he has specialised in representing NonStop vendors around the world.

David truly enjoys being involved in the NonStop community, and is well-known in the EMEA region. He is a regular attendee and presenter at regional NonStop user groups such as VNUG, GTUG, SATUG, FTUG, VNUG, FinTUG, and EBUG. He was also chairman of BITUG in 2010 and remains an active member of the BITUG committee.

If you are located in the EMEA region and are interested in learning about how you can modernize and improve your NonStop operations with middleware, feel free to reach out to David at davidross@nuwavetech.com, or give him a call in the UK office +44 (0) 1494 77 1981 or on his mobile at +44 7799-673582.

Among other things, Dave can answer questions about how you can:

  • Utilize existing Web services to enrich your NonStop applications
  • Turn green screens into modern interfaces
  • Connect to your NonStop applications from other platforms
  • Negate the need to install OSS, and
  • Allow your NonStop to be seen as a standard platform that fits into your company's IT strategy

 


Register for the GTUG "PanEuropean NonStop HotSpot 2015" - April 27-29, 2014 in Munich, Germany

 

The “European NonStop HotSpot - Conference & Exhibition” is hosted by GTUG and Connect Germany for the fifth time. Based on the great success of the past conferences we changed the frequency of the event from every two years to an annual event.

 

This is your chance to meet your fellow NonStop users and to discuss your requirements with HP Executives onsite. In addition, you have the opportunity to get first-hand information and to learn about the latest strategic and technical developments on NonStop from users, HP and partners - now even more up-to-date! The latest developments on HP NonStop X (x86) will be a major focus and updates from HP, vendors and users are high up on the agenda.

 

…. enjoy the comfortable conference facilities at the Munich Marriott Hotel, located between the Olympic Park and downtown Munich, close to “Englischer Garten” and the lively quarter “Schwabing”.

 

…. discover Munich, home of the famous Oktoberfest, BMW and the Deutsches Museum and get a taset of the Bavarian Life Style - an inspiring symbiosis of traditional “Beer Gardens”, historical monuments, elegant shopping boulevards, cultural highlights and a very dynamic and innovative economy.

 

Conference language is English.

 

For more information and registration please go to … NonStop HotSpot 2015

 


Third Data Corporation

High Performance Switching and Secure Data Storage

888-301-2431 / sales@thirddata.com

               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.
 


Celebrating

Our

15th Anniversary!

 

MOMI officially launched on January 1, 2000!  Why did we start celebrating early?  Because MOMI was implemented at a major telecommunications firm before the official launch date!

Since 1999, BlackWood Systems’ MOMI has been the superior Real-Time tool for NonStop monitoring, diagnosing and troubleshooting System operations:

User Friendly

Budget Friendly

Resource Friendly

Reliable, Technical Excellence and Strong Customer Support!

MOMI runs on all NonStop platforms including the new x86! 

 A quick reminder to customers using the free, Full-version of MOMI we gave out at the Boot Camp:  the password expires 1/31/15.  Contact us for a new trial password!

 When Your System Demands Quick Attention...®

Kathy Wood

BlackWood Systems, Inc.

www.momi.com

kwood@blackwood-systems.com

602-569-8766

 


comForte's Limited Edition 'HP NonStop for Dummies' Book!

 

This book is for anyone with an interest in HP NonStop systems. This book is for you if you're new to the platform, have spent many years working with it, if you manage people or IT systems, or if you're a system operator or developer on/for the HP NonStop platform.

 

Get the book and …

 

·        Learn more about HP NonStop systems - a lot has changed in the past few years

·        Find out why the platform is unmatched in the areas of high availability and linear scalability - all out of the box

·        Discover how to develop new applications on the platform and how to modernize existing ones - all using modern and standard technologies

·        Explore ways to better integrate your HP NonStop systems in the Enterprise IT infrastructure

 

If you would like to receive a free copy of the 'HP NonStop for Dummies' book please register at … http://www.comforte.com/ns4dummies

 

 


NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2015

Save the Date!  The Connect NonStop Technical Boot Camp will be held November 15-18, 2015 at the Fairmont – Downtown San Jose!

We had an excellent 2014 Boot Camp with approximately 500 people in attendance, 33 Exhibitors, and over 80 technical sessions from HP and Exhibitors.

Congratulations again to the 2014 Passport for Prizes winners:

PARTNER

PRIZE

WINNER

HP

HP 360 laptop

Paul Watson

HP

VO cognac

Lewis Keeling

BlackWood Systems

Logitech G430 Gaming Headset

John Taylor

Crystal Point

Seagate 2 Terabyte External Solid State Drive

Sammy Fu

Tributary Systems

Apex Tablet 7 HD

Luo Ying Kuei

3Qube

Apex Tablet 7 HD

Bill Honaker

Network Technologies

Amazon Gift Card $100

Pete Hinden

TANDsoft

Kindle Paperwhite

Bo Jonsson

Merlon

Wireless Headphones

Guillermo Avilez

XYPRO

Go Pro Camera

Tony Messink

Gravic

Kindle Fire HD

Eduardo Roloff

Resource 1

Visa Gift Card $200

William Muckerheide

Omnipayments

JBL Flip 2

Marvin Harper

TIC

Cash $100

Trudy McCulloch

Attunity

Fit Bit

Jesse Tsao

NuWave

Jabra Extreme 2

Mei-Ling Kuo

Voltage Security

Crosley Vintage Radio

Kelly Lin

Integrated Research

Visa Gift Card $100

Fernando Gomez

ACI

Prepaid Debit Card $100

Victor Tsai

Oracle

UR Beats by Dr.Dre

Eric Brown

ETI-NET

Gift Card $100

Cathy Meurer

ESQ

Bose Headphones

John Sandridge

Ascert

Google Chromecast

Damian Ward

Lusis Payments

Apple TV

Steven Dorland

Idelji

Apple TV

Neil Barnes

QSA

Go Pro Camera

Allen Wang

WebAction

Apple Gift Card $100

Tom Schaper

Third Data

Samsung Note 4 Tablet

Max Yang

CSP

JBL Portable Bluetooth Speaker

Koteswara Silla

Canam

Seagate Portable Drive

Daniel Gullett

Carr Scott

Jawbone Bluetooth Speaker

Shawn Evans

ComForte

Dr. Beats Professional Headset

Ales Cernilogar

The Partner SIG looks forward to seeing you back in downtown San Jose!

Kathy Wood

NonStop Partner SIG/Vendor Chair

kwood@blackwood-systems.com

 


Availability Digest Encourages You to Take a Software Sanity Check

 Complex software makes many decisions for us in real time. Such decisions range from flying aircraft to running businesses. In most cases, the results of computerized decisions are to notify individuals of suggested actions to take. For instance, a flight computer might detect that an airplane’s speed is decreasing and will alert the pilot to increase speed to avoid a stall. But what if the flight computer issued an order to lower flaps without pilot authorization while the plane was cruising at 500 knots? The wings surely would separate from the fuselage.

Similar situations exist in business environments. Whenever a computer is allowed to take actions directly without human involvement, there must be built-in sanity checks to ensure that the actions are within acceptable bounds. In “Amazon Christmas Present – Buy for a Pence,” the failure to take advantage of available sanity checks led to thousands of products of U.K. online sellers being sold for the price of an English penny. In December 2014 during a one-hour time period, many U.K.-based Amazon partners discovered to their horror that their products were selling online for one pence because of a malfunction in an automatic price-setting utility. Although sanity checks are available both from Amazon and RepricerExpress, the company whose software glitch caused the disastrous price decline, the sellers who were impacted by the glitch had failed to take advantage of the monitoring services that would have prevented the massive losses in revenue.

In addition to “Amazon Christmas Present – Buy for a Pence,” read the following articles in the Digest’s January 2015 issue (http://availabilitydigest.com/digests/v10_i01/1001_digest.htm):

Grocery Store Chain Achieves Continuous Availability with OmniReplicator – A large, privately held grocery store chain operates 300 supermarkets. Its original BASE24 financial-transaction switch ran on a single HP NonStop server with no backup. The chain now uses the OmniPayments financial-transaction switch, whose OmniReplicator replication engine is built on a NonStop active/active system that guarantees continuous availability.

Comparing Clouds with CloudHarmony – Public clouds still have a ways to go to achieve carrier-grade availabilities. Some are nearly there and demonstrate average availabilities of about five 9s. Others appear stuck at availabilities of little more than three 9s. The web-monitoring site CloudHarmony offers insight into the performance, pricing, and capabilities of dozens of public clouds.

High Availability IT Services – If you think availability is expensive, try downtime. Dr. Terry Critchley’s book “High Availability IT Services” defines in detail the methods by which we can protect our critical applications effectively and economically from the plethora of faults that can take them down.

@availabilitydig – The Twitter Feed of Outages - 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.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com. Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn. We’re at 674 members and counting. Follow us on Twitter @availabilitydig.

        


comForte at events near you in 2015

 

The Event Calendar is filling up quite quickly. Join us at these events:

 

PCI London

22 January 2015

London, UK

SUNTUG

6-7 March 2015

Florida, USA

PCI Dubai

18 March 2015

Dubai, UAE

DUST

24 March 2015

Phoenix, AZ, USA

Int'l GTUG

27-29 April 2015

Munich, Germany

MENUG

4 May 2015

Dubai, UAE

HP Discover

2-4 June 2015

Las Vegas, USA

PCI Community Meeting, North America

29 Sept - 1 Oct 2015

Vancouver, Canada

The Payment Knowledge Forum 2015

5-6 Oct 2015

London, UK

PCI Community Meeting, Asia Pacific

14-15 Oct 2015

Tokyo, Japan

PCI Community Meeting, Europe

3-5 Nov 2015

Nice, France

Connect NonStop TBC

15-18 Nov 2015 (tent.)

San Jose, CA, USA

 

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

 

Last but not least, follow us on ...

NEW - comForteLounge Blog

comForteLounge LinkedIn Group

comForteLounge Twitter

comForte on YouTube

 

 

 


TIC LogWatch Makes It Easy to Monitor Application Logs

 The longer it takes to detect, isolate and recover from an issue, the more productive hours are wasted.

Application log data is an underutilized yet extremely important data resource for troubleshooting issues and supporting broader business objectives.

By effectively managing and monitoring application logs, you can be in an optimal position to detect issues and resolve them more quickly and efficiently.

TIC LogWatch can automate your log monitoring procedure and increase your operational productivity easily. 
 

Read TIC blog to learn more about LogWatch: http://ticsoftware.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=1138&action=edit&message=1


Leading HP NonStop solution providers, comForte and TCM, team up to further extend their excellent service offerings for HP Nonstop customers across EMEA

 

comForte 21 GmbH and TCM Solutions Limited have signed an agreement to promote their respective products and services to the HP Nonstop user base in Europe, Middle East and Africa. comForte is a major vendor of security, connectivity and application modernization solutions in the HP NonStop industry and TCM very successfully provides professional and managed services to users of the HP NonStop platform.

 

"We are very pleased working more closely with TCM across the EMEA region as TCM's leading professional services portfolio nicely complements comForte's product solutions offerings.", says Michael Weilbacher, SVP Sales EMEA of comForte. "Our customers often have very specific services requirements concerning the HP NonStop platform and together with TCM we will be able to provide the very best service to our customers."

 

"comForte is the leading vendor of innovative and proven software solutions in the HP NonStop market place worldwide. We are very excited to be able to work together with comForte across EMEA offering our complete range of professional and managed services to HP NonStop users," says Tony Craig, Managing Director at TCM.

 

About comForte

comForte provides proven and innovative middleware, connectivity, modernization, and security solutions for users of HP NonStop systems. comForte cares about its customers and the HP NonStop platform, offering an unrivaled and unmatched portfolio of software products in the NonStop industry. With customer value in mind, it is comForte’s goal to deliver best-in-class products and solutions and to provide customers with the best support possible. For more information please visit www.comforte.com.

 

About TCM 

TCM is the premier provider of specialist NonStop IT support services with an 18 year track record of delivering innovative, proven and customer focussed solutions.  Our wide range of professional and managed services includes systems management, hardware support, application management, system migrations and upgrades, through to specific focus areas such as performance, capacity, security, NonStop MQ, business continuity, automation plus more.  With an emphasis on quality and value our flexible approach allows us to deliver a high level of customer satisfaction. For more information please visit http://www.tcm.uk.com/nonstop/.


What Excited Me about NonStop in 1984 Still Excites Me in 2015
 

Let’s talk about a technology with legs and longevity. In 1984, as a young developer on the NonStop TXP, I grew fascinated with the NonStop operating system and its ability to tolerate faults by building on the RAS fundamentals of reliability, availability, and scalability. The capability to immediately fail over from one inoperative component to an operating backup was remarkable. So also was a customer’s option to purchase a minimum of two NonStop CPUs and then scale up as the business grew. It was pure genius from both a technical and a marketing perspective.

Now it’s 2015, and I am still fascinated with NonStop. Taking that same genius of a fault-tolerant operating system and porting it to commodity blades has allowed the platform not only to evolve but to outlive by decades those competitors that failed to adapt to an open environment.

I chose to focus my career path on NonStop architecture and started TANDsoft in 1993 to develop NonStop solutions. However, even I did not foresee how successful the platform would become in extending its value and competitiveness to new entry points in terms of industries, emerging economies, and companies much smaller than NonStop’s large-scale enterprise customers.

TANDsoft recently certified its products on the NonStop X. We, of course, were impressed with the speed of the Intel x86 chip. It is fast! But what impressed us even more was the ease by which OPTA2000, FileSync, and other TANDsoft products could be migrated to the NonStop X architecture from the previous Itanium system. For that we are grateful to HP’s NonStop X team. They did a great job.

When a company concentrates its efforts on developing products for a single platform, you become very aware of the risk you take in running smack into the ceiling of available consumers. TANDsoft still hasn’t hit the ceiling, which we are confident will grow increasingly higher as the NonStop X attracts new customers. My introduction to NonStop in 1984 so impressed me that I made a career as one of its solutions partner. In 2015, I am happy to say that I am still very excited about NonStop.


Jack Di Giacomo
President, TANDsoft


 


 

Find out more about us at www.tandemworld.net

 



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+44 (0) 20 8304 7979


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