A 50-minute runtime reduced to 2½ Minutes Makes TANDsoft FileSync Customer Very Happy

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June definitely lived up to its billing, especially in Las Vegas. It was hot, and unseasonably so, even for this desert city. As for HP Discover, for 2014 it lived up to its billing as well. If you are keen for a look to where HP is going, this is the event. If you need access to a variety of HP executives then this too has few alternatives – and HP execs are only too keen to talk to you, to me, and to anyone that has a need.

June too may be the harbinger of even hotter days to come and HP Discover 2014 may just prove to be the harbinger of a completely new way to compute – including a new take on the way computers are put together. Going into the event, we knew that HP CEO, Meg Whitman, would participate in two key note sessions, the first Defining the New Style of IT and the second, a vision of the future for the New Style of IT but few outside of HP Labs knew exactly how big a game changer HP’s vision for computing would turn out to be.

Some attendees dismissed this new computer, simply called The Machine, as just more marketing hype from HP. Yet others thought it was all about resurrecting something previously attempted but failed, with the hope that new ideas could help push the project along. However, what few in the industry anticipated how Whitman, and indeed the entire HP board of directors, bought into The Machine so enthusiastically that for the foreseeable future, 75% of HP’s entire R&D budget would be devoted to bringing The Machine to market.

In her introduction of HP CTO, Martin Fink, Whitman talked of how increased data volumes from “cloud computing, the Internet of things, mobile networks, machine to machine computing” are generating unfathomable and unmanageable amounts of data and a new computing architecture is necessary to deal with it.  Much has now been written about the presentation and the Internet is alive with commentaries and reports, one of which I am referencing here, the c/net.com article by Brooke Crothers, HP takes a crack at reinventing the computer

“We've been using the same architecture and been doing it the same way for decades,” said Fink and when “you look at it, ninety percent of what the operating system and processors are doing ‘is just shuffling data between different storage tiers,’ he said. Web news site c/net reporter Crothers then states, “HP’s answer is The Machine - a new compute design built from the ground up. Processors, specialized for a particular task or ‘workload’, connect to a fabric based on light for communication. In turn, all of this is connected to a large single pool of ‘universal memory,’ which obviates the need for separate memory and storage tiers.” Yes, the numbers are staggering, as the universal memory pool of The Machine will be capable of holding 160 petabytes with every single byte accessible in under 250 nanoseconds.

However, two remarks in passing really did catch my attention. As Fink went on to illustrate the whys and wherefores of The Machine, he noted that “one of the biggest themes driving The Machine is energy consumption. As data centers grow, the demand they put on the electrical grid will be unsustainable with the current architectures. The Machine will be able to do more using ‘orders of magnitudes of less energy’ … moonshot is our first instantiation of that ... Creating system-on-a-chip packages that will combine all of the components - the processor, the memory, and the connectivity.”

I have been following Moonshot for some time and already have a client with Moonshot installed in support of their new web serving application. However, they are not part of the NonStop community (well, at least up to this point) and so I was watching to see what may draw in any segment of the market. It was only a moment later that Whitman added, as she stepped back into the presentation, “Imagine a dashboard capable of displaying every aspect of your enterprise operations in real time.”

Now I see two companies with strong histories tied to NonStop recognizing potential opportunities following the big reveal of The Machine. Integrated Research (IR) has been telling customers for some time that future operational environments will pull from big data and apply operational analytics for much greater insight into the business and the demands to do this in real time will only increase. Look for a follow-up posting on this subject to the web publication, realtime.ir – imagine a dashboard on The Machine? Well I can provide an educated guess about who will likely not pass on this opportunity.

WebAction too has been heavily involved in providing the means to better build and deploy real-time data driven apps in days, not months or years. The developers at WebAction are familiar with NonStop and they are equally familiar with big data and analytics and with the business driver for The Machine being data, lots of data, it’s highly likely that they will give The Machine due consideration. After all, breaking down the tiers that have led to separate memory and storage, replacing it all with a massive memory pool, will generate even bigger demands for products like WebAction.

The good news here, as I look at vendors like IR and WebAction, is that they have all the hallmarks to succeed in this promising new compute era – their products are available for installation now and each has a strong toehold on what’s to come having made the investments early in the game. It’s important to acknowledge that these moves have been cautious at first but have been a part of a much bigger plan for some time and I am aware that their interests will continue to evolve even as new products emerge. Data will only grow and as of right now, we have barely scratched the surface of what will be generating data in the future.

If looking at Moonshot today gives us an insight as to what to expect with The Machine and if vendors engaged in monitoring and big data analytics already have a leg-up on others when it comes to leveraging the potential of The Machine, what of NonStop? What about traditional vendors focused on modernization, networking and replication?  With 75% of HP’s R&D budget earmarked for The Machine, there’s bound to be opportunities in the short term as well as in helping integrate The Machine into the current computer establishment.

The good news here is that The Machine is a collection of multiple projects – at least three to do with the hardware plus the operating system and stack (which will be all new, obviously) – and will be a complementary system for the first couple of years. Reinventing the computer doesn’t imply for one moment that we drop everything to deploy something this radical. Many more opportunities will open up for all involved in NonStop and that’s going to the subject of many more blog posts to come.  


With that, I will wrap up this month’s musings and encourage you all to look for the posts and commentaries that will surely follow, as this will generate opinions from almost everyone involved in IT!

Richard Buckle
Founder and CEO

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

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“How can we reduce our existing 50-minute file-synchronization runtime?” This is what a longtime TANDsoft FileSync customer asked TANDsoft to do for an OSS environment comprising 200,000 unaudited files. The job runs twice daily. The customer uses FileSync in multiple Guardian and OSS environments. But with a 200,000-file OSS environment and the challenge presented by OSS pathname lengths, the runtime took 50 minutes - longer than acceptable. TANDsoft’s new FileSync Incremental feature, available now in FileSync Version 3.2, successfully addressed the issue. FileSync Incremental decreased the 50 minutes to just 2 ½ minutes, a substantial savings in both time and processing power.

FileSync Incremental is available for review via TANDsoft’s free trial program.

Typically, once an OSS or Guardian environment is replicated in full to the target system, the synchronization software of choice reviews periodically all files within the environment to determine which files have changed. Only changed files are then synchronized with the target system. This reduction in files to be replicated reduces synchronization time, but what it doesn’t reduce is the time it still takes to verify every file in the environment in order to locate the changed files.

FileSync Incremental eliminates the need to analyze all files. Instead of asking the system to provide all the files for FileSync to review, FileSync Incremental asks the system to provide only those files that have changed within specified time parameters – 12 hours, a day, a week, and so on. In the case of the TANDsoft customer mentioned above, whose OSS environment runs twice daily, only those files that have changed since the morning run are reviewed and synchronized. The result is a smaller, much faster synchronization effort. For TANDsoft’s customer, 50 minutes was reduced to 2 ½ minutes.

For very large files, FileSync Incremental can be used in conjunction with FileSync Deduplication. With this feature, 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 time and the bandwidth required to replicate files is substantially reduced because a multi-megabyte file can now be updated by sending just the few blocks that have changed rather than having to send the entire file over the communication channel.

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 3.2.1, and all earlier SQL/MX versions. FileSync supports all Guardian files – audited, non-audited, structured and unstructured; all OSS files; NonStop SQL/MP Catalogs, Tables and Partitions; program source and object files; and configuration and TACL files. TANDsoft customers use FileSync for system migrations, disaster recovery, upgrades, and backups.

FileSync replication and synchronization software works closely with all NonStop real-time data replication products to provide a comprehensive solution for maintaining duplicate system and application environments. It is valued by customers of NTI DRNet, Gravic Shadowbase, HP NonStop RDF, and Oracle GoldenGate. FileSync is available via its worldwide distributor network.

In addition to FileSync, TANDsoft solutions 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. Visit www.tandsoft.com, or contact Jack Di Giacomo at +1 (514) 695-2234. Our Enscribe to SQL Migration Forum on LinkedIn is at 189 members and counting. Our latest thread addresses NonStop customers who are synchronizing Guardian and OSS unaudited files between production and DR systems.
 

Gravic Supports New NonStop Products at HP Discover 2014

Gravic representatives enjoyed the well-attended HP Discover 2014 conference held recently in Las Vegas. Highlights included keynotes from HP President and CEO Meg Whitman, HP CTO Martin Fink, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, and by video link, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Whitman focused on HP as the best technology partner for your business, stating HP’s strengths are your strengths to leverage, with investment areas of focus in cloud, security, big data, and mobility. In Meg’s words, “HP is back.”

On the NonStop front, there were fewer NonStop specific sessions than in previous years – the Connect NonStop TBC has become the prime NonStop event for the US – but there was still an active NonStop presence. Randy Meyer, VP and GM of HP Integrity Servers, presented a session covering the HP Integrity Servers product line, which comprises HP/UX and OpenVMS servers as well as NonStop (basically, all the Itanium HP platforms). This session showed continued interest and vitality for the NonStop platform, and stressed these main points:

• It’s never OK for your business to be unavailable to customers.
• Your business must be always on.
• Zero unplanned downtime is important.
• Data integrity cannot be compromised.
• Recovery must be in seconds.
• The ever-increasing requirement for continuous service availability means more demand for NonStop systems.
• HP will continue to invest significantly in NonStop in the future (as evidenced by the NonStop on x86 program).

There were a couple of big announcements at the show. One was Project Apollo, which is a new water-cooled server initially aimed at the high-performance computing space. Six-time space shuttle astronaut Story Musgrave was on hand to help launch Project Apollo!

Martin Fink delivered another big announcement: HP Labs is working on a completely new computer architecture named “The Machine.” (With respect to the rather unimaginative name, Martin quipped that HP Labs does not have a marketing department.) This future technology boasts six times the performance with 1/80^th the energy consumption of today’s systems. The key attributes of The Machine are that, electrons compute, photons communicate (optical fiber replaces copper between CPU and memory which yields more bandwidth through smaller "wires," using less energy and over greater distances), and ions store (memory is based on ionized oxygen atoms called "memristors," which require no power to preserve state). With The Machine will come a new open-source operating system, based on Linux with POSIX compatibility, which will be developed in close cooperation between HP and academia. Parts of The Machine technology will rollout incrementally over the next decade. “Trafodion” is another open-source project in HP Labs, created to develop OLTP capabilities for Hadoop, with a standard ANSI SQL interface and support for ACID transactions.

Overall, HP Discover was a very positive and informative conference, and the future of HP and NonStop looks as bright today as ever.

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NuWave Technologies recently launched NuWave Labs, a place where NonStop users can go to get their hands on the latest tools and product previews from NuWave. All that is required for download is some basic personal information (name, email, etc.), and you're off! There will be many tools that will be placed into NuWave Labs over time, but for now, the first piece of software is called NonStop Entropy Process, or NEP for short.

NEP provides a high-quality, cryptographic random data source for NonStop systems. NEP runs as a fault-tolerant process pair in the Guardian environment and uses the OpenSSL cryptographically-secure pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) as its random data source. The process continuously gathers entropy from various system sources that are frequently changing and unpredictable, and it mixes it into the PRNG state. NEP makes random data available to applications via an easy-to-use static API library, or NEP may be queried directly using the industry-standard EGD message protocol, via the Guardian IPM system.

When you're in need of a random number generator, or other innovative products for your NonStop, check out NuWave Labs to see what's new and exciting.