Tandemworld eNewsletter for May 2013

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Some systems require, nay demand, proactive management.  They are too important, handle too much money, or are too visible to customers or management to wait for an alert to go off.

On the other hand, the reality of our world is that resources are constrained. You simply don’t have enough time to do all the work that’s required.  You are handling hundreds if not thousands of systems, more often than not spanning multiple architectures.  You could use a hand.

Ban Bottlenecks is that helping hand.  It is a service designed to turn you and your team into heroes.  It does all of the tedious work and empowers you with information, not data.

The Ban Bottlenecks service implements “Stage 5, Paranoid and Competent” performance management. It is an affordable, ongoing service based on the ITIL model.  It includes data collection, elegant hand-crafted reporting, and personalized expert consultation.

One system or hundreds, NonStop, Windows, Unix, VOS.

Meet us at the NonStop Technical Boot Camp in San Jose in November!

assist@banbottlenecks.com

1.415.256.8369

www.banbottlenecks.com

Need a big win in database management?  Are you a big time data consumer looking to reduce the load on your database personnel?  Want better performance with less I/O and better space management?  Reorgs can be a game changer!

DBA’s have a lot on their plate ALL the time.  Data management, performance management, application management, security management, you name it.  The NonStop server does one thing VERY well:  it serves up big data.  Whose job is it to see that the beast (database) is fed and cared for?  The DBA.  Who is responsible for the performance and maintenance of the beast?  Same person.  Who has to make a time to review the internal structures and ensure the beast is performing optimally?  That same guy/gal, of course!  Database maintenance is critical to ongoing operations and due to the size and nature of the NonStop database, it is time consuming as well.

If only there was a simple to use tool that could take the load off of the database team and manage the mundane function of analyzing and scheduling reorgs!  DBA’s could sleep at night AND focus on way more important things like developing the countless, yet very important, reports everyone seems to ask for every day!

Wait, there is such a tool!  MARS – the Merlon Auto Reload System!  It won’t mow your lawn or cook dinner, but it will free up enough of your DBA’s day that they can do the important stuff and let the NonStop server do what it does best.

From deciding what needs a reorg, to scheduling and resource management, MARS can do it all.

And, XYPRO Professional services can make it even easier by showing you how to minimize time spent while maximizing database performance.

Read more at: http://blog.xypro.com/

comForte is travelling far and wide to be at an event near you.

Come and join us at these events in 2013:

CTUG Education Day, Toronto, Canada, May 31, 2013

HP Discover, Las Vegas, USA, June 10-12, 2013

KNUG, Korea, July 3, 2013

VNUG, Stockholm, Sweden, Sept 4-5, 2013

EBUG Knowledge Forum, London, UK, Sept 23-24, 2013

GTUG, Frankfurt, Germany, Sept 23-25, 2013

PCI US Community Meeting, Las Vegas, USA, Sept 24-26, 2013

PCI EU Community Meeting, Nice, France, Oct 29-31, 2013

CONNECT Advanced Technical Boot Camp 2013, San Jose, USA, Nov 3-5, 2013

PCI AP Community Meeting, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Nov 19-20, 2013

               Third Data Corporation provides numerous products which can reside on HP Nonstop and other HP hardware platforms.

StoreOnce Virtual Media Manager is an advanced media manager software-only solution for connection to and manageability of all fibre channel versions of HP Storage StoreOnce Backup Systems. SOVMM runs on all NonStop Integrity and Blades servers running NonStop RVUs J06.12/H06.23 and later. SOVMM is the result of enhancements to the time proven Library Media Manager/Silo Media Manager/Entry Level Media Manager products that Tributary Systems has been marketing for 14 years.

Key Features of SOVMM include:

·        SOVMM resides on the NonStop host only, providing direct FC connection to the StoreOnce device – no additional hardware required

·        Supports multiple StoreOnce devices with (for all practical purposes) an unlimited number of virtual cartridges on a single SOVMM license

·        Supported on all FC connected  42xx, 43xx, 44xx and B6200 models of HP StoreOnce – no modifications to the StoreOnce hardware required

·        All features of HP StoreOnce, including replication and data de-duplication, are fully supported by SOVMM

·        SOVMM includes automatic tape labeling and advanced backup scheduling features

·        All data written to the HP StoreOnce device are in NonStop tape format

·        Supports NonStop IOAME/VIO/CLIM FC attachment

·        Supported on all NonStop RVUs J06.12/H06.23 and later

·        SOVMM has an intuitive easy to use GUI that runs on most customer Windows based workstations

·        Priced at just $15,000 regardless of NonStop server type or HP StoreOnce model

For more information on SOVMM, please email sales@tributary.com or call +1 214-356-9046.

Gravic recently published its latest case study, Two Merged Retailers Integrate HP NonStop SQL and Oracle RAC, available on its website. A major U.S. retailer has thousands of stores, and wanted to integrate the point-of-sale processing for its existing ACI BASE24 application with a new AJB point-of-sale application as it rolled out new stores or upgraded existing stores. The BASE24 application runs on NonStop SQL and the AJB application runs on Linux/Oracle RAC. This challenge required bi-directionally integrating an active/active heterogeneous database environment across the ACI BASE24 NonStop SQL database and the Linux-based Oracle RAC database as the applications actively run in each environment. The retailer turned to Shadowbase Streams to integrate the distinctly different applications by mirroring key parts of the NonStop SQL and Oracle databases. Each store now has local access to all sales, refund, and exchange activities so that any customer is easily serviced at any store. The retailer completed the integration without any downtime of the application services to its customers or stores.

Gravic helped organize the first MATUG Meeting in three years, held in May at Quest Diagnostics headquarters in Chantilly, VA. Chris Gotiear, Senior Manager of Application Development at Quest opened the meeting with an overview of Quest, followed by four HP presentations: NonStop and Big Data, Internal NonStop Sales Support, NonStop and Persistent Cloud (PCS) Technology, and NonStop Hardware/Software Roadmap. The full agenda included eight well-received vendor presentations (posted at: http://www.connect-community.org/group/MATUG) and a Connect update by Nina Buik, Chief Marketing Officer. Look for the vendor presentations, soon to be posted on the Connect website. After the meeting several attendees continued their networking opportunities at “Eggspectations,” a local restaurant. Plans for next year’s meeting were discussed, including the possible locations of Philadelphia and Wilmington, DE. If your company is interested in potentially hosting next year’s meeting, please let us know. Gravic has received much positive feedback and hopes that next year’s event will be just as successful.

In April, Gravic was pleased to participate in the 2013 South African Technology User Group’s (SATUG) Conference and Tradeshow at the Emerald Resort and Hotel Casino, in Vanderbijlpark, Gauteng, South Africa. The event kicked off with a dinner at the High Stakes restaurant that SATUG hosted for the vendors in attendance and other attendees who were staying at the hotel. The well-attended dinner allowed for networking opportunities with several businesses, as well as members of HP, including Neil Pringle, NonStop Enterprise Division Director and members from Connect, including Kristi Elizondo, CEO. The speaking agenda and trade show began promptly on Monday with introductions by Pieter Rostoll of ABSA Bank, the SATUG Chairman. Neil Pringle presented on the state of NonStop in EMEA and beyond, followed by a day and a half of vendor, customer, and additional HP presentations. Networking activities throughout the conference included buffet meals, coffee and tea breaks, a “braai” (South African barbecue) and bonfire event, as well as a twilight dinner cruise on the Vaal River. An HP-sponsored training day covered the NonStop Cluster I/O Modules (CLIMs). Gravic has sponsored this annual event every year since 2004 and looks forward to participating again next year!

Interested parties may contact us at +1 610-647-6250 or SBProductManagement@gravic.com to discuss their specific situation and to learn more about the solutions we offer.

HP Discover 2013, Las Vegas, NV, 10-12 June

VNUG Conference 2013, Sweden, Stockholm, 3-5 September
The EBUG Knowledge Forum, London, England, 23-24 September

Connect NonStop Advanced TBC, San Jose, CA, 3-5 November

For more information, please visit: www.gravic.com/shadowbase.

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

http://www.facbook.com/pages/Gravic-Shadowbase/116969767814
          Trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective own

Join XYPRO at these NonStop & Security events this summer

HP NonStop [Tandem] Security Group on LinkedIn - join the discussion.

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comForteLounge LinkedIn Group

comForteLounge Twitter

comForte on YouTube

Musings on NonStop!

May, ‘13

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

The next Musings I write will follow my participation at this year’s HP Discover event in Las Vegas. However, I will wait until after the event to provide additional Musings covering the experience, as I know many within the NonStop Community have elected to skip this event, preferring to participate in the NonStop Boot Camp to be held in San Jose later in the year.

In my last Musing, I opened with remarks included in a Forbes article following the announcement of HP Moonshot. “The biggest driver of datacenter expansion are the pervasiveness of smartphones and a new class of devices, nicknamed IoT, or Internet of Things,” I quoted from the article. “Current enterprise datacenters aren’t prepared for the onslaught of devices coming their way.” Looking through subsequent blog posts and articles published in May, this theme attracted further comments from several vendors well known to the NonStop community.

“If enterprises do not have the ability to access mission-critical data when they need to, employees will not be able to carry out tasks efficiently and will be forced to suffer the consequences that come hand in hand with poor performance,” said Itamar Ankorion, Attunity, Vice President, Business Development and Corporate Strategy. Ankorion noted that “Cloud, mobile and other innovative technologies continue to emerge” and with their greater integration with traditional IT, the mission-critical data they generate will need to become a part of Big Data frameworks supporting today’s business analytics.

Starting with a clean sheet of paper, Attunity developed their Attunity Replicate product and is now finding that it benefits all enterprises with the need for faster data integration solutions because of this onslaught of mission-critical date coming from much wider deployment of mobile devices. Check out this Attunity post of May 8, 2013, as well as those that followed at:
http://www.attunity.com/blog

In the throes of wrapping up Beta programs for their new Prognosis 10 release, the demand for support of a rapidly growing community of mobile users hasn’t escaped the attention of IR. I have been working closely with part of the brains trust within IR – John Dunne and Jonathan DeVeaux – and already, the new User Interface (UI) is turning heads. According to DeVeaux, “With the new lightweight, browser, UI providing visually rich, secure, client-independent support (including mobile devices) that is part of Prognosis 10, it will be far simpler to launch queries of logs ...” Check out these observations and more on the realtime.ir blog site:
http://realtime.ir.com/category/we-need-to-step-up-our-monitoring-%e2%80%93-the-crooks-are-getting-smarter

And the really cool thing here with what IR provides is their support of HTML5 that allows anyone with a smartphone or tablet to interact with the NonStop system – once the prerogative solely flight-deck, systems and network operators, seated behind table-top screens. Even as the datacenters prepare for the onslaught of the Internet of Things, they are changing their modus operandi as well!

As for what is transpiring within solutions vendors offerings there was no hiding how OmniPayments Inc. CEO Yash Kapadian was preparing to handle the increased interaction with mobile devices. “We are seeing a marked uptick in the interest in online and mobile financial transactions with our customers looking for the best way to process such transactions. At OmniPayments, we are among the many who are witnessing the rapid growth in use of smartphones and tablets and witness just how many transactions are initiated from these devices …”

Again, the really cool thing here is that those on the front lines, working closely with customers, are seeing the first uplift of what many are forecasting will become a tsunami. Moving a lot of data that comes with additional user interactions, monitoring from our own mobile devices and enjoying new services from our favorite financial institution all speak well of just how important a role NonStop will play. But what of HP itself? What do we see coming from our primary vendor?

This week in her presentation to the financial community, following release of HP’s quarterly results, HP CEO, Meg Whitman, went on record as having said “HP is investing in innovation, bringing cost in line with revenue, improving profits, lowering its debt, optimizing cash flow, and exceeding financial performance” and that “HP launched its Moonshot server at the “hyperscale” server market. The server is 89 percent more energy efficient than HP’s Proliant servers. It uses less than 80 percent space, and reduces complexity by 97 percent while costing 77 percent less.”

However, it was also reported how “HP has been dealing with a couple of negative trends. The PC market has slowed down because of rising tablet sales … On top of that, HP hasn’t been participating in the mobile market at all.” While initially, there had been high hopes held for Palm, following the acquisition, I just cannot imagine HP electing to sit on the sidelines as wave after wave of smartphones, tablets, and these new classes of devices, the IoT, pass by. Perhaps Whitman too is looking at a clean sheet of paper, starting afresh!

Then again, maybe this year HP Discover will hold more than the usual surprises. Perhaps we hear something a little more definitive. After all, with core messages around Mobility, Security, Big Data and Clouds, something mobile from HP has to make an appearance at some point. Data centers will be processing many more transactions than ever before and the companies consuming them will deem many of these transactions mission-critical. NonStop has only upside opportunities with this, and of that I am confident.

Look forward to posting next month’s Musings as I come back (hopefully) with more to discuss!  

Richard Buckle
Founder and CEO

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

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

Check out (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 Lounge at http://comfortelounge.blogspot.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

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

Following last January’s recommendation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to disable Java in browsers, Oracle now has come out with a massive set of patches to try to plug security holes in Java.  Oracle has released its April 2013 Critical Patch Update for Java SE. The release comes a few months after Facebook, Twitter, and NBC News suffered attacks due to Java vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to infiltrate their networks. The April 2013 CPU for Java SE addresses forty-two security flaws. Thirty-nine vulnerabilities were remotely exploitable without authentication (username and password). These vulnerabilities would have allowed a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code, to cause a denial of service, or to gain unauthorized access to a company’s files or systems.

Also in the May Digest: 

Hacked AP Tweet Crashes Markets - On April 23, 2013, an Associated Press tweet reported that President Obama had been injured in an explosion at the White House. It sent the U.S. financial markets into an instant tailspin when high-frequency trading systems automatically read and processed the tweet. Fortunately, the tweet was false. The AP Twitter account had been hacked. However, what does this mean for “flash crashes” in the future when unverified and perhaps malicious information is disseminated via social media?

The $45 Million ATM Heist - Perhaps the biggest financial cybercrime in history was carried out early this year when “cashiers” around the world branched out with phony, limitless prepaid debit cards and withdrew USD $40 million from ATMs in 27 countries in ten hours. The attacks actually occurred at two different times. On December 22, 2012, thieves stole USD $5 million dollars from ATMs worldwide. Then, on February 19, 2013, the thieves struck again and stole another USD $40 million. It seems that the first attack may have been a dress rehearsal for the second, much larger attack.  Much of this money has not been found, and the brains behind the operation are yet to be identified.  Unfortunately, these attacks are not unusual.

Published monthly, the Digest is free and lives at www.availabilitydigest.com.  Please visit our Continuous Availability Forum on LinkedIn.  We’re at 542 members and counting.  The Availability Digest is now on Twitter.  Follow us at @availabilitydig. 

The NonStop systems of a large, post-trade services provider were located in two countries with different time zones. The company decided to upgrade to five NonStop BladeSystems (NB54000, NS2200) for its production, development, and disaster-recovery functions. At the same time, it wanted to consolidate all NonStop activities into one geographical location rather than two. The key to making that possible was TANDsoft’s OPTA2000, which allowed the services provider to host in its newly consolidated environment the applications that ran on system time as well as the applications that required a virtual system clock in order to reflect the timestamp of the second time zone.

OPTA2000 is a virtual clock and time-zone simulator that is user-friendly, easily installed, cost-effective, and requires no application modifications. It uses intercept technology to allow multiple applications operating in a consolidated environment to each have its own virtual system clock or to function in its own virtual time zone with date/time specifications that are different than that of the system clock. For time-zone simulation, virtual times are offset from a system’s actual time by an amount expressed as a deviation from GMT time (Greenwich Mean Time). For clock simulation, the virtual times can be offset to whatever time is required for the testing, maintenance, etc., of an application. A single system can host thousands of applications.

OPTA2000 supports all applications (user, HP, and major third-party apps, including BASE24) on the HP BladeSystem as well as on NonStop S-Series and Itanium servers. It also supports a wide variety of NonStop subsystems, including TACL, NetBatch, EMS, Enform, Spooler, OSS, VHS, FTP, and Pathway.

In the case of the post-trade services provider, OPTA2000 is used with SQL/MP, SQL/MX, C, TAL, COBOL, in-house and third-party solutions, TACL, NetBatch, and Spooler.

With OPTA2000’s new Time-Zone API, any OPTA2000-enabled application can acquire any Local Standard Time (LST) or Local Civil Time (LCT) of any time zone. For instance, if an application operating in London time needs access to the local Tokyo time when one transaction took place and the local Buenos Aires time when another transaction occurred, the Time-Zone API makes that possible.

TANDsoft’s “best of breed, best in price” philosophy offers highly competitive value for all TANDsoft solutions. In addition to OPTA2000, they include: FileSync for automatic file synchronization and replication; 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, which offer flexible, affordable alternatives to more expensive conversion products or manual conversion techniques; and our newest solution, E2S-Lite, which permits efficient, low-cost Enscribe modifications without the need to change a program’s source code.

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 160 members and counting.

 www.tandsoft.com.
 

Discover 2013 will be held in Las Vegas at the Venetian/Palazzo Resort on June 11-13.  Registration is open:  http://h30614.www3.hp.com/discover

Registration is open:  http://www.connect-community.org/?TBC2013

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