Editions

August 2020, where to even start…  As I write this note to our community, things in the US are still uncertain vis-à-vis Covid-19, but I know as a community, we will continue to thrive and do great things! HPE had a virtual Discover event that was pretty well received, things are still in the planning stage for the NonStop Bootcamp, and I am sure we will have a great event no matter what format it will be. We have also had a few great NonStop virtual events, so things are continuing, abet in different formats.

We’re in a new world, “new” in more ways than one. The biggest change is the social norms and people interactions. Not sure how long it’s going to last. Some say “this could be a lasting change” but I do hope that’s not true. Human perseverance to improve lives have always won over crises that threaten to take us backwards. I do look forward to see that happening this time again!

Well we at HPE continue to work from home.  I was doing that anyway so my only change was never going out.  When I do I’m complying with mask recommendations and washing my hands often.  My youngest son is worried about me, which is very endearing.  He always offers to do the shopping but every once in a while you just want to pick your own peaches.  I never appreciated a trip to the store so much.  I’m sure everyone has their own stories to share and hopefully, we may be able to share them at the Bootcamp but we are still waiting to hear if that will be live or virtual.

The pandemic, which we are currently experiencing globally, has created chaos in the business world. Corporations scramble to deal with an uncertain economic future. Many projects or initiatives have been deferred till later this year, and in some cases, next year, or even indefinitely. The immediate strategy is to leverage current assets and extend and maximize their values. The NonStop has always proven to be the most reliable and cost-effective platform, supporting thousands of mission-critical applications worldwide every day. In these uncertain times, investment in the trustworthy NonStop platform through modernization will return more benefits than migrating to other platforms.

Recognizing the NonStop community is technically oriented with people having many years of system experience, it’s understandable that comfort is high when “The Topic Du Jour” is about technology.

Just a few months ago, N2TUG was starting to plan for our early summer meeting.  We had barely started the task when events outside our control made our usual in-person, Vendor-sponsored meeting unlikely at best.  We knew we wouldn’t be able to hold it in summer, and started considering the Fall.  In hindsight, even that was a bit too optimistic.

Japan is located in the east of the Eurasian continent, consists of five main islands from north to south, Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa, 6,852 islands in all. The climate classification varies from subarctic in the north to subtropical in the south, and there are four seasons. It has an area of 377,975.21 km2 with a population of 126.16 million and a time zone of UTC +9. The capital is Tokyo, Japan, located on the mainland.

Database and systems performances rely heavily on traditional Queue Theory Analysis to identify performance barriers. While this type of analysis quickly targets short-term obstructions, its methodology focuses only on a single metric during each evaluation cycle and fails to look at the comprehensive environment…

File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) is a foundational requirement for security compliance frameworks to help identify unexpected or malicious activity across critical system files, diagnose unwanted or inadvertent changes, and shut down attacks before they have a chance to cause damage and disruption.

A large European steel tube manufacturer ran its online shop floor operations on an HPE NonStop Server. To exploit the currency and value of this online, trapped, and siloed data, the manufacturer periodically generated reports on Linux Servers using a customized application and connectivity tool that remotely queries the online NonStop Enscribe database and returns the results.

Yikes! My very first video presentation.

I have been presenting, training, and pronouncing on the advantages of Insider Technologies product set for over 20 years, across various User Groups, customer installations, and training sessions but not one of them has involved the use of video. So why now?

The need to backup, replicate, and recover data has always been historically imperative; today it has become a prioritized concern across all enterprises. Over a span of four decades, storage and backup technologies have had an evolutionary progress; one that has traversed all the way from the traditional reel-to-reel tapes, through disk drives, and their virtual avatars and ultimately, to breakthrough technologies like data deduplication and object storage that has massively reduced data redundancy and overheads…

Holistic security means more than just implementing one tool, one method, one solution, or one process to protect your business’s data. It means exploring every avenue to implement a multi-pronged defensive strategy and never depending on just a single security tool or solution. Organizations that follow more holistic approaches to security are the ones best positioned to remain in compliance with internal and regulatory mandates and to prevent breaches or unauthorized access to sensitive data. They’re the ones who can best protect their intellectual property, their brand reputation, and their customers’ most sensitive data.

The LightWave solution suite, LightWave ServerTM and LightWave ClientTM, have been helping NonStop users quickly and easily integrate their NonStop applications with REST environments for a number of years now.

CyberArk’s Brian Carpenter, Director of Business Development for CyberArk the global leader in privileged access management, and Steve Tcherchian, Chief Product Officer and Chief Information Security Officer for XYPRO Technology Corporation, a leading cybersecurity solutions company Co-presented on the topic of integrating HPE NonStop servers with CyberArk.

Lusis Payments is a leading global innovator of mission-critical payments software and data science technology. Established in France in 1999, Lusis has offices throughout Europe and North America with customers globally. In 2010, Lusis Payments was created to focus on the payments industry. Lusis is best known for its TANGO solution, an online transaction processing engine for mission-critical 24×7 solutions including payments, retail, loyalty, finance, fraud, utilities, and transport. TANGO delivers performance, availability, and scalability, with a rich set of functionalities, all from a single architecture. TANGO is built on a highly performing micro-service architecture providing agile delivery for business needs. Lusis has also made significant advancements in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, FX Trading, ISO 20022, Fraud and Blockchain.

A year ago, none of us could have foreseen the type of year 2020 has turned into with most of the country sheltering at home or just starting to reopen businesses but when venturing out, wearing masks as we try to go about our lives during the worldwide COVID 19 pandemic.   I’m proud to say that HPE has been very good in moving all employees to work from home, checking in and keeping everyone informed as to the latest information from our governments and the company’s future plans within those guidelines.  And we expect HPE to very slowly begin reopening some of our business sites over the summer.   Before we start talking about the NonStop business and events, I’d like to take a moment to send all of you, our customers, partners and friends around the world our best wishes for your personal good health and the good health of your families during this time of social distancing and uncertainty.  As things start to reopen again, we hope you are continuing to take appropriate measures to keep yourselves healthy and safe.

As we’ve been thinking more about the future of NonStop in this newly established column, an item of real concern has been how to continue to build community among vendors and customers, in the absence of users group gatherings. With most companies, including TIC Software, working remotely, how do we reach across the screen, so to speak, to cultivate key personal relationships?

Satisfying today’s very demanding applications and business needs is a made to order scenario for NonStop.  As the following chart highlights, NonStop is a superior platform for enterprises if the goal is to improve outcomes.  The platform options to support applications essential to business success are summarized in the following chart.

If you follow my column (and if you do, thank you), you know that I tend to favor the ‘Trends’. I confess the technology does hold more fascination for me but it is high time to discuss some NonStop success. Now, first off, NonStop is a unit inside Mission-critical systems which is a business unit inside High Performance Computing which all rolls up to Compute within HPE which is still just one of several major business divisions. I say this because I don’t want the percentages I am going to disclose to be interpreted as a recommendation to buy or to not buy HPE stock. That would be between you and your financial broker. Also the percentages I am discussing refer, this issue, to North America. So that being said and without disclosing any real numbers I am okay in relaying that so far this year NonStop is about 15% up revenue-wise over last year (Y/Y). This quarter NonStop is up over 30% (Q/Q). And for the year so far we are tracking over budget. So wins are definitely happening. Since I do not have customer permission to disclose any specific names let me just say that major banks, major retailers and major credit card companies continue to be pleased and are investing in their NonStop mission-critical systems. The x86 platform systems are the predominant platform that is selling, and the latest systems (HPE Gen 10 or for us X-3) takes full advantage of the HPE silicon root of trust, making it the most secure x86 architecture available. See this article on HPE cyber security or search the website for Cybersecurity or silicon root of trust. Pretty cool stuff. If you have an existing Gen 8 or 9 system (X-1 or X-2) you may consider a processor swap to the latest Gen 10 (X-3) processors. They are faster and have the added security built in (see link above). If you saw my last article on the old syndromic surveillance pilot, I am happy to say that there is renewed interest in that solution both in the United States and overseas. We are seeing the criticality of systems as Covid-19 is cresting in the United States and starts, hopefully, to begin to decline.

The maximum speed limit in Texas is 85 mph.  Maybe not everything moves fast in Texas, but cars and trucks certainly do.  Perhaps it is just due to the geography.  There is a lot of area to cover in the vast state of Texas. It is the largest state in the Continental US, although Alaska is 2.2 times larger by area, and Texas is second to California by population.  The GDP of Texas is $1.6 trillion, comparable to Russia, South Korea, Tokyo or New York City.

In Japan, a lot of companies are working from home since the end of March when COVID-19 became more serious, and sales activities have been restricted. Under such circumstances, we held a Webinar on April 22nd promoting the NonStop database “SQL/ MX” so customers could participate from home. The Seminar title is “A recipe of system construction that never stops business”, and introduced how to build a system that cannot be stopped by using the NonStop Database.

A major U.S. merchant provider operates a major payments transaction authorization switch – to several million small to medium-size businesses throughout the world. The merchant processes payment authorization for Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club, and other major credit and debit card client companies. The cards are issued by banks and other financial institutions for consumer purchasing at brick-and-mortar and online stores, and for withdrawing cash from ATMs. Each card transaction must be approved by the issuing bank before it can be accepted by a merchant or an ATM.