A Nonstop Hitchhikers Guide to HP Haven

A NonStop Hitchhikers Guide to HP HAVEn

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Advocacy: SIG Activity at the 2013 NonStop Boot Camp...... Page 8 president By Dr. Bill Highleyman Steve Davidek Community Resources: News from NonStop Advanced T.B.C...... Page 10 City of Sparks By Richard Buckle

A NonStop Hitchhikers Guide to HP HAVEn...... Page 12

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his is an exciting time for NonStop computing. For nearly of IT, with ever-increasing demands driven by an always-on world. four decades HP NonStop has played a vital role in data Enterprises are under enormous pressure to reduce complexity, centers that support the world’s most mission critical manage complex backend requirements and standardize. Of Tapplications, from ATMs to POS systems processing financial course they need to do this while maintaining extremely secure transactions, from Telco service providers connecting millions of systems, becoming more cost-effective, and responding quickly mobile subscribers to manufacturing assembly lines. When your to changing business dynamics. Never before has the demand for business can’t afford to stop and your customers won’t wait, HP highly secure, continuous application availability been stronger – NonStop is the platform of choice for continuous business. And and that’s precisely what HP NonStop delivers. Only HP enables at last month’s excellent Connect Advanced Technical Boot Camp you to leverage a proven solution for always-on business that event in San Jose, we announced plans to enhance to our roadmap delivers timeless value and longevity regardless of the underlying by extending the 100% fault-tolerant solutions customers rely on architecture, and leverages HP’s Converged Infrastructure to to the x86 architecture. This means that customers will have the maximize data center efficiency. choice of HP NonStop on either Intel Itanium or x86 architecture – Need more insight on the value and future of NonStop? Be the only flexible approach to a 100% fault-tolerant infrastructure. sure to read “The Best of NonStop: Home Edition” by HP Senior Customers will continue to benefit from innovations for their Technology Consultants Tom White and Rebecca Howey. On the established NonStop environments, based on Intel® Itanium® modernization front, HP NonStop Solutions Architect Nasima processors, with greater scalability, performance and security. To Ahmad shares the results of a Proof of Concept (POC) with that end, we have also recently announced the availability of the partner Blu Age in “Got COBOL? Want Java? Modernizing a legacy HP Integrity NonStop BladeSystem NB56000c and NB56000c-cg. mainframe application for NonStop Java and SQL/MX”. Finally, for The NB56000c (and NB56000c-cg) offers up to a 50% performance a great overview of HP’s approach to Big Data and where NonStop capacity increase over the NB54000c (and NB54000c-cg), and fits in the strategy, read HP Master Architect T.C. Janes’ article “A provides an in-rack upgrade path for all HP Integrity NonStop NonStop Hitchhikers Guide to HP HAVEn”. BladeSystem customers. For more information on the recent announcement, including If you’re asking why NonStop, and why now, just look around. a video from HP CEO Meg Whitman and a replay of my talk at the The megatrends you see and hear about, from cloud computing to Connect event, go to www.hp.com/go/nonstop. You can also hear social media, and mobility to big data, are all leading to a new style more at HP Discover 2013 in Barcelona – hope to see you there!

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Time flies when you are having fun. pair to the desktop. We used the HP 3000 as our “share” server and When I graduated from High School in 1980, a career in IT was it even had a “PC Backup” program to back up the user's files. the furthest from my mind. I figured I’d get a degree in Business The City’s Technology has changed over the years from that Admin and work in an office somewhere. I took classes in Business, one HP 3000 to about 50 servers today, both physical (ProLiants) Accounting and also programming…Cobol and RPG. Those were and virtual. We have a robust HP Network with about 400 desktop the days. Write the program, take it to key punch and then after devices attached including over 125 Virtual Desktops. We have way they finished the next day, take the 80 column cards to the data more storage using a mix a 3Par, EVA and LeftHand arrays than I center to run the cards. Hope it worked right and you could turn it could ever have imagined in 1984. in before class the next week. What a process. But enough about my technology history - I want to talk about Things changed in the summer of 1981 when I was offered a job our “Community.” as a Computer Operator for the National Judicial College based at I became Secretary/Treasurer for SierraRUG in 1987 and started the University of Nevada Campus. The computer was a brand new attending Interex conferences here in the US. I bring this up IBM System 34 with 8-inch floppies for backup. I had a lot of fun because I was still having fun, meeting HP users from around the and couldn’t imagine my luck. We had 5 monitors and this very globe. It was amazing what a “community” we had. large dot matrix printer. I even got to upgrade to a System 36. As I’ve watched technology needs grow and change I realized I made the leap to the City of Sparks, Nevada in August 1984 that the “community” is why I’ve been successful at my job. As as their Computer Operator on an HP 3000 Series III computer. a firm believer in giving back, I became involved with Interex What a great box. It was the ultimate computer (to quote a great as a volunteer. I was on the User Group Support Committee for Star Trek episode) in my book. It took toggle switches to boot, a many years helping the local groups become more successful. I 1600 bpi tape drive and the printer even had a paper tape to tell co-Chaired the System Admins SIG group for many years, and I what form you were printing. We had 21 green screen terminals. started helping with the Interex World Wide Survey and became I could run payroll in 2 hours, our quarterly utility billing in 15 very involved with Advocacy group. hours and it took about 6 hours to do a backup to the tape drive. My Advocacy work lead to my move to the Encompass and then Because the HP 3000 users in our area were many, there was Connect boards. All this volunteering has culminated with these this monthly meeting I was asked to attend to get to know the other last two years as President of Connect. HP 3000 computer operators and to see what new things we could These past 28 years as a “community” volunteer has been do. Yes, this was my introduction to User Groups. Our group was amazing. The people I’ve met have helped me grow as a person, as a affiliated with Interex in North America as SierraRUG. technologist and as an employee. Many people have heard me talk In 1985 we purchased a couple of HP150 Touch Screen PC’s to about how my storage area network was designed over a beer at be cash registers for our recreation department. Imagine touching an HP Conference. Think about it, I meet this person on the expo a screen to run an application…today that is old hat, but in 1985 it floor and he explained just what a SAN was and what I needed to was “Jetson’s” technology and they were the first real PC’s the City do to get one started. purchased. This is what being part of this great community is about, all of Over time I saw us upgrade our HP 3000 to a series 70, add two us helping others do a better job. That is a great reward. more HP 3000 servers to manage our Police Records and dispatch Thank you all for helping me do a better job. and then upgrade all of them to HP’s PA Risc platform. As always, feel free to contact me at [email protected]. In 1986/87 we started replacing our terminals with Intel PC’s and we put in our StarLan network…thin coax to hubs and twisted

Steve Davidek Connect President [email protected]

www.connect-community.org 7 Advocacy SIG Activity at the 2013 NonStop Boot Camp Dr. Bill Highleyman Managing Editor Availability Digest

our Connect SIGs are your channel into HP. By being active in a SIG, you can express your opinion about HP products, relate problems that you are having, and discuss Yenhancements that are important to you. At each SIG meeting, the most popular requests are escalated to HP for their comments and potential action. At the 2013 NonStop Boot Camp, the NonStop SQL SIG, the NonStop Security and Audit SIG, the NonStop Open SIG, and the NonStop Vendor SIG all held meetings. Their discussions and issues are summarized below.

NonStop SQL SIG The NonStop SQL SIG meeting was hosted by Scott Randall, the SIG Chair, and Ajaya Gummadi, the SIG’s HP liaison. Over thirty attendees were present. NonStop Security and Audit SIG Issues that were active at the previous SIG meeting and that now The NonStop Security and Audit SIG was run by Wendy have been completed included: Bartlett, the SIG’s HP liaison, with co-chairs Lee Evans and • Ability to upgrade one catalog at a time. Chris Draper. Jim Enright from HP Product Management also • Default schema versions for each release documented in participated. About fifteen people attended. the Migration FAQs. Several topics were discussed: Existing issues that were discussed included: • NonStop security overview • MXCI HELP online. - A white paper is now available at www.hp.com/go/ • Materialized views. nonstop/security, in the White papers (technical) section. • Removing or renaming columns without a FUP reload. • PCI compliance: • Upgrade to 3.x catalogs one at a time. - Data-at-rest encryption options, including tokenization. • COMMIT EVERY option on updates and inserts to reduce - Key management. contention during batch. - VTS encryption • Use modular names (Guardian names are too short). • Anti-malware software: The SIG’s current priority list is as follows: - Common auditor question. 1. Native SQL/MX DB access via Perl DVD/DVI. - Where is it? There isn’t any. 2. JDBC T2 driver option to force user credentials vs. using - HP can provide customers with a letter explaining why Pathway owner. NonStop is different. 3. REUSE partition option with either MODIFY or • CLIMs REPARTITION. Faster label management when 1st - Use ISS servers. partition is truncated and becomes the last. - HP has fixed several vulnerabilities in iLO (server 4. CQDs at the statement level. management) software over the last nine months. HP security 5. Improved manageability of SQL statements in Measure… bulletins and NonStop Hotstuffs have been published. a. Identify SQL source by statement instead of just the • How does HP handle vulnerabilities? SLT Index#. - HP provides no details until the vulnerability is fixed, b. Eliminate problem where Measure doesn’t track and few details at that time so as to not provide clues SQLSTMT if Measured after the 1st execution. to hackers. c. Track statements to MXOSVR data source. - Not even under an NDA. 6. Input rowsets in Java for a WHERE clause…. - Everyone sees the disclosure at the same time (HP Select * from postal_addr security bulletin plus Hotstuff). Where part_num, customer = ?, ? OR • Installing SQL/MX part_num, customer = ?, ? OR - Common way requires logging on as SUPER.SUPER, part_num, customer = ?, ? OR which is a problem if aliases for it are in use. part_num, customer = ?, ? OR - However, script can be changed to 255,255. part_num, customer = ?, ?;

8 Nov/Dec 2013 NonStop Open SIG The NonStop Business Continuity SIG The NonStop Open SIG was chaired by Bill Honaker with There was interest expressed in restarting the NonStop Business his HP liaison, Roland Lemoine (who kindly filled in for Wendy Continuity SIG. We need a chair (we may have one) and an HP Bartlett). About ten people attended. The meeting was abbreviated Liaison to get one going. due to last minute schedule changes. It started late and left only a half hour for discussion, but a good bit did get accomplished. At Last! A Major Issue Resolved – Finding NonStop This SIG discusses issues and solutions concerning the Documentation increasingly open nature of development for the NonStop platform. For several years, there have been complaints that NonStop Given the importance of modernizing the NonStop environment, documentation was virtually impossible to find on the HP the focus of this SIG is an important one. web site. Sonja Ingeroi, a Senior Technical Writer for NonStop This SIG focuses primarily on five areas: publications, has resolved the issue. All NonStop manuals are now • Open Source Development: The porting of applications available at hp.com/go/nonstop-docs. This is a landing page that and tools written for UNIX and POSIX systems to run has a direct link to each NonStop documentation collection on inside the OSS environment. HP has devoted a significant the HP Support Center. amount of resources to porting a number of C, C++, and Sonja encourages you to contact her ([email protected]) Perl utilities to OSS. In addition, most Java Open Source with any questions or comments. can be run directly without porting. The Open SIG provides a forum for porting and archiving of Open Source And Finally – The 2013 NonStop Availability Award Software, for communications regarding availability, and Goes To: for NonStop-specific topics regarding Java Open Source MasterCard! BANKSERV of South Africa was the runner up. • Java: All aspects of Java development and The MasterCard recipient, Steve Geimer, commented that interoperability that are unique to the NonStop Java winning the award, though it required a lot of documentation implementation are covered. effort, was a great marketing tool. • Open System Services (OSS): The POSIX-compliant API Randy Meyer, HP’s Vice President and General Manager, Integrity and UNIX shells that sit atop the NonStop Operating Servers, noted that applying for this award makes you really think System (formerly the NonStop Kernel). Java runs under through your availability procedures. You may find out things you OSS, as does most ported Open Source software. wish you didn’t know, but you’ll be glad you found them out. • Eclipse: The Open Source (and free) Eclipse Development Environment (found at eclipse.org) is a very feature- rich GUI platform for software developers to create Java applications. In addition, HP provides the NSDEE environment, which extends this tool to C/C++, COBOL and TAL/pTAL. • ITUGLIB: ITUGLIB is the repository for much of the open- source contributions from HP, partners, and practitioners. One issue that was raised was that libraries from ITUGLIB cannot be installed if they are not supported. Attendees asked that the libraries that are supported be advertised, There has been some progress on our last ‘top 3’ list. For example, OSS programs are now able to access files that are stored on SMF virtual disks. The NonStop Open SIG is planning over the next few weeks to start a new LinkedIn group to replace the ‘forum’ that was previously on the Connect website in conjunction with other SIGs. We’ll get the word out to all of Connect’s members when it’s in place. This will be the tool we use to capture advocacy issues going forward.

NonStop Partner SIG Dr. Bill Highleyman is the Managing Editor of The Availability Digest The NonStop Partner SIG, chaired by Kathy Wood with HP (www.availabilitydigest.com), a monthly, online publication and a liaison Wendy Bartlett, was well attended with over thirty people. resource of information on high- and continuous availability topics. The main focus of discussion was the conference and proposed His years of experience in the design and implementation of mission- improvements for the future. critical systems have made him a popular seminar speaker and a sought-after technical writer. Dr. Highleyman is a past chairman of Kathy Wood was confirmed to be the NonStop Partner SIG ITUG, the former HP NonStop Users’ Group, the holder of numerous chairperson for the next year, her fourth year of service. The partners U.S. patents, the author of Performance Analysis of Transaction were generally very pleased with the NonStop Boot Camp, especially Processing Systems, and the co-author of the three-volume series, Breaking the Availability Barrier. with the level of attendance and activity at the vendor tables.

www.connect-community.org 9 Community Resources Blogger | Richard Buckle, Pyalla Technologies, LLC News from NonStop Advanced T.B.C.

Follow the NonStop Social Media blogging team, go to the Mission Critical Computing blog site at: http://bit.ly/aAlO6c

he secret had been well contained shortcomings, and for further transformation for a long time; at the NonStop of IT to take place bold actions must be taken Advanced Technical Boot Camp we by the major vendors. Tall heard of how NonStop plans to support As more information became available Intel’s popular x86 architecture! about HP’s project Odyssey, HP talked At a time when it’s becoming apparent openly about extending the full mission- to many IT professionals that perhaps with critical experience to the x86 architecture, budgets trimmed as tightly as they have and all within a common modular been for the past four or five years good infrastructure. At the time, there were has become good enough. So much so, that presentations about how the knowledge all involved with NonStop have become within the NonStop development team perplexed over the almost daily reports of would be exploited by developers working major system crashes. From government on other OSs. However, at no time was there data centers to stock exchanges to online any discussion about NonStop bringing its retail service providers, we all watch as availability proposition to x86. Quite to the major failures are simply dismissed as contrary, NonStop would remain positioned nothing more than technical glitches, and at the top of the pyramid depicting HP’s with NonStop has not letup in the weeks that an acceptable response from those in product lines – it’s unique attributes that have passed, and by now nobody could charge is that everything is now OK as they reserved for those within IT well-acquainted have missed the major announcement: the powered-off, powered on, and reset the with NonStop’s true value proposition. NonStop architecture is being extended to application. Good, it would appear today, is include support for the x86 architecture. simply good enough! The humble PC has indeed revolutionized IT, but it’s not without its downside, not the least being its influence on IT managers and executives who rationalize that every need in the private and public sector can be addressed with a PC-based server. Not good by itself is simply not good enough! Unfortunately, the discussions about doing a better job for IT usually stop there, as few are willing to set aside the budget required to properly address these availability Yet many within the NonStop community wondered whether there would be a time when NonStop would add support of such popular chip architectures as the x86. As I was to relate in the post following the keynote, it was in 2012, I wrote of this in a recent post to the following that year’s HP Discover event, NonStop community blog, Real Time View, in the post Sailing, tacking and avoiding The real deal - NonStop supports x86! The conflicts! that I referenced Intel. For me, timing of this post was just hours after we I had said, it was always about the “Intel had heard the keynote presentation by HP Architecture”. It was less about the chip at this year’s NonStop Advanced Technical products, per se. And in that 2012 post I Boot Camp. The fallout from this keynote referenced a conversation I had with Intel by HP executives and managers working Corporation’s General Manager, Enterprise

10 Nov/Dec 2013 option, and up until this announcement by GM of Integrity Servers, Randy Meyer, HP, many of them thought the opportunity summed it up. Key objective of this program to exploit NonStop technology was beyond (with deep roots into both Project Odyssey their reach. Fortunately, HP continues to as well as Converged Infrastructure), reward those who do indeed capitalize on according to one NonStop manager, NonStop systems key attribute, availability was “maintaining compatibility at the and once again, at the Boot Camp, the application level – just recompile and go”! NonStop availability award was presented. As I brought the post The real deal The winner this year was MasterCard and - NonStop supports x86! to a close, it it was pleasing to hear that accepting the warranted just one more quote from the award was my good friend, Steve Geimer, keynote presentation. “The combination who has been a strong advocate for user of HP’s proven leadership in mission groups for many years. critical x86 technology and in HP NonStop technology will offer a compelling business choice,” HP pitched in its Software Strategy (and former head of presentation, further highlighting how big NonStop Enterprise Division), Pauline a transformation of NonStop has occurred. Nist. She had reminded me that whatever With HP saying this, the many naysayers transpires with future chip products, the doubting the future of NonStop will find Intel Architecture would prevail. little to talk about in the months ahead. In telling me this, Pauline was The bar didn’t get moved, and there was no reiterating clearly that NonStop temporary fix proposed for a select few (we customers would be protected and didn’t get a box to stand on, for instance); upward compatibility would be assured. this is the real deal. Believe! Should we anticipate NonStop supporting Itanium and Xeon going forward? Two distinct marketplaces, with two separate product lines? In the commentaries that followed the post The real deal - NonStop supports x86! expectations were set that with NonStop on x86 new markets would The question over good becoming good emerge, and that NonStop usage would enough has bothered many within the expand. This is clearly the intentions of HP NonStop community, but this week, at the who sees NonStop on x86 providing value NonStop Advanced Technical Boot Camp, to existing customers even as it attracts HP demonstrated that indeed they will be new solutions and new customers. taking the bold steps. The bar hasn’t been reset – being good isn’t good enough – but rather, rising up to the height of the bar will now be more attainable as HP NonStop embraces x86 and the economic model that comes from making this move. That’s right – a complementary product line exploiting for the first time x86 architecture with InfiniBand. Welcome, too, to the new Lxx operating system. Imagine a future, we have just been told, where you could provide customers and business partners alike, 100% NonStop fault-tolerant environment on the Intel Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Xeon platform! “Our NonStop customers Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a However, the overriding need fueling truly make it matter,” said HP CEO, Meg long association with the IT industry as a user, such a demand will continue to be from Whitman, in a video adding how pleased vendor, and more recently, as an industry those expecting a lot more than simply commentator. Richard has over 25 years she was to extend NonStop to include x86. of research experience with HP’s NonStop having good be good enough – those who Demonstrating once again for the NonStop platform, including eight years working at want much better. For these customers, community that indeed, NonStop “is a Tandem Computers, followed by just as many outages of any kind are simply not an timeless architecture,” was how HP VP and years at InSession Inc. and ACI Worldwide.

www.connect-community.org 11 A NonStop Hitchhikers Guide to HP HAVEn: How does NonStop contribute to HP Software’s Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything? T.C. Janes Managing Consultant Enterprise Solutions & Architecture Hewlett Packard Company

Figure 1 - Pan-HP HAVEn Architecture ig Data means many things to many people. In the cult percentage of operational, real-time queries—often up to 80 science fiction book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, percent— which are interactive lookups focused on data about the main characters meet an unemployed planet builder a specific client, account or stakeholder. However, NonStop may Bwho relates the story of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional not be the preferred tool when a security team needs to correlate beings who built a Big Data solution named Deep Thought. Deep video facial recognition, sentiment analysis and written intelligence Thought was created to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate reports to reduce terrorist threats. This is where HAVEn comes in. Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer No kidding. was revealed to be 42, Deep Thought explained to his perplexed Some of this requires further explanation, which is why this questioners that the answer was incomprehensible to them because article will discuss the components that make up HAVEn, how the questioners really did not understand the question they were NonStop facilitates the answer to your organizations “Ultimate asking. This is very similar to the Big Data Strategies of many Question” and the integration testing that has occurred. organizations we get to consult with today. You can’t set out to solve a problem if you don’t really understand the problem that you are What is HAVEn? attempting to solve. “A common mistake that people make when trying The term “big data” is pervasive, and yet still the notion to design something completely foolproof is to engenders confusion. Big data has been used to convey all sorts of concepts, including: huge quantities of data, social media analytics, underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools” next generation data management infrastructure, real-time data – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and more. It took Deep Thought 10 million years to calculate the HP announced the HAVEn architecture at Discover Las Vegas Ultimate Answer. This would be one example of two of the three last June. In the larger evolutionary perspective, big data is Gartner “V’s” of Big Data; Volume and Variety. However, if you evolving into a fusion paradigm under which Hadoop, massively do not have 10 million years to wait for your answer, the third parallel processing (MPP) data stores/warehouses, in-memory “V” (Velocity) is important to your Big Data plans. If Velocity columnar, stream computing, document databases, and other is important to your organization, NonStop delivers an out-of- approaches support extreme analytics (similar to the Logical Data the-box, integrated platform for real-time situational awareness Warehouse described in the May/June issue of “The Connection”) providing a customizable solution optimized to address the high in the cloud. HAVEn synthesizes HP and open source data analysis

12 Nov/Dec 2013 products into a hybrid architecture that encompasses all those mathematical foundation for all digital communications systems. technologies. Claude Shannon stated that information could be treated as a Why would an organization choose an architecture versus quantifiable value in communications. Natural languages contain individual products to address big data pain points? The real a high degree of redundancy or nonessential content such as benefit of the architecture is leverage – the ability to start with “a” or “the”. For example, a conversation in a noisy room can be one capability and easily add others over an organization's big understood even when some of the words cannot be heard, and the data journey. HP takes a balanced view of big data with the needs essence of a news article can be grasped simply by skimming over of the business foremost – the benefit is pre-integration of its the text. Information Theory provides a framework for extracting components to reduce your implementation time and cost. If you the concepts from this redundancy. Autonomy's approach want to build your own “Deep Thought” with HP HAVEn, NonStop to concept modeling relies on Shannon's theory that the less architecturally contributes an essential operational analytic frequently a unit of communication occurs, the more information capability. it conveys. Therefore, ideas, which are rarer within the context of a communication, tend to be more indicative of its meaning. HAVEn - Hadoop Thomas Bayes was an 18th century English cleric whose work The “H” in HAVEn stands for Hadoop. You may have heard has become a central tenet of modern statistical probability of it recently. In spite of what you may have heard Hadoop is not modeling. Bayes' efforts centered on calculating the probabilistic the sum total of big data. Hadoop is an important (but not all- relationships between multiple variables and determining the encompassing) component of it. The Apache Hadoop software extent relationships are affected when new information is obtained. library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing A traditional statistical argument posits that if a coin is tossed 100 of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple times and comes up heads every time, it still has an even chance programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers of coming up tails on the next throw. An alternative, Bayesian to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and approach, is to say that 100 consecutive heads are evidence that the storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, coin is biased. What Bayes theorem clearly demonstrated is that: the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the a) the more information given, the more accurate the view of the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a world will be, and b) prior experience should be used to inform cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures. new data. Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, the creator of Apache Autonomy software identifies the patterns that naturally Lucene, the widely used text search library. The name Hadoop is occur in text, based on the usage and frequency of words or not an acronym; it’s a name the son of the project’s creator, Doug terms that correspond to specific ideas or concepts. Based on Cutting, gave a stuffed yellow elephant. the preponderance of one pattern over another in a piece of All of the HP HAVEn “engines”, including Autonomy, Vertica, unstructured information, Autonomy understands that there is X% and Arc Sight, are able to interact with Hadoop for data collection probability that a document in question is about a specific subject. and analysis. Hadoop is well-suited for storing and cataloging Due to the hundreds of “connectors” to differing content large amounts of semi-structured data (like logs) and unstructured providers, an understanding of a page of text, Web pages, e-mails, data (like audio, video, and email). For other high-value data, HP video, voice, documents and people's interests, and automate customers typically rely on the engines of HAVEn to store data in operations dependent upon unstructured content Autonomy has an optimal format for analysis, meaning that HAVEn processes data moved to the top of Gartner's E-Discovery Magic Quadrant. up to 100 times faster than the batch-oriented data processing of Hadoop. HAVEn - Vertica Vertica is a powerful, highly scalable analytics engine that drives HAVEn - Autonomy down the cost of capturing, storing, and analyzing data while The “A” is HAVEn stands for Autonomy. HP Autonomy’s producing answers 50 to 1,000 times faster compared to traditional Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) automates the process of data warehouse technology. This enables your organization to recognizing, categorizing, and retrieving concepts and meaning in take an iterative, conversational approach to analytics. Enterprise unstructured human information, which falls into two categories: customers choose Vertica because it produces answers to business 1. Unstructured text data: Includes content in blogs, news queries in record time, at a lower cost than alternative solutions. feeds, documents, and social media interactions. The key to Vertica’s performance is three fold: 2. Unstructured rich media: Includes photos, videos, sound Vertica organizes data on disk as columns of values from the files, and forms of information that do not include text same attribute, as opposed to storing it as rows of tabular records. beyond simple metadata. This organization means that when a query needs to access only a Autonomy's strength lies in a unique combination of few columns of a particular table, only those columns need to be technologies that employs advanced pattern matching techniques read from disk. Conversely, in a row-oriented database, all values in (non-linear adaptive digital signal processing), utilizing Bayesian a table are typically read from disk, which wastes I/O bandwidth. Inference and Claude Shannon's principles of information Vertica employs aggressive compression of data on disk, as well theory. Rather than asking you to “Google it”, please allow a as a query execution engine that is able to keep data compressed moment of explanation. Shannon's Information Theory forms the while it is operated on. Compression in Vertica is particularly

www.connect-community.org 13 effective, as values within a column tend to be quite similar data for IT security; governance, risk and compliance to each other and compress very well—often by up to 90%. In (GRC); IT operations; security information and event a traditional row-oriented database, values within a row of a management (SIEM) solutions; and log analytics. table are not likely to be very similar, and hence are unlikely to The little “n” in HAVEn reflects the “n” number of applications compress well. Columnar compression and direct operation on that the 120 or so partners are working on as we speak. compressed data shift the bottleneck in query processing from If you go to the main HP website, you won't find a button disks (which are not getting faster) to CPUs (which are getting that lets you download a trial version of HAVEn. You won't see faster all the time). performance benchmarks or case studies with clients proclaiming Because data is compressed so aggressively, Vertica has HAVEn’s praises for having solved their business problems. The sufficient space to store multiple copies of the data to ensure reason is HAVEn isn't so much a product as an architectural fault tolerance and to improve concurrent and adhoc query concept. performance. Logical tables are decomposed and physically What HAVEn may lack in slideware, HP will make up with stored as overlapping groups of columns, called “projections,” flexibility, industrial breadth, and technical depth. Hadoop is and each projection is sorted on a different attribute (or set of an integral component of HAVEn, and to that end, HP works attributes), which optimizes them for answering queries with with the three leading Hadoop distributors, including Cloudera, predicates on its sort attributes. Hortonworks, and MapR Technologies. A Vertica database is composed exclusively out of these query- optimized structures on disk, without the overhead of base NonStop – the answer to Velocity tables. It’s similar in concept to a database made entirely of “Nor is Vertica meant to be used for transactions.” materialized views (with no base tables). – Colin Mahony, General Manager - Vertica Of course, compression, column-orientation, and table decomposition are transparent to the end user. In fact, With this impressive array of software capabilities, one might Vertica provides a standard SQL interface to users, as well initially surmise that all possible value from data can be obtained as compatibility with existing ETL, reporting, and business thru a HAVEn “engine”. Where might NonStop contribute? All intelligence tools. This makes it easy to migrate existing databases data has a form of “structure” but Hadoop and Autonomy basically to Vertica and use other BI technologies with Vertica databases. work on non-relational (PDFs, video, voice) data which is generally Vertica is designed to run on inexpensive clusters or “grids” of ill-described as “unstructured”. NonStop and Vertica work on off-the-shelf Linux servers that use local disk for storage—no “structured” relational data. However, they work on it from the expensive SANs or high-end servers are required to run large data opposite end of the temporal spectrum. warehouses on Vertica (although it performs well using shared Vertica and Hadoop work from the perspective that the more SAN storage if that’s a preferred deployment route). Vertica both data I aggregate, the more value I can obtain from it as Bayes reduces hardware costs (often by up to 90% relative to other data theorem tells us. However, time is the enemy of individual data warehouse databases) and improves the ability to answer more items. Individual data items such as transactions or interactions queries for more people against more data. that have enormous value at their moment of creation may have less value an hour from now and perhaps no value tomorrow. HAVEn - Enterprise security, powered by HP ArcSight Stock traders have understood this from the beginning of time – if The HAVEn platform brings with it an entirely new level of you can identify and act on a transaction opportunity faster than enterprise security—allowing your organization to see not just if a anyone else, you will benefit the most. breach will occur but also when it is likely to occur. HAVEn enables you to unify data in various formats from various sources into a simple common format, allowing an organization to: • Collect: Collect any data from any device in any format from over 300 distinct log generating sources. • Enrich: While the data is being collected, you can filter and parse it with rich metadata, helping to unify the machine data. • Search: As the machine data is enriched during collection, you can search millions of events using text-based keywords—no obscure commands or domain expertise required. • Store: The unified data can be stored in any format you have Figure 2 - Value of Data Changes Over Time through a high compression ratio of up to 10:1, eliminating the need for additional database administrators. In the figure above, on the vertical axis you see Data Value. On • Analyze anything: The rich content built into Logger helps the horizontal axis, one can follow structured data value as data perform complex searches and create comprehensive drill- ages. In this graph, the difference in structured data value depends down reports. In addition, real-time alerts use machine

14 Nov/Dec 2013 on the type of data you are trying to master, the business objective transformation and loading (ETL) data federation/virtualization you are trying to optimize and the potential tool the organization is and data replication/synchronization. Debra Labanowski of the leveraging. Real-time data focuses on what is happening right now, NonStop Advanced Technology Center (ATC) and consultants not on what has already happened. It enables situational awareness. from the NonStop Enterprise Solutions & Architecture (ES&A) The value of an individual data item is at its highest at the moment team have tested flavors of those styles of data integration including it is visible to the organization. Here’s an example; WebAction (replication/synchronization), Talend (ETL) and Composite Software (data federation/virtualization) using JDBC.

Figure 3 – Capital Markets Risk Mitigation Architecture A capital markets broker/trader has trading engines at various locations around the world (e.g. Tokyo, New York, London, Frankfurt, etc.). Each trading system is independent of the others, so headquarters wants to maintain the real-time global position of Figure 4 – An HP Logical Data Warehouse the entire firm, i.e. the aggregate number of shares long or short WebAction for all securities. If any position is too large, then appropriate WebAction Real-time Big Data Server is an end-to-end platform corrective action is initiated. Hence, for every trade anywhere in that enabling real-time, data driven applications by acquiring, the world, a message is sent to a database at headquarters where the processing, and delivering both structured and unstructured data. "state" of the firm's position is “updated” in real time. In our tests, WebAction provided enterprise-class replication / If you plan to be a capital markets broker/trader state engine, synchronization /operational integration complementing the NonStop there are a few characteristics your primary platform needs to have with immediate/actionable/operational events so information and NonStop has those in spades. It is a fully durable relational that accumulated in the ODS can be leveraged with the real-time database with unrivaled availability characteristics and my firm component involving both Vertica and NonStop environments. absolutely does not want my state engine to disappear due to planned or unplanned downtime. It combines high-velocity data Talend ingestion/updating, massive scalability, and real-time analytics/ Talend's open-source data integration tool is deployed largely decisioning to enable an organization to unleash an appropriate for bulk/batch data delivery. Talend Open Studio was used for action on data at its point of maximum value. HAVEn does not testing and the generic JDBC connector was used to connect to have an engine for OLTP and operational analytics. both source and target databases. If NonStop is my operational state engine, what role does Vertica play? One of the biggest drivers of the Big Data trend is Composite Software ingesting and analyzing large volumes of structured of data for Composite's data virtualization is implemented using modeling. Performing ad hoc queries on petabyte level data middleware technology that connects to data sources, executes volumes does not come naturally for DBMSs like NonStop SQL, queries to retrieve requested data, federates this data with other which use a row-oriented design optimized for write-intensive data and transforms the result set to conform to the business need transaction processing workloads rather than for read-intensive and then delivers the data to consuming applications. Composite analytical workloads. leaves source data in place and uses a set of virtual views. From the perspective of performance, both NonStop and Vertica How do we move data between NonStop and Vertica? are loosely coupled, massively parallel processing architectures “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful whose data integration scalability is linear. Your organization's without having to believe that there are fairies at the performance will vary depending not only on the size of the bottom of it too?”– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's NonStop/Vertica systems but factors such as the load schedule, Guide to the Galaxy network availability, degree of parallelism, how “real-time” should the load be, is the organization loading NonStop in “real-time” and Data integration tool markets have traditionally been of a Vertica in micro batches, or trickle feed, SLAs for queries while the "siloed" nature. Separate markets and vendors have existed for load is taking place, etc. various styles of data integration technology, such as extraction, continued on page 30

www.connect-community.org 15 The Best of NonStop: Home Edition Thomas H. White Rebecca Howey Senior Technical Consultant Senior Technical Consultant HP NED ATC-sdi HP NED ATC-SDI

ver the course of 25+ years – each – as technical is a silly and benign example, but organizational processes can be consultants (as independent contractors and more malignant. Process for the sake of process can create technical debt recently for HP) we’ve seen a lot. We don’t go places where by delaying or preventing necessary change. Very often those charged Olife is swell. We go places with problems, usually Big Problems. with administering the process admit privately that these hoops are a And we notice patterns: no one has enough money, enough meaningless and counter-productive charade. The organization stalls, people, enough time… But the most important patterns we see are and people are compelled to go through the motions of their jobs, these: technical debt, crippling processes, and even perfecting the regardless of their desires to accomplish and contribute: they must operation of obsolete software. learn not to care. Beneficial processes are streamlined to the speed Technical debt covers a multitude of sins, very often committed of business and support business objectives by minimizing risk and with the best of intentions for the greater good. Money, indeed, is maximizing quality and repeatability. But when the process, not its often at the root of this unintentional evil. We incur technical debt product, becomes the goal, we are living in a rickety House Made of every time we put a Band-Aid™ on software instead of really fixing Sticks, hogtied with red tape and bound to fall. it, when we skimp on documentation, training or software upgrades Sometimes we encounter a House Made of Bricks. It can be a because it seems okay, when we slam in changes to meet a deadline thing of beauty from the inside, so sturdy and reliable, so well-known and don’t go back to “do it right,” when we modernize without and loved. Surely our children will be happy to live here too? With finishing the job, when we do things we know we’re going to pay for one bathroom, tiny bedrooms and – what?! You can’t bring that big “someday,” and when we do things that only later we learn were not screen TV in here! You’ll blow the wiring! Your mother loves that the best options. We have all done these things, each and every one figurine collection! It’s NOT going in the attic! What are you doing?!!! of us. The benefits of technical debt are short term; its consequences - From the outside, it looks like a tired, old house with outdated can last until the end of time. Paybacks seldom come cheaply, and architecture, a hodgepodge of add-ons and remodeling jobs, too people lead agonizing lives supporting these messes. Technical debt many knickknacks, and systems you can’t get parts for anymore. And incurs “interest” in the form of inflexible and complex – expensive - forget that mortgage-burning party; you’ve got technical debt. Yup, applications that can fail in spectacularly public ways. Risk is another we’ve lived there, too, and shed a tear when the flocked wallpaper and form of interest on technical debt: ask anyone who has leapfrogged shag carpeting were replaced. We’ve sighed and marveled at where five versions in a software release upgrade. Sometimes the debt we ended up when we were looking backward. mounts to the point that outsourcing is the only economically We’ve seen other kinds of edifices in the neighborhoods we’ve reasonable response. If this were a fairy tale, technical debt would be visited. Residents of the House of Cards can be mighty proud of the House Made of Straw. One big wind, one match, and it’s gone. their condominiums built on sand. These places look handsome The House Made of Sticks represents a framework of – on the surface, but closer inspection reveals architectural flaws organizational processes that look good, pass audits, but don’t offer in the database or application. Sadly, because everyone has an any real protection or benefit. There is a vault somewhere that engraved plaque extolling their craftsmanship of this shaky palace, contains a document, signed by all parties responsible for a major re-architecting is out of the question. “Enhancements” are the only application modification affecting millions of customers around politically viable option, and technical debt intentionally accrues. A the world. That document includes this statement, “The primary House of Cards often serves as the beachside resort for a House of role of the database administrator is a crescent roll, although many Parliament, where political power trumps everything. Turf protection prefer a Parker House roll, because it is more versatile.” That, ladies and internal intrigue might make good television but contribute and gentlemen, is a broken process. There is more than enough little to business objectives. Political forces can quash innovation, documentation to build a bunker, but most of it is just paper. This especially during the learning phase, creating and perpetuating

16 Nov/Dec 2013 technical debt and stagnating the business and its IT. Here, as in And this is where “The Best of NonStop” comes in. Regardless of the House of Cards, much energy is expended in the search for the platform, being “the best” requires modern hardware and software guilty, punishment of the innocent and promotion of the oblivious architectures, openness and flexibility to use the best product for each and malleable. Both tend to be dysfunctional places ruled by fear and purpose and to meet the demands of business today and tomorrow. fueled, in the trenches, by antacids and pain medication. It means honesty about where you are and honest commitment This issue is about “The Best of NonStop,” so why are we talking to making things work – really and truly – and to investing in the about this not-so-best stuff? Because in recognizing these patterns people, processes and equipment that enable reaching that goal. in others, we realize that in one way or another, at one time or Being the best means looking forward, acknowledging that new ideas another, we each have been a polka dot in these and other patterns. and approaches constantly emerge, and embracing change. It means As Guardian users, we initially resisted the OSS side of things. One realizing that OSS is NonStop’s entrée to the mainstream of modern of us is not a fan of the v(irtually) i(mpossible) editor. It’s a personal IT. Being the best of NonStop means we can reach across walls that failing; she’s working on it. We have each slammed in our share of might separate us from our colleagues on other platforms, who also quick and dirty code, and one of us wrote that long-ago nonsense (mistakenly) believe they work on the best machine ever. about crescent rolls (which her amazing boss really went to corporate NonStop Servers still offer the fundamentals we know and love; headquarters to submit). that Brick House has modern wiring - and blades if you want them. But we have also each become advocates of continuous quality Integrity series NonStop Servers are smaller yet more powerful and improvement, because we have seen that being honest, committed and energy thrifty – and still NonStop. proactive really works in the long run. We have seen the difference There is a whole future filled with flexible NonStop middleware that one person, one voice, can make. We have witnessed the power of and business application products, using modern architectures, a question and the power of unified cooperative action. One of us has languages and tools. That future represents the best of NonStop; that a cynical nature, but we have each learned the value of keeping one’s future is now and ours for the making. eyes on the prize, of discerning the real prize and going forward toward that instead of holding fast to the past. The scope of continuous quality improvement is bigger than a single application or system.

Tom White joined HP eleven years ago, following an established career as a NonStop consultant. In his current role, Tom conducts workshops for customers interested in business continuity and related topics. He graduated from the University of Texas with a B.S. in industrial engineering and an M.S. in computer science.

Rebecca Howey joined HP in 2002 and, like Tom, is currently a member of the NonStop Advanced Technology Center (ATC) database group. Her B.A. in sociology, M.S. in library and information science, and certificate in project management contributed to the content of this article, as did her belief in the infinite resilience of people to amend the infinite number of things that can go awry.

www.connect-community.org 17 Got COBOL? Want Java? Modernizing a legacy mainframe application for NonStop Java and SQL/MX

Nasima Ahmad NonStop Solutions Architect

screens, nine transactions and 61 use cases used to test the ProLiant conversion. The tests were performed against a mixed environment, where the application ran on a Windows platform connected to a NonStop SQL/MX database, and against a pure NonStop environment in which both the application and database resided on the NonStop Server. The diagram below shows the phases of the extended POC and the configurations that were used.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian-s/ P and Blu Age® recently completed a multi-step migration and modernization Proof of Concept (POC) project that took a legacy OLTP application from COBOL and DB2 Hon an IBM mainframe, first to Java and DB2 on the HP ProLiant DL360 platform, and ultimately to Java and SQL/MX on an HP NonStop Server. The project included comparisons of transaction execution times in the ProLiant environment, a hybrid NonStop and Windows environment, and a “pure NonStop” environment. The NonStop Server was clearly the overall winner for the set of transactions comprising this POC. The Blu Age1 software suite implements Model Driven Architecture (MDA) principles and offers appropriate methods This part of the POC also required conversion of the database to deliver Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) application from DB2 to NonStop SQL/MX, adjusting the Blu Age software programs written in Java. The Reverse Modeling component to support the JBoss environment, and validating the deployment facilitates the extraction of business logic from the legacy code of an online EAR (Enterprise Application Archive – “the and constructs UML (Unified Modeling Language) models that application”) on the pure NonStop environment. can be used to generate the application in a Java framework. The Blu Age software is packaged as a plugin for Eclipse, an open POC configuration source IDE (integrated development environment) frequently Configuring the hardware and software for this POC required used to develop Java applications. no extraordinary efforts. Standard 1 GB Ethernet connections were used to connect POC objectives these hardware components used for testing: The primary goal of the NonStop phase of the extended POC • NonStop Server: NS16004, with 10 mirrored data drives, was to demonstrate Blu Age’s ability to use the same UML model running H06.25, SQL/MX 3.2, and NonStop Java 6.0 (1.6). to generate functional online Java application components for • Windows server (for Java middle layer): HP ProLiant two disparate environments: WebSphere with a DB2 database DL360 G5, running Windows Server 2008, Java 1.6 and (on HP ProLiant DL360) and, of course, a NonStop environment Blu Age 3.7. with a JEE JBoss server and a NonStop SQL/MX database. The The middleware setup required installing JBoss 7.1.1 and its UML model was generated when Blu Age was used to convert the dependencies. legacy (COBOL) application to the ProLiant Java, WebSphere and A few minor (and common) DDL adjustments were made DB2 implementation. when the NonStop SQL/MX tables were created: The final NonStop phase of the POC centered on creating • VARCHAR columns with lengths less than 20 were and testing the functionality and performance of the NonStop changed to fixed CHAR columns of the same length. (This components generated by Blu Age, using the same five is a typical optimization practice for NonStop SQL.)

1 BLU AGE® is a registered trademark belonging to NETFECTIVE TECHNOLOGY SA. Further information about Blu Age, a registered HP partner, and its products can be found on their webpage: http://bluage.com/en/en_home.html . You may also wish to view an archived HP NonStop Customer Conference Call about the Blu Age software suite and its use on NonStop Servers. The call occurred on October 17, 2013

18 Nov/Dec 2013 • BIGINT columns were changed to the equivalent NonStop – with no change in functionality. SQL/MX data type, LARGEINT. • Proved the feasibility and potential value of a mixed • Columns declared with DEFAULT NOT NULL syntax environment: the application running on Windows and were given a default value of 0. accessing a NonStop database. Additional changes were made to the data source configuration: • Demonstrated that the NonStop Server can support both adding the application name for management purposes and a Java JBOSS JEE server application for OLTP and the enabling statement pooling for performance. The value assigned to NonStop SQL/MX database it uses. the applicationName property is passed to the server and used in • Achieved the best online performance results in a pure the Server Statistics logs when they are enabled. This “best practice” NonStop environment, with both the Java application and is frequently required by system managers. Another frequently used the database running on NonStop. property, maxStatements, enables statement pooling, the caching of Got COBOL, want Java? Check! compiled SQL queries by the driver for use by any connection in its pool. This reduces compiler activity on the system and, in this case, resulted in the NonStop environment being the best performer of Nasima was the Project Manager of this POC project, which finished on time and within budget. Currently part of a NonStop Presales team, the three tested. Nasima previously worked as a Solutions Architect in HP’s Business Critical Systems group. Prior to joining HP, she implemented POCs and The results conducted custom benchmarks at the IBM Advanced Technical Center Testing focused on 61 use cases related to the nine for 14 years. She has a Computer Science degree from the University of Florida. transaction types available in the five screens used for testing. Functional testing was successful in each of the 61 cases. The Java OLTP application generated by Blu Age for the NonStop Server and SQL/MX database performed the same functions, with the same results, as the legacy COBOL IBM application and the ProLiant application using either a DB2 or SQL/ MX database. This POC demonstrated that Blu Age software supports migration of OLTP applications from COBOL to NonStop Java. This POC also compared transaction execution times, measured on the application server side, for the three environments. Response times recorded for the DB2 implementation on the ProLiant platform were similar to those of the original, presumably optimized mainframe (IBM COBOL) environment. The timings captured for the hybrid ProLiant application and SQL/MX database varied: some were higher, others lower than the ProLiant/DB2 baseline. Most exciting for the POC sponsors was the roughly 25% overall Low cost improvement in OLTP execution time with the “pure NonStop” solution that used statement pooling. Comparison of timings for HP NonStop the pure NonStop and the ProLiant DB2 environments showed recorded response times approximately halved in the NonStop Software environment in three cases and, in another, reduced by 79%. While three transactions clearly took longer in the NonStop environment, Factory the variances were minor relative to the gains of the four improved times. Results for the two remaining transactions in the set were roughly the same in both environments. Further improvements can be expected with additional analysis of these results, tuning of NonStop components and the use of dedicated hardware. This is not, however, the end of the NonStop/Blu Age story. The next chapter, the conversion of legacy batch programs - from COBOL OmniPayments Inc. to Java and from EBCDIC platforms to NonStop, is underway. [email protected] www.OmniPayments.com Summary This POC, a collaboration between HP and Blu Age: • Demonstrated that Blu Age can generate online applications for a JBOSS / Hibernate architecture on the NonStop server as well as a WAS / OpenJPA environment

www.connect-community.org 19 What’s the Big Deal about Big Data? Should HP NonStop Platform Owners Care? Thomas Burg, CISSP Thomas Gloerfeld Chief Technical Officer VP Marketing comForte 21 GmbH comForte 21 GmbH

Introduction and Terminology 25 gigabytes of data every hour. Ford processes this data in its data center and offers it back to drivers via a Defining Big Data mobile application. With big data powering their mobile Big data is a term that’s increasingly being discussed and written applications, drivers can find out about their car’s battery about, but what does it really mean? What constitutes “big” and life, the nearest charging station, and more. With this data, how does it differ from prior analytics approaches? The definitions Ford can help deliver a better experience to drivers, gain of big data aren’t concrete, and are ultimately subjective. While more detailed insights into how cars are being used, and authors of analyst reports and articles in trade magazines are often leverage that intelligence to guide future enhancements3. looking to hype the latest terms, the reality is that, while the phrase • Insurance. MetLife has leveraged big data in an effort to improve “big data” is relatively new, some underlying concepts of big data the customer service experience and lower the costs associated have been around for a long time. with hiring new representatives. Through its application, known When reading the common definitions of big data, the key as “The Wall”, the company has created a single place that contains takeaway will often be that big data is a massive undertaking. all the information known about its customers. The Wall brings For example, the Wikipedia page on the topic states that big data together data from more than 70 legacy systems4. Long-term features “data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to users of the HP NonStop platform will probably remember the process using on-hand database management tools or traditional term “zero-latency enterprise (ZLE)”, which Gartner coined a data processing applications.”1 In other words, if you’re going to few years ago. At the time, HP delivered a solution around this pursue big data, you’ll need to make some significant investments. framework, which featured the HP NonStop platform. An often-cited definition from a UC Berkeley professor described • Healthcare. Health care organizations are increasingly using big big data this way: “Big Data is any data that is expensive to manage data to identify patients who are disproportionately at risk for and hard to extract value from.”2 specific medical conditions, before serious problems occur. For We would argue that, to the contrary, for organizations running example, a Texas-based health care system is using data from both HP NonStop platforms, big data projects do not always have to clinical records and insurance claims to identify which patients be hard or expensive. In fact, if you know what you are doing, big will be at risk of suffering from an ailment in the future, and then data proof of concepts, which are the best place to start, can be a using that information to provide early preventative services5. surprisingly smooth undertaking. The key thing is to start with clearly defining the business case. Data Visualization and Big Data In this article, we look at some examples that fit the more formal To realize an effective big data implementation, an organization definition of big data, and some that don’t. In addition, we look will need to address some fundamental challenges, including at some different approaches for how HP NonStop platforms can establishing the ability to aggregate and process massive volumes of support big data initiatives. Finally, we provide some details of a data. However, while the technical aspects of processing and storage sample application that illustrates how a live Twitter feed can easily in big data environments are by no means trivial, these areas are be analyzed on an HP NonStop platform. often given the bulk of media attention and IT focus. We would argue that visualization may often be the most vital aspect of a big data Examples of Some Big Data Projects implementation, offering a significant role in two key respects: Before getting into the technical details of big data and the role • Helping users gradually develop a sense for the real value of of HP NonStop platforms in these implementations, it’s important big data. to look at some examples of how businesses have leveraged big • Enabling organizations to realize true business value from a data and the benefits they have realized by doing so. Following are big data implementation. examples from a few different industries: While visualization is often under-estimated or over looked, that is • Automotive. While Ford’s research and innovation because we are accustomed to having to rely on spreadsheets and poor group has been doing advanced business modeling for visuals to do our analysis. It is by visualization that we as humans can begin over two decades, the organization is now leveraging big to effectively learn from the massive amounts of information we have data techniques to manage larger and more diverse data available (see sidebar Visualization Unlocks Beauty of Data on page 21). To sets. For example, its Energi plug-in hybrid cars generate illustrate, following is an example.

1 Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data 2 Michael J. Franklin, Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley 3 GigaOM, “How data is changing the car game for Ford”, Derrick Harris, April 26, 2013, http://gigaom.com/2013/04/26/how-data-is-changing-the-car-game-for-ford/ 4 GigaOM, “The promise of better data has MetLife investing $300M in new tech” Derrick Harris, May 7, 2013, http://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/with-300m-earmarked-for-tech-innovation- metlife-wants-to-remake-insurance/ 5 Salon, “Big Data Improves Health Care”, Siemens, http://www.salon.com/2013/09/09/big_data_improves_health_care/

20 Nov/Dec 2013 Figure A

Figure A is a raw, non-visual depiction of information. In This example illustrates the vital nature of visualization, this case, this is about half of the text of all nine of the articles even for a relatively simple matter of parsing the text found in pertaining to information security that comForte has written for The nine journal articles. As you increase the scale and complexity Connection magazine. of the issues being analyzed, visualization grows infinitely If you copied all these articles into a single word document, you’d more critical. have about 22,000 words of text. Scanning this image, closely, you can For an extensive look at visualization products and get a lot of data, but very little information. How do you determine approaches, and how they relate to big data, register to what these articles are about? download a white paper entitled “Visual Discovery Tools: Using an online tool like Wordle (wordle.net), you can paste the Market Segmentation and Product Positioning”, which is entirety of this text and automatically have a so-called “word map” available at the following url: http://searchbusinessanalytics. created. Figure B is the resulting visual that appears, with those techtarget.com/ebook/Visual-Discovery-Tools-Market- words that are used most frequently appearing the largest. Through Segmentation-and-Product-Positioning this visual, a reader could more quickly and easily understand the nature of these articles. Visualization Unlocks Beauty of Data

Figure B When it comes to the interrelation of big data and visualization, David McCandless provides some very compelling insights. McCandless is a London-based data journalist and information designer who brings a uniquely insightful perspective into the worlds of information and big data. A speaker at our recent comForte Key Customer Workshop, McCandless reveals how visualization is a key solution for all of us as we seek to combat information overload. It is through visualization that we can take large volumes of data and make the information understandable, so we can start to see patterns, sift through the noise, and focus on what’s important. The more information we have to work with, the more vital effective information design becomes. Consequently, it is in the realm we call big data that the need for visualization becomes more critical than ever. To hear McCandless for yourself, be sure to view his presentation at a past TED Conference: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_ mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html

www.connect-community.org 21 A Sample Project: Analyzing the live Twitter Feed Accomplishing steps 1 and 2 is mostly a programming on the HP NonStop Platform challenge, one that is characteristic of the big data arena in that We’ve recently undertaken a project in which we’ve set up the it requires different skills than the typical application or system automatic analysis of the live Twitter feed6. On a continuous basis, programmer has9. Over time, the Twitter feed is relatively high users of the Twitter social networking service submit tweets, which in volume, it is rather fast (up to 800 TPS), and it is somewhat generate a constant stream of data. The rate of tweets being issued unstructured, especially when one is trying to parse the meaning varies widely. During this year’s Super Bowl, for example, Twitter of a tweet. reported 24.1 million posts7. Assuming the entire Super Bowl The programming challenge at hand here lies in the following broadcast lasted for eight hours, that amounts to about 800 tweets successive steps: (1) Getting to the data (2) Understanding the per second, which, while substantial, isn’t a transaction rate that format of the data (3) Interpreting the data (4) Collecting the most HP NonStop users would be impressed by. data, resulting in some structured data ready to be analyzed For this project, we used Python, a powerful programming further. Steps 1 and 2 have eventually been implemented in language. Python features a range of key characteristics, including Python using two separate scripts, which contain about 60 and modularity, interpreted language, object-oriented design, and support 400 lines of code respectively—obviously not a lot of source for rich data structures. Given these characteristics, Python is often code10. used in ad-hoc projects and has become the language of choice for The immediate output of the aforementioned Python scripts many big data projects. Beyond being powerful, one of the great things is a comma-separated text file, which can be imported into a about Python is that it has been available on HP NonStop platforms as spreadsheet. Figure C is an excerpt of the result, after having an ITUGLIB port for quite a while. Further, HP has announced that applied some language sanitation. official support for the language will be coming soon8. By reviewing this raw output, we can assess the validity of the For this project, we set out to do the following: sentiment analysis code. While it is obvious that the score is not 1. Collect the live Twitter feed for a given length of time and always right, across the board, it is mostly right, and that is good store it in a file. enough for the purposes of this project. 2. Analyze the file as follows: In this project, we started by analyzing the live feed for 12 a. Using a word list that rates about 2500 English words on minutes, which resulted in a text file of about 125 MB to analyze a simple “happiness scale”, assign a “happiness score” to containing about 44,000 tweets and, post-analysis, in a table with each tweet. 168 tweets. In a second stage, we analyzed the live feed for about b. For tweets that have a geographic location attached, 14 hours, which resulted in a text file of 3.9 GB containing 1.4 collect latitude and longitude. million tweets at an average of about 28tps ; about 8000 of them 3. Display the results in a meaningful way. having a geo tag within the United States. Figure C

6 Twitter provides an API for other companies to access the data created by Twitter users. The API is simple to use and allows individuals to download either all or selected subsets of users’ tweets. 7 Associated Press, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/live-action-twitter-grabs-super-bowl-spotlight, Retrieved 5 February 2013 8 The current schedule (subject to change) is that Python v2.7.5 will be released as port of RVU H06.28/J06.17 9 There is a new job role in IT which is called “Data Scientist”, see for instance the following story in CIO magazine http://www.cio.com/article/740797/Who_s_Training_the_Next_Generation_of_ Data_Scientists_ 10 If you are interested in a copy of the actual source code, please contact the authors of this article.

22 Nov/Dec 2013 Visualization of Project Results examples of business cases that could potentially leverage this Looking at the output in a table format does not enable us to quickly real-time Twitter analysis: or effectively analyze the information. This is where data visualization is • Fraud detection. A credit card issuer could use the Twitter a critical factor. Figure D and Figure E represent a sample graphic output data as additional input for fraud detection. If a user name of the findings. Figure D depicts the tweets generated in the continental on Twitter could be connected to a credit card number, United States and shows which regions were busiest in tweeting. which wouldn’t be trivial, a business could correlate the origin of a tweet with the location of an ATM transaction. Figure D If there’s a discrepancy in locations within a specific window of time, a flag could be generated to trigger an investigation into whether fraud was perpetrated. • ATM location intelligence. A bank could leverage Twitter data to gain insights into its distribution of ATMs. By using the Twitter feed to ascertain where people gather during busy shopping times, and correlating that data with existing intelligence, such as the current locations and utilizations of ATMs, a bank could optimize its future allocations for maximum user convenience.

Big Data and NonStop If your organization is looking to pursue a big data implementation and you are wondering about if or how you can leverage your HP NonStop platforms, the reality is that you can, and you have several options for doing so. In the following Figure E then aggregates the data per state. The number sections, we outline several potential approaches, providing a appearing in each state reflects the number of tweets analyzed high level description and a sample scenario for each. during the 14 hours data was captured. The color of the state represents the average happiness score of the tweets collected. Deployment Option 1: Using NonStop as one of several Raw Data Sources to be analyzed Figure E Description In this approach, an organization extracts raw data from HP NonStop and imports it into a separate big data platform for all required processing and analysis. In prior discussions, we have had users report that a significant percentage of data from HP NonStop systems is already submitted to other systems for consumption. So, terminology aside, this approach is already being put into practice and live in production at several customer sites.

Business Cases There are several business cases in which this option can be employed. Following are a couple of examples: • An organization can feed transactional data from NonStop into back-office applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) One can only speculate why some states are happier than systems. others here. However, repeating this exercise during a highly • A business could feed NonStop-based transactional data visible university football game, for example, will probably reveal into a production fraud alerting system. Often these results that do correlate with the game’s outcome. fraud alerting systems run on separate platforms than the NonStop platform that is processing the transactions. Project Applicability In this case, the fraud alerting system will receive a In a real-world scenario, a user may want to analyze the transaction from NonStop, potentially use data from Twitter feed in real time - this could be done on the HP other sources (for example, a live Twitter feed), apply NonStop platform as well as other platforms11. Following are two logic, and return a result to the HP NonStop platform.

11 It should be noted that through smart “inbound filtering” it is possible to do this with only little continuous CPU usage. For the examples given below, we would only be interested in a very tiny subset of the full live Twitter feed – hence the processing power required would be rather minimal.

www.connect-community.org 23 Example By aggregating this HP NonStop information, organizations As described earlier a card processor could aggregate can begin to fully leverage this information for maximum business transaction logs from an HP NonStop platform along with value. Figure G illustrates how a payment processor could aggregate geographic data from Twitter feeds in order to gain an additional this massive amount of PTLF data and display it in a visual way. layer of intelligence for combatting fraud. Through these visuals, a processor could provide highly valuable Consider the following example: A user posts a tweet from insights. For example, Figure G features statistics broken down by their home location in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and within an hour, card brands and types, which can be useful for internal analysis a credit card transaction occurs for that same user in a retail and also be of interest to their retail customers13. Here again, outlet in Chicago, Illinois. By harnessing big data processing, visualization can provide insights that would be too difficult or that geographic mismatch can be correlated and used to trigger too time consuming to glean from the raw data. immediate investigations and potentially preempt further fraudulent charges. Deployment Option 3: HP NonStop as the Big Data Platform Deployment Option 2: NonStop the Sole Source of Data to be Analyzed Description Organizations that employ this approach effectively use HP Description NonStop as the central big data platform. Source data sets may Given the massive and varied data sets that reside in reside inside and outside of the HP NonStop platform, which is the many enterprise HP NonStop deployments, an organization’s ultimate repository for all data, processing, and analysis. entire big data implementation may be based solely on While HP isn’t necessarily actively promoting this use of the data originating in HP NonStop. In this case, data sets are platform, the reality is that any user that is running a business- inherently consistent and ready for processing and analysis critical application on the HP NonStop platform could leverage within the big data platform. the platform for a small to medium-sized big data project. The fundamentals of the HP NonStop platform—namely its scalability Example and optimization for parallel inserts and reads in the database— Those involved in payment processing will be no strangers certainly fit the requirements. to having to sift through large volumes of payment data. Figure F features a POS transaction log file (commonly referred to as Business Cases a PTLF file), which illustrates the type of data a processor may Some fraud management solutions are running on the HP need to manage12. This is highly structured data that contains NonStop platform. As a result, organizations can use the same such information as credit card numbers (featured in red), a POS system type to process transactions and check for fraud. This device ID, retailer, transaction amount, card issuer, and more. approach offers some clear advantages, including eliminating A busy processor may be tasked with handling 1000s of the need to send 1000s of transactions per second to a separate transactions a second, which means that millions of these box for fraud scoring. As we have seen earlier, adding other data records are managed each day. Here again, there are massive sources (such as the live Twitter feed) can often be done easily. amounts of data, but little digestible information. As mentioned earlier, an organization can use the HP NonStop

Figure F

12 The example shows a PTLF log file of BASE24™. BASE24 is trademarked and copyrighted by ACI Inc, all rights acknowledged.

24 Nov/Dec 2013 Figure G

platform to function as a single instance that can house data from Within this article, we have shown that big data projects can a variety of enterprise data sources, and enable users to gain live, be implemented on the HP NonStop platform—without massive read-only access to that information for business analysis purposes. investments or development efforts. Once again, the NonStop systems in use today prove well suited to modern business and Example technical use cases.14 Decision makers within a satellite entertainment service provider were looking to get real-time, comprehensive views into critical enterprise information. The organization aggregated Acknowledgements data from all of the company’s IT subsystems onto HP NonStop We’d like to thank the online University Coursera for the platforms. Now, in one location, users can access a central highly useful class on big data, entitled “Introduction to repository for all critical enterprise data, such as records of Data Science”. The sample project discussed in this article is customer interactions across all touch points, including via the call based on an assignment given in that class as well as on some center, Web site, and payment centers; account balances; payment sample source code provided. The course provided a great histories; and more. introduction to the topics of big data and, more generally, data science. Further, the professor clearly articulated an Conclusion understanding of the HP NonStop platform and its merits. By leveraging big data, an organization’s leadership can gain a The software used for visualization is called Tableau. For range of new insights that can fuel improvements in a range of areas, details, see www.tableausoftware.com. including boosting marketing results, delivering more profitable Finally, we wish to thank Insider Technologies offerings to customers, and more. For organizations that have Limited (http://insidertech.co.uk) for allowing us to use made investments in HP NonStop platforms, these investments can some screenshots of their products to demonstrate the absolutely be harnessed in an effective big data implementation. In visualization of ATM or POS log data. It should be noted this effort, IT teams can choose from several approaches, options that that there are other products available on the HP NonStop will present different pros and cons depending on the nature of the platform that can achieve similar objectives. environment and the objectives of the implementation. Before moving forward, it’s important to start with a clear For over 13 years, Thomas Burg has been Chief Technology Officer for understanding of the business case for the initiative. Once that’s comForte, a software vendor specializing in security, connectivity, and solidified, it is time to look at the technical options to implement the modernization solutions for the HP NonStop market. He represents comForte in the Accredited Standards Committee X9, which develops and solution. manages standards certified by the American National Standards Institute. Burg can be reached at [email protected].

13 The graphics are showing a screenshot of the RTLX product by Insider Technologies Thomas Gloerfeld has been associated with the NonStop community for 20 Limited, see Acknowledgements for details. years. Before joining comForte five years ago, he held various management 14 In a prior article titled ‘’Cloud-enabling NonStop Systems: Why You Should Care and positions at ACI Worldwide, both in Germany and the UK. In his role at How You Can Do It”, we looked at HP NonStop systems and cloud computing. In the article, we outlined how, much like big data, with cloud computing, it isn’t technology comForte, he closely monitors emerging trends like cloud computing and which is availabe or not on the HP NonStop platform that’s the critical factor, rather it is big data. Gloerfeld can be reached at [email protected]. determining the business case.

www.connect-community.org 25 Virtualization a shoe-in! Big Data, Hybrid Computers and Cloud Computing become Megatrends! Richard Buckle Pyalla Technologies, LLC,

ooking back on 2013 I am amazed how quickly this year Megatrends has passed by – I readily recall that, just a short time ago, For two years now, HP reiterated its major focus areas for I was busily writing a feature for the May/June, 2013, issue all of HP development. These were Mobility, Security, Big Data ofL The Connection. I recall, too, how much I was looking forward and Clouds. Furthermore, for eighteen months we have, as a to HP Discover 2013 and now, with the event well in the past, it is community, been looking to see where the NonStop business the new-format, NonStop Boot Camp, that is keeping me focused unit would be making its presence felt. Now we know, since on what is coming. Randy Meyer, VP & GM, Integrity Servers, provided the update at the recent fall user group event, CTUG. Under the banner of Virtualization Megatrends, Meyer identified Big Data, Hybrid (Computers), However, before looking back at the year that is ending, and Cloud (Computing) as the three-focus areas key to NonStop perhaps a good place to start is with the recent announcement of development. the latest additions to the family of NonStop systems. When you “We want to do the investments,” Meyer told CTUG look at the numbers HP provides, there are some staggering data attendees, “that help our customers leverage these Megatrends!” an unambiguous reference to what was in the NB56000c points. Performance has benefited from Intel’s announcement as well as what will be new Poulson chip, which is delivering up to discussed in more detail at the Boot 50% more performance when compared to the Camp. Fortunately, this too aligns with previous NonStop system family members. the investments made across the vendor Furthermore, an NB56000c can scale “up to community, and I will reference these 16,320 cores, up to 192,000 program processes investments here, in the following paragraphs per node, and an incredible 48,960,000 as they speak volumes about how relevant program processes in an Expand network”, HP’s focus areas are, and with NonStop according to the data sheet HP Integrity talking openly of Megatrends, there’s an NonStop BladeSystem NB56000c – for assurance of how big a role NonStop will play businesses that never stop. in the coming years. Appearing at the top of the key features Returning to the subject of virtualization and benefits list, Improve your virtualization it’s almost a shoe-in for even more widespread work load efficiency, HP states how today, promotion in the coming months. It is the with the NonStop operating system, users subject of ongoing discussions among two of my can expect to see their NonStop system clients and topic of a number of blog posts. The “automatically balance workloads with point to realize when discussing virtualization a fully virtualized system that optimizes is that it can be implemented at different levels resources at the application level”. This means in a combined hardware / software stack. There that users with applications developed for will always be trade-offs, of course, as nothing Pathway (including those written leveraging is free – I recall an IBM instructor suggesting Pathway capabilities, such as is the case with to me in that mid 1970s that the benefits from running a virtual storage operating system will Java and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) increase greatly if you provide plenty of real implementation on Nonstop), can scale out memory! For the mission-critical applications running today on across almost a limitless number of servers that might comprise NonStop systems, they are every bit as virtualized as any other a very large NonStop system deployment. application running on more popular platforms. All of these features – NonStop running on blades, utilizing the latest Intel chips and supporting application virtualization Big Data like this - certainly are newsworthy. Yet HP wasn’t alone in Big data is not about big databases or big files and no, it making breakthrough announcements as many within the HP is not something that plays to the strength of products like vendor community also pursued implementing breakthrough NonStop SQL. Big data is high volume, velocity, and variety solutions well worth taking a second look at. These include - information assets that according to Gartner “require new solutions and middleware providers, each of them ending the forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, year on a high note, and that is welcome news for the entire insight discovery and process optimization.” Perhaps even more NonStop community. enlightening for the NonStop community are the remarks of serial

26 Nov/Dec 2013 start-up entrepreneur, angel investor and Chairman, European overall availability properties of NonStop systems! However, as HP video start-up, Videoplaza, Richard Titus, who said, “Three continues to drive out costs from the NonStop platform, there is also considerations about Big Data before it becomes useful; generate a growing recognition that not all transactions are of the same value the data, transport the data, refine the data.” Randy Meyer, VP (to the business) and that perhaps, running them off platform may be & GM Integrity Servers, said something very similar during his a solution after all. Increasingly, we are seeing NonStop development presentation at this year’s fall CTUG event, “For the NonStop moving drivers to low-cost industry-standard controllers, but this community, feeding data in is good; but more interesting is isn’t, strictly speaking, the type of Hybrid Computer envisioned feeding results of analytics back to transactional systems.” within NonStop development. Meyer then highlighted the work being done by Attunity and The more NonStop development embraces standards and supports WebAction, suggesting that both companies had introduced the application virtualization we see today outboard of NonStop, products this year in support of Big Data. Both vendors have the more Hybrid Computers will become a reality. Pathway with been given considerable support from HP and have both been Advanced Cluster Services (ACS) is just a first step along this path active participants in the Advanced Technology Center (ATC). but it is indicative of where it could lead. In blog posts for other “Big Data is big business; get on the train or get left behind,” was NonStop vendors, likely to be posted as this issue of The Connection how Itamar Ankorion, Attunity VP, Business Development and is becoming available, I wrote of how virtualization can be achieved Corporate Strategy, positioned Big Data during a recent interview. at the processor or subsystem level. “As is the case with Java and the “Getting NonStop transactional data into Big Data stores is an Java Virtual Machine or .Net with the Common Language Runtime opportunity that NonStop users have to look at considering the - it has helped fuel the acceptance of virtualization,” said IR’s General business value of the data they manage on NonStop. These stores Manager - Products & Alliances, John Dunne. “When it comes to today can be anything from large-scale Data Warehouses to transactional systems such as IBM’s CICS and HP’s Pathway, they Hadoop and Cloud-based storage.” Following successful product too support virtualization at the application level and this is probably demonstrations at this year’s Vertica event in Boston, Attunity more applicable to the markets we serve – these are special cases of has produced a variant on its Attunity Replicate product that now virtualization as they now can involve heterogeneous mixes of servers. loads data from NonStop SQL and Enscribe data bases into the Jonathan DeVeaux, IR’s Head of Payments and HP NonStop, Vertica Big Data warehouse. said, “Having taken the initial steps to ensure Prognosis would Whereas the work Attunity has done addresses the transport of support platforms apart from NonStop,” a reference to how Prognosis the data, what WebAction is focusing on is additional refinement 10 is now cross-platform aware, then added “However, we aren’t of the data, all in real time. “Yes, we have included support expecting a rush to these hybrid configurations but rather a careful of NonStop in the initial development and the WebAction weighing of the value proposition from moving transactions off platform is now generally available and includes support for NonStop”. This is where the most recent comments from Yash HP NonStop systems,” WebAction cofounder, Sami Akbay, told Kapadia, CEO, OmniPayments Inc., confirm what DeVeaux and me just recently. “We are targeting the intersection of real-time Dunne were contemplating. For some time now, Yash had designed transactional data with the collections of unstructured data into OmniPayments system support for hybrid computers in order generated by machines, devices, social media, emails, sensors to more competitively price his payments solution and this led him and pretty much everything else. The intent is to augment the to make the next jump – to Cloud computing. In the Sept/Oct, real-time information from NonStop and then leverage historic 2013 issue of The Connection, Yash wrote, “To ensure continuous knowledge from analytics frameworks, such as data warehouses, availability of the cash distribution services to poor mothers (in and make the information complete and actionable in real-time." Colombia) even in this extreme and unlikely case (of a major Akbay then explained how “WebAction has been deployed at disaster), the system is backed-up by alternate systems in Opsol’s the ATC and demonstrations of its capabilities have been given disaster recovery cloud, hosted in its California datacenter." to many parties inside HP – this has been a major milestone. With just a little extra help from HP’s field organization, we are Cloud Computing looking forward to translating our early success with demos into To many of the NonStop community the acceptance of Hybrid real-world success for customers. In order to better facilitate Computers is indeed a stepping stone along the path to Cloud this transition, we have already begun building our own sales Computing – a journey along a highway where HP talks of there being force. Among the first hires have been sales professionals well many on-ramps. With considerable evangelism and support from versed in the way NonStop systems and their users can be fully HP solution architects, this year, comForte’s development partner, involved in this intersection of the structured world of real time Infrasoft, completed the first stage of development of maRunga. and the unstructured world of just about everything else.” Leveraging the considerable effort that had gone into the development of the communications product uLinga, the release Hybrid Computers of maRunga into the NonStop marketplace will surely help those The reference by Meyer to Hybrid Computers caught some companies looking to capitalize on Hybrid Computers and the cost CTUG attendees by surprise. In the past, NonStop development has savings their use represent. No longer needing to purchase costly server been cautious about just how far business logic should travel beyond farms, the NonStop community can leverage the flexibility that comes the NonStop platform. When it comes to availability, and indeed through the elasticity of provisioning cloud vendors provide. scalability, surely such replication of business logic would degrade the continued on page 32

www.connect-community.org 27 We've Come a Long Way! NonStop Security Celebrating & Looking Back on 30 years of XYPRO History

Barry Forbes XYPRO Technology

013 marks XYPRO’s 30th year in business in the HP NonStop I Know We're Trustworthy But…. arena, fondly remembered as Tandem. XYPRO was started in 1983 While on-site for a troubleshooting meeting, XYPRO’s by two former Tandem Analysts. We were a consulting company representative, with no more than a name as identification, was that2 grew over time into the Mission Critical Security software and asked to wait in an office with a PC connected to the NonStop solutions company we are today by working closely with our customers network while the company’s hosts attended another meeting. She to meet their requirements, along was promptly given the SUPER.SUPER ID and password for all with those of the constantly systems before they left and closed her office door. changing security marketplace. Taking a lighter look at the ever serious and fundamental need for security, we’re sharing some of our, and your, younger times with a short pass through time in photos and some amusing stories from some experiences of XYPRO’s team members. XYPRO’s founder, Dale Blommendahl and Jimmy Treybig.

Try This One On Your Auditors Today When working with a prospect on helping them improve on their audit reporting, we asked them to describe their current process for audit reporting. Their Under construction in 2004. Greg Swedosh, Lisa Partridge, Bob Alvarado, Terri response: “We use MS Word and Hill, Ellen Alvarado, Scott Uroff and Barry Forbes. write our own reports by hand and though the information is 1-800-ACCESS not real, the auditors don’t know While supporting a customer experiencing an issue, a SAVEABEND the difference." file was required for further investigation. Logistics for receiving the file ITUG 2000. Scott Uroff, Terri Hill, were discussed. The trusting customer's reply: "Sure. You can just dial in Lisa Partridge and Barry Forbes. We to our modem at 1 800 XXX XXXX and download it. When you see the were there to “Pump you up” with our security strength! TACL prompt, type the command "LOGON SUPER.SUPER," and you'll be able to find the file on $SYSTEM.SYSTEM". Needless to say corporate Not Exactly Password Quality security has come a long way since then and we haven't seen any security During a Tandem security review at a large international bank, one holes like this in a long time, particularly free access to SUPER.SUPER finding was an unencrypted, unsecured edit file aptly named by its owner as without a password. “PASSWORD”. The file contained all privileged user IDs, including SUPER. Growth in 2005. XYPRO SUPER and all their passwords. Reason: “They were too hard and too many expands its footprint in the NonStop market of them to remember”. The file had existed for 10 years at the time. as well as on the trade show floor.

Security Has Come a Long Way in 30 Years! These are definitely the few exceptions where we can see the humor in some security shortcomings while the vast majority of security interest within the NonStop community and with Tandem/Compaq/HP has been well thought out and very seriously adhered to. NonStop is a real Happier times on September 10th, 2001. Barry Forbes, Lisa Partridge, Sean Bicknell, Sheila Johnson and Terri Hill community with strong values, a rich history, and a commitment to ▶

28 Nov/Dec 2013 collaborative improvement. NonStop advocacy and Special Interest 25 Years! Groups have served to improve many facets of technology over the years and one of particular note was the “Top 6 Most Popular Safeguard Requests,” which was a list of requested enhancements to the Safeguard product via the NonStop Security SIG (Special Interest Group) at the ’99 ITUG.

These top 6 requests have now all been incorporated into the current version of Safeguard and are there directly as a result of the community efforts and cooperation of development and product management at HP. An impressive ice sculpture representing XYPRO’s 25th Anniversary in 2008 was temporarily on display at our annual kick-off dinner. From ITUG to Discover 2013: Celebrating XYPRO's 30th Anniversary and HP Partner of the Year Award. At HP Discover in June, XYPRO was named the 2013 HP AllianceOne Partner of the Year in Security. The award was based on our success in delivering comprehensive security solutions for mission-critical applications. Naturally, the XYPRO team was thrilled and honored by this recognition of our products and our dedication to NonStop security—especially to receive it in our 30th anniversary year! However, even as we celebrate the Partner of the Year award and our anniversary, we realize that our success (both past and future) has been enabled by the support of our customers, partners and the entire NonStop community. We sincerely appreciate your commitment to XYPRO and we’re looking forward to the next 30 years working together with you. Thank you!

Looking in on the new trade show floor at a Discover event. With openings by Kevin Bacon and filling an entire arena of attendees to see a private concert by Paul McCartney, “Maybe I’m Amazed” at how far we’ve come.

We Wrote the Book on Security…Twice.

XYPRO’s Ken Scudder, Sr. Director, Business Development and Strategic Alliances, accepts the 2013 HP AllianceOne Partner of the Year award in Security Category. After many years without a current reference document for NonStop security, XYPRO published their first NonStop security book in 2003 and followed with a "This article submitted on behalf of the 'Best Of NonStop' issue and is a special second in 2006. advertising submission."

www.connect-community.org 29 continued from page 15 The point is that the number of variables. We would recommend Summary engaging ES&A or the ATC for your initial foray if you are not yet There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, familiar with the tools we described. As we sometimes like to say, there is the possibility of magic. – Douglas Adams, The “Your mileage will vary.” Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Special Thanks Hybrid architectures like HAVEn with NonStop address the HAVEn’s breath precluded an in-depth discussion of NonStop/ heterogeneous reality of big data environments and respond to the Vertica integration efforts that have gone on recently. Please need to incorporate both established and new analytic database allow me to offer thanks to those who have worked diligently on approaches into a common architecture. The fundamental principle these efforts. Without the knowledge and commitment of Debra of hybrid architectures is that each constituent big data platform is Labanowski (NonStop ATC) the ETL effort would not have gotten fit-for-purpose to the role for which it’s best suited. off the ground, let alone been a success. The same can be said Most of us are familiar at this point with the Gartner 3”V”s of for Kevran Day (NonStop ES&A) and data virtualization. Alan Big Data – Volume, Velocity and Variety. HAVEn is a fabulous Charley’s mastery of NonStop performance analysis and generally toolkit for Volume and Variety. When you are building your own just-how-stuff-works was invaluable as were fellow NonStop ES&A “Deep Thought” and set out to solve a problem in which the answer member Mike Clapper’s Linux contributions. Stan Kosinski of NED needs to be returned in real-time, NonStop provides the answer as Development was the brains behind the test loader and transaction an out-of-the-box, integrated platform fit for real-time operational database environment. Thanks to a number of HP Vertica analytics. So long, and thanks for all the fish. contributors, in particular Tuan Pham and Mark Slavin. Last but not least, thanks to the WebAction team. WebAction is a Palo Alto based startup that you will hear more from soon, likely, a lot more. We look forward to their success.

T.C. Janes is a Managing Consultant with HP’s Enterprise Solutions and Architecture group. T.C. collaborates with client business and IT senior management to understand, prioritize and architect advanced use of data and information, drawing insights required to make informed business decisions. His current focus is the utilization of event-driven business intelligence design techniques and technologies for mission critical processes. T.C. is based in the heartland with his wife Maura and their four sons Ian, Connor, Brendan and Colin. He can be reached at [email protected] .

30 Nov/Dec 2013

continued from page 27 As if to second-guess the likely success of maRunga, Prognosis for uLinga helped consolidate this product’s position as a reliable development has already implemented a Cloudburst Dashboard alternative to older products from ACI Worldwide and HP. The launch depicting loads that are leading to processes moving into Clouds, and of Prognosis 10 likewise marked a major milestone for IR and readying then as these loads diminish, returning to the NonStop systems. For a version for the marketplace that included support of NonStop, customers of IR planning on embracing Cloud Computing, Prognosis certainly was a major highlight in the early days of WebAction. development will provide a future solution well-integrated with the This year has also been a big one in terms of new technology rest of Prognosis 10 features. Cloud Computing is now only a short solutions. Big Data, Hybrid Computers and Cloud Computing jump away for a number of users with large NonStop systems and the have all fueled investments among the NonStop vendors. When expectation is that, as the coming year unfolds, several real-world Proof other manufacturers’ systems and servers may be shying away of Concepts (PoCs) will begin. from some of these Megatrends, this is not the case for NonStop. While Virtualization too may not be categorized within NonStop Conclusion development as a Megatrend, it’s handprint can be clearly seen This year has seen a number of highlights for the vendors behind several of these Megatrends. 2013 has been a year of referenced here. Certainly, OmniPayments’ successful deployment transition and transformation as it has been a year of discovery and of its products in Colombia in support of a new government divergence, but for all within the NonStop community, the benefits initiative to ensure poor mothers receive enough cash to feed their are significant – no longer can anyone suggest NonStop isn’t modern children touches a lot of hearts. Coming as this deal did so soon after nor can it be said that there’s no place for NonStop in HP’s future. successfully replacing a much larger incumbent at one of the four What has been covered here has simply reflected the actions of just a biggest American banks could have easily led to a drop-off in intensity few vendors and more are actively pursuing similar projects but the but it didn’t, and indeed helped fuel even more activity from the bottom line is the same – it’s all happening for NonStop! company. Likewise, the success comForte enjoyed from new business

Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the IT industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator. Richard has over 25 years of research experience with HP’s NonStop platform, including eight years working at Tandem Computers, followed by just as many years at InSession Inc. and ACI Worldwide.

Well known to the user communities of HP and IBM, Richard served as a Director of ITUG (2000- 2006), as its Chairman (2004-2005), and as the Director of Marketing of the IBM user group, SHARE, (2007- 2008). Richard provides industry commentary and opinions through his community blog and you can follow him at www.itug-connection.blogspot. com, as well as through his industry association and vendor blogs, web publications and eNewsletters.

The quotes included in this feature come from some of Richard’s clients including HP, Attunity, comForte, Infrasoft, IR and Opsol.

32 Nov/Dec 2013 Storage Director is a policy based solution with Any-to-Any connectivity (any host platform with any backup application to any storage technology or media).

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