AWS and Nonstop

 Transactional data captured by NonStop applications can be a key source for business analytics; however, the NonStop platform may not be ideal for storing and analyzing the information over a long period of time.  Developing and hosting an in-house data analytics solution can be a challenging – and expensive – option.  An attractive alternative is AWS which provides all the cloud-based services needed to easily extend a NonStop application with a scalable, flexible and cost-effective infrastructure.  But how do you get the information from the NonStop to AWS and which AWS services do you use and how do you use them?

The diagram below shows just one possible approach for integrating data from the NonStop platform with AWS.

The AWS services in the above diagram can be split into 3 categories – Collection, Storage and Analyze.

Collection Services

AWS’ Direct Connect service can be used to connect NonStop application data to AWS.

Storage Services

AWS provides several storage services.  The example above uses AWS’ Simple Storage Service (S3) to hold data in its raw form – thus providing an excellent data lake implementation.  A concern with data lake implementations is that they can often turn into “data swamps.”  This is a term used to describe a situation where the data stored cannot be easily queried or used and can happen when data is simply stored into a data lake without any information about it’s context (date, source, identifiers, etc.).  AWS’ data lake solution addresses this by storing data in packages and tagging each package with metadata.  You can define the metadata you need for your packages to keep them organized.  AWS’ Elasticsearch and DynamoDB are used for storing and retrieving these packages.   Redshift is a data warehouse service where data can be stored for sophisticated querying and analysis.  Data can be loaded from the data lake into one or more data warehouses.  Lambda is AWS’ serverless function environment.  It can be used to develop event-driven code for receiving data from the NonStop and loading it to S3 and storing metadata in DynamoDB.

Analyze Services  

AWS provides many analysis services.  In the above example, AWS Quicksite is used. Integrating AWS with NonStop can provide a scalable, flexible and cost-effective platform for big data analytics

Jenkins in Guardian environment.

If an application runs on OSS, its easy for Jenkins. Because it has been setup to run things directly in Shell like below.

• Add a Shell step to a job.
• Put the command in you want to execute.
• If the step fails, Job fails.
• And turns RED in the control panel.

This works the same whether you are using a local Jenkins or whether you have a Controller/Agent Situation.

What About Guardian?

In Guardian environment, you have to use Controller/Agent Architecture.  But there would be 2 potential issues.

1. OSS Pseudo Terminal is NOT available for 100% of functions in GUARDIAN’s programs and Vice Versa.

• For this issue, Program must NOT attempt to read it from TERM. You should have a macro to redirects the TERM through OSSTTY.  Keep in mind that terminal handling between OSS and GUARDIAN is never be clean. 

       2. GTACL and SSH both use the PWD variable, So we could have a conflict.

          This issue would happen when you have remote situation. To run a GUARDIAN from OSS, where Jenkins lives, you need to use GTACL which uses PWD environment variable to decide where to start.  In a remote situation, create a TACL macro wrapper where we pass in the desired volume and subvolume.

Nonstop I Platform - An Update.

I am NOT sure , howmany of Tandem professionals know already,

• Nonstop I platform which is built on itanium technology from intel will reach end of sale in October 2019(for NS2300/2400)
• NB560000c/cg will reach end of salt by July 31^st 2020.

And it will move to 5 years live support. So expect these systems be around until 2025.

HP Nonstop - In Cloud

Cloud design and implementation service

 

Setting up a cloud environment only for deploying Virtualized NonStop (vNS) systems is justified if scale permits i.e. you are building the infrastructure to host several vNS systems in the cloud or if you have a longer term vision to bring in more workloads currently running on other platforms (e.g. Linux, Windows) over to vNS in your private cloud. 

If you do not already have a cloud environment, you need to start from ground zero!! Setting up the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using OpenStack private cloud is no easy task and requires you to invest time and resources to design and implement it.

 

Designing, implementing and managing a private cloud is a specialized IT practice. You will seldom be able to do it reading through the cookbooks or web literature or user manuals or any such “do it yourself” approaches. If you want to design your datacenter using the cloud paradigm, you are better off in some expert hands.

 

Relationship between HPE and redhat

 

Leveraging the long term partnership between HPE and Red Hat, the NonStop Enterprise Division (NED) and Red Hat offers you the cloud design and implementation service using HPE gears.

 

Red Hat is a market leader who popularized the adoption of open source technologies, particularly Linux, in the modern Enterprises. They distribute OpenStack under the product name Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) which NonStop supports as one of the deployment environments.

 

RHOSP brings in the required pieces to the OpenStack software to enable smooth cloud deployment and brings in high availability and manageability features that are so essential for enterprise grade cloud Deployment.

 

So, if you are thinking where to start, you should probably consider HPE and RedHat to help you do your cloud.

 

Support for VMware environment

 

Virtualization is a mature market today and, according to Gartner, many

enterprises have virtualized >75% of their  x86 workload (Source: https://www.gartner. com/newsroom/id/3315817).

 

VMware is the dominant player in this market and deserves credit for much of this wide adoption of virtualization in today’s enterprises. It has a robust virtualization offering under the vSphere suite and a strong cloud manageability portfolio under the vRealize suite.

 

Many NonStop customers trust VMware for their mission-critical IT needs.

Support for VMware is the next logical step in enabling vNS’ wider reach into the Enterprise IT. In the upcoming release, vNS will support deployment in a VMware based virtualization environment.

 

While VMware has a robust portfolio of products for the cloud market, a large portion of the installed base use vSphere mainly for server virtualization and management requirements.

 

For deploying vNS, you would only require

• the ESXi hypervisor,
• the vCenter management appliance and
• the vRealize orchestrator which are fairly standard products in a VMware environment.

In other words deploying vNS in your VMware environment should be no different compared to how you deploy other Virtual Machines (VMs).

You would of course require specific Network Interface Cards (NICs) in your compute nodes to leverage some of the unique features that only NonStop offers and no one else. The icing on the cake of course is that it’s the same NonStop L-Series software!!

 

So, the same program built for the L-Series platform can now also be deployed on VMware.

NonStop Dynamic Capacity (NSDC)

With cloud comes the flexibility. While vNS offers you the flexibility to deploy your workload in an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) built using your choice of hardware and software components, the upcoming release goes one step further.

 

NonStop Dynamic Capacity (NSDC) is a new offering, for the very first time on NonStop, and offered only on HPE Virtualized NonStop!! NSDC would provide you the flexibility to scale your system to meet transient demand spikes. For example, if your workload demand grows up during a festival season or your DR system needs to be activated until your production system can be brought back online, you no longer have to configure the system to manage the peak load. You only need to configure it for the normal traffic with a reasonable estimate of demand growth.

 

When the system needs to step up temporarily to handle a demand spike, you can fire up additional cores of your NonStop CPUs so that they are able to handle the spike. You can now imagine the savings this could accrue to the total cost of running your Mission-Critical workload on Virtualized NonStop!!

What is Jenkins?

Jenkins is actually a very simple job monitor, very much like NETBATCH in Tandem.(What else Tandem professional can say J ). There, You create jobs that run either on

• a Calendar,
• an Interval
• OR Triggered by an external event.

What makes Jenkins is really useful, is the large set of plugins that have been written by Jenkins community.

PLUGINS

• There are plugins that monitor GIT – so that when someone pushes code to GITHUB enterprise or Bitbucket server, a Jenkins job will automatically gets started.
• There are SSH Plugins that allow you to run commands or even other parts of jobs on other systems.
• There are packaging plugins, email plugins that send results to a team.
• Hipchat plugins that can send a message to your phone when is job fails.

Jobs are run by executors like in NETBATCH.

How to setup?

• Download the Jenkins WAR file
• Run in using JAVA.

Don’t run Jenkins in user SUPER.SUPER.

Simple way of running:

Nohup Java $(JAVA_ARGS) \

-Djavax.net ssl.trustStore=$(JAVA_HOME)/jre/lib/security/cacerts \

-cp ./Jenkins.war main \

2>&1>> Jenkins.log &

Nohup is there, to make sure Jenkins does NOT step when your terminal session ends.

Note : Your Java Arguments may vary. Don’t just copy & Paste the above one.

Jenkins can run on multi platform systems too.

Jenkins in Nonstop

Only run one copy listening on a particular port...MAXSERVERS 1 if using NSJSP

       –multiple standalone “slave” copies can run on different ports CPUs/IPUs

        –they must be configured to use different work directories

–Expected startup exception: No suitable implementation found for Free Swap Space monitor – not an issue

–Give Jenkins plenty of heap space -Xms512m -Xmx512m

–Some plugin installations require a restart of Jenkins, stop and restart the process

–Turn on the “auto refresh” for the job status page (“ENABLE AUTO REFRESH” upper right hand corner of the job status page)

–Develop serverclass in NSDEE

–Use Source Control tool like git

–Jenkins monitors git repository

     – Can work from sources and check build

     – Can work with delivered binaries

–On successful modification deploy into a TS/MP domain

How to find out CPP File in a Archive file - In a unix environment

In a HP Nonstop Unix or Z USS environment,  If we need to find out CPP File in a Archive file.


Here's the command.

java -cp $SHARED/java jwhat ifbnet.a | grep bnet.cpp

bnet.cpp,379.4.6.1.3.1.3:c++:1

Future Trends and Relevance of the Nonstop - Part 2

HP Nonstop Bootcamp there were talks on Blockchain/DistributedLedger

Technology and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and NonStop. See in the below figure.

Of course the big news was the virtualization of NonStop and the capability of running on almost

any x86 device. NonStop has demonstrated an ability to quickly understand and add value to

industry trends and directions.

Mobile payments, after much hype in previous years saw some uptake in 2016. For example

Apple announced that 1 million Apple Pay users were being added per week. Most of the top retailers rolled out payment capabilities to their mobile apps (CVS, Kohl’s, Walmart, etc.).

As mobile payment options multiply application developers will be interested in creating a simple and unified experiencec for mobile payments

An App That Allows owners of newer Andorid and Iphone to make in store payments.

What can’t be sacrificed is speed, security and accuracy in the transaction. A fast growing frontend mobile payment market will require a solid, reliable backend infrastructure. So NonStop will continue to play a key role in the financial infrastructure while supported new payment methods. As always, behind the scenes. As always, indispensable. See that below figure.

Future Trends and Relevance of the Nonstop - Part 1

2017 and beyond promise a lot of change. This continues from the accelerated pace of change

we’ve been experiencing for quite some time. NonStop strives to find areas in which to contribute as

we march into the ever-changing future.

A brief retrospective of NonStop and change. Those that follow NonStop know that early

capabilities were demonstrated in cloud computing back in 2011 and 2012. See the below figure.

GuardianAngel later released as MaRunga demonstrated NonStop’s ability to both support cloud

burst – now known as hybrid cloud computing and an ability to provide some NonStop attributes

off platform.

By off platform we mean a NonStop capability to watch over and respond to events

occurring on Linux systems or even, as demonstrated, applications running in the Amazon

public cloud.

In Big Data, NonStop was presented in the exciting area of real-time data-in-motion processing

as we teamed up with STRIIM and Network Kinetix to demonstrate real-time analytics on data in

flight. This directed NonStop into the Internet of Things and what will become a massive data-inmotion avalanche of information. See the below figure.

Of course the best place to observe, analyze and react to this information is at the edge, where

the data is created. In 2015 NonStop demonstrated direct connectivity to sensors and an ability

to collect this information using open-source middleware (Mosca and Redis) and an ability to

communicate back to the sensors thanks to our node.js (Bombora) capabilities.