Survival of the Fittest: Modernize your NonStop applications today

comForte Webinar "Application
Modernization"

This deck of slides was used as the basis for a Webinar which comForte presented in May
2011

This PDF document serves as the “offline” version of the Webinar – but it is still HIGHLY
recommended to listen to the actual Webinar which is available on YouTube:

comForte general YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/comforte21

On YouTube, this Webinar split in two parts:
• Part 1/2: http://youtu.be/nJtUxr6DNtE
• Part 2/2: http://youtu.be/ERcu48M6nG4

1

comForte Webinar "Application 4-Jul-11
Modernization"

As of June 2011, comForte is far and foremost the worlds largest ISV in the HP NonStop
space which focuses on platform modernization in the key areas of security, connectivity,
networking and emulation. comForte 21 GmbH is a privately hold organization with
subsidiaries across the globe as shown here. It has roughly 60 employess and has a strong
business relationship with the HP NonStop Enterprise Division (NED): several comForte
products are OEM’d by HP.

For more information on comForte, please see http://www.comforte.com

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Modernization"

In this section, we look at how many people (wrongly!) perceive NonStop systems as
“legacy” and “costly”.

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Modernization"

Side note on cars: On the left there is a Porsche 356, predecessor of 911, produced 1948 –
1965. And yes, Porsche is NonStop customer !

The headline of this slide is (unfortunately) the view shared by many CIOs and IT leaders.
These systems have been around 35+ years after all – so OLD indeed they are. And aren’t
these systems kind of like mainframes (so sure enough they are EXPENSIVE) ? [both true for
the car shown here by the way] . And don’t I see my people using special emulators getting
to the systems (INFLEXIBLE?) ?

The reality is more complex and is discussed controversially using themes such as Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) discussion, the platform being “open” or “standard”. Let’s try to
stay with the facts here:
-yes, the systems have been around for a long time
-So have been some applications running on it
-Some applications have not seen changes in the last 10 years
-the Gartner’s of the world don’t like them (if nothing else, because they don’t run on X86
hardware)

While the speaker personally does not find the systems either expensive or inflexible, he
has heard that statement from customers over and over again. So it seems like that – if
nothing else – some CIOs will find this statement accurate.

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Modernization"

From the perception “inflexible & costly” it is a small step to want to bring cost down or
migrate off the platform. In the car analogy, that might translate into:
-Keeping the Porsche, but don’t maintain it fully
-Sell the Porsche, buy Golf

This matches what comForte hears when talking to some of their NonStop customers:
- “The platform is no longer strategic”
-“Our CIO wants to go into the cloud direction”
-“No new applications are put on the platform”

At the end of the day, it seems like the two options considered most often are indeed
“migrate off” or “get rid of it totally”

5

Modernization"

What happens if you under-maintain a Porsche: worst-case it looks like this Porsche 356 in
Berkeley, CA..

The money spent on actual modernization of a typical NonStop system beyond the cyclical
hardware upgrade is – in comForte’s estimate – rather low. That actually does imply risk for
the applications running on your NonStop. If these applications would not be VITAL for your
organization, they would not be running on the platform in the first place – so let’s look at
some risk scenarios:
-Scenario I: Financial institution driving their ATMs. System goes down. ATM outage. In the
paper the next day
-Scenario II: Payment solutions provider aquiring POS transactions. System is “hacked”. All
credit card data of the current day (month) is lost to the hackers. Very bad press. Stock
price will go down.
-Scenario III: Hospital using NonStop for medical records. NonStop is hacked, medical data
is posted online.

So from a simple risk perspective, the NonStop seems well worth investing in. Note that
while scenario #1 is well covered (this is what NonStop is all about), scenarios #2 and #3
are typically not. Why is the NonStop often overlooked ?

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stormbear/2824269720/

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Modernization"

Obviously, you want to start with an assessment on where you are (left side, hopefully
neither picture being close to your status). Then you need to decide where you want to be
on the right side. Talking with many customers, we find it interesting, that there seems to
be no “best practice” as to “how modern” NonStop systems are at the typical large IT
operation. You will find all kind of “cars” …

Where you want to be is obviously on the lower right … however your budget is limited –
both in terms of human resources and capital investment.

The car analogy is maybe not the perfect fit here, but you certainly don’t want to run your
critical applications on IT systems which match some cars on the left side of the slide. A
modern car (whether a Porsche, Ferrari or Golf) will cost you less money and better
integrate with your other IT systems.

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Modernization"

Why would you want to work with comForte:
-We have changed many tires / modernized many NonStop applications
-We are the only vendor in the NonStop world which offers a whole breadth of products in
areas of modernization such as Terminal access, SOAP-enabling, security standardization

In the rest of this presentation, we’ll show some specific examples

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Modernization"

Here we (briefly) look at the foundations of Pathway and how modern it was decades ago.
This is the reason why many of the old applications can be modernized relatively easy.

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Modernization"

This picture shows how you do *not* want to modernize your NonStop systems – changing
an engine while driving is not a good idea…

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Modernization"

This diagram is from a HP NonStop manual on “Pathway”, the transaction monitor for
NonStop systems. It looks somewhat old because it actually *is* old – Pathway was created
about 20 years ago. The terminology used here (PATHCOM, TERM, Terminal, PATHMON
etc.) certainly looks outdated.

But let’s look behind what Pathway is actually doing – the colors in the diagram show an
abstraction layer for:
-database (blue),
-server code (“app logic”, green)
-client code (“presentation layer”, orange)

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Modernization"

This diagram is how a modern Software stack for Java development might look like. All
acronyms are modern and up-to-date (at least today…). However, looking at the abstraction
layer we see the same three layers (Presentation, Business logic, Database). This proves
that Pathway was a very modern (brilliant!) concept when it was invented.

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Modernization"

The similarity between Pathway and modern development paradigms such as J2EE are very
important: Because NonStop applications were designed based on still-up-to-date design
“patterns” 20 years ago, they can easily be modernized with very low risk and at moderate
cost

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Modernization"

In this section, we look at some reasons for modernizing – saving money being among
them.

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Modernization"

Side note: for many customers, NonStop system *are* their cash cows as they process the
very transactions which generate the core revenue (credit card transactions, ATM
transactions, stock transactions, connecting mobile phones to the network).

The point here is different, namely that Modernization can pay for itself .We will look at
some real-life scenarios in which actual comForte customers are saving money through
having modernized their NonStop applications.

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Modernization"

Here is an example for a return on investment (ROI) calculation for an actual project
comForte did for a large Dutch customer. The “ROI calculator” shown here has been put on
the Internet by a provider of Single-Sign-On solutions, NetIQ.

The math done here calculates potential savings through implementing an SSO solution
based on some numbers:

• International Data Group reports that an average user in a 10,000-employee company has
14 separate passwords.
• One password reset costs $10 - $30
• Calculator from http://www.netiq.com/products/spa/roicalc.asp
• Assumptions from comForte
• Total cost =
(#incidents) x (time help desk) x (wage help desk) + (#incidents) x (time end user) x (wage
end user)
=120000 x 5 + 120000 x 7.5 = 600000 + 900000 = 1.500.00

The car falling in the water was in fact used as a model by the project manager: when
facing internal resistance to put the finished project live (“we are too busy”) he threatened
to put a crane on the parking lot and drop a brand new BMW every month as this was the
money they were loosing by not putting the project live.

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Modernization"

Here is another look at cost savings through modernization: in the “before” scenario, costs
occur through:
-Maintaining of the SNA network
-The very high license cost for SNA connectivity software on NonStop

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Modernization"

Post-modernization, the user is using the comForte product uLinga, replacing SNA network
with “full IP”. There were no application changes required to reap these savings.

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Modernization"

The diagram shows that in many organizations, NonStop systems have not followed trends in
security and application design which evolved over the past 20 years. The reason for that is
probably that “the system works”; but also the system often is simply overlooked by the
organization.
In Information Security, it is rather hard to calculate an actual ROI. The author of these slides think,
that ROI is the wrong approach to security: are you calculationg the ROI of the fire alarms, sprinkler
systems, emergency stairwells in your office buildings ?
The computer security industry is gravitating towards “best practices” which are imposed through
regulation and that is a healthy trend. It comes down to “risk management” rather than “ROI
calculation”.
Many NonStop systems lack some very basic security controls such as:
-Firewalls
-Integration in User provisioning, Strong Authentication, Single-Sign-On
-Network IDS
-Modern GUI tools for operators & developers
-Modern GUI for applications
-Integration in user provisioning, single-sign-on
As the information on the platform is very confidential/important this results in massive risks. In the
payment industry, that risk can easily be calculated:
- The typical cost to replace a stolen credit card is $2-3 per credit card replacement
- Assuming you process 1000 TPS on your NonStop system, that translates into $2000/second or
roughly $170 Million/day
For application modernization, doing nothing also has implied costs such as:
-lack of platform acceptance for new employees (operators, developers)
-loss of end user productivity

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Modernization"

In this section, we will look at three real-life examples of modernization using comForte
products and services

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Modernization"

NonStop systems are complex by nature. Application –and their supporting infrastructure-
have grown over years, so “where to start” modernizing is not always an easy question.
Also, there is never a clear boundary between “the application” and its “foundation
technologies” such as how to get to the application (TELSERV anyone?), how users are
authenticated etc.

comForte is uniquely positioned within the NonStop ISV space as only comForte has the
breadth of modernization products and experience ranging across security, networking,
emulation access and application design.

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Modernization"

Here we look at a rather typical application scenario of a comForte customer prior to
working with us:
- Beyond the NonStop platform, there were corporate standards for how integrate
applications in the corporate SOA framework
- On the NonStop, BASE24 is running and while it is handling the transactional load nicely,
all management of users is done through terminal emulation

Beyond the IT issue of having a platform which does not follow corporate design standards,
from a business perspective there was the requirement to allow access to BASE24 for end
users through the Internet.

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Modernization"

This diagram shows the customer scenario after modernizing with comForte products:
BASE24 is now fully integrated into the corporate SOA ecosystems. From and end user
perspective, NonStop/BASE24 is just “another service” which can be used when authorized
properly.

Note that only minimal application changes for BASE24 where required, see next slide.

23

Modernization"

This “Geek Slide” shows the technical details for the chosen solution:
• Grey/orange: the corporate SOA ecosystem for “other systems”
• Light blue: BASE24 classic
• Bright orange: comForte product CSL enabling integration of BASE24 via a WS endpoint
implementing a BASE24 gateway.

• Please contact comForte, t.burg@comforte.com, for details of this implementation

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Modernization"

This example shows how Applied Industrial Technologies chose an evolutionary approach
to Application Modernization. From left to right, the application was modernized in two
steps.

___________________________________________________

Here is an excerpts from Connection article, written by AIT, available from comForte upon
request:

In our ongoing efforts to deliver top products and services, our operational infrastructure is
critical: It plays a central role in how responsive and effective our sales and support
organizations can be, as well as how efficient and profitable, our organization ultimately is.
Consequently, OMNEX® is integral to our success. OMNEX is a NonStop-based operational
system used for order entry, order processing, inventory management, and a host of other
business-critical processes.

In many ways, OMNEX is a typical NonStop application. Developed in COBOL over the
course of 15 years, this system has hundreds of screens, batch programs, and associated
Pathway servers. Accessed through traditional NonStop “green screens,” the system, while
extremely powerful, was highly complex to use. To do anything beyond the most basic tasks,
new users faced a very steep learning curve.

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Modernization"

The old application (leftmost figures) presented a classical text mode screen using a fixed
size and proportional fonts.

During the first step of the modernization, the comForte product JPath was used to do a
quick conversion to a more modern look and feel (see figures in the center). Access is no
via a browser; also the “proportional font block-mode screen” has been replaced by a more
modern, HTML-type view. This works without having to redraw any screens manually.

In the last step, the client-side code of the application was completely rewritten.

26

Modernization"

This diagram shows the final architecture:
• the old application code is still being used for these screens which were not used
enough to justify a rewrite (using JPath via 6530 terminal sessions)
• CSL is used to connect a middle tier implementing Web Services to the original Pathway
servers
• JDBC is used to make direct SQL calls from the middle tier to the SQL database
• SOAP requests are made from new client (called Asyst and implemented using Ecclipse)
to the middle tier

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Modernization"

We have looked at this customer early when we discussed the savings involved in many
users having to enter their password again when logging on to the NonStop system.

This is the “before” scenario where users first logon on to Windows using a smart card to
provide extra security. Then they log on to NonStop using username and password which is
both cumbersome and not very secure.

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Modernization"

The modernization project via comForte required only a couple of lines of code being
changed in the application; now authentication to logon leverages the existing logon to
Windows.

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Modernization"

The SecurSSO product combined with J6530 emulation here implements secure Single-
Sign-On. SecurSSO uses the Kerberos protocol to tightly integrate NonStop into Microsoft
Active Directory authentication.

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Modernization"

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Modernization"

Here are “50 reasons not to change” – found on the Internet at
http://13c4.wordpress.com/2007/02/24/50-reasons-not-to-change/

The red ones are probably really hard to get by (but it will depend where in the
organization you sit).

However, the green ones are simply not true: Modernization of NonStop applications is
possible and not complicated. It can and has been done and it is NOT a fad.

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Modernization"

The picture here is an image drawn during a workshop on NonStop security. It shows the
“organizational disconnect” of different players such as CIO, the CSO, Application Architect,
NonStop group, the IBM group etc. All players have different knowledge, viewpoints and a
different agenda. The end result very often that decisions regarding properly securing
NonStop systems do not yield the best end result.

A very similar situation occurs with “modernizing NonStop systems”: There is a culture
clash between the CIO (influenced by Gartner), Midrange management, NonStop
management (rightly mostly concerned with keeping the system and applications up), the
CFO and other players.

That all said, from the proper viewpoint, *not* modernizing NonStop systems does not
seem the best choice in most customer scenarios – as this Webinar tried to explain.

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Modernization"

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Modernization"

Let us summarize a bit …
-Cost cutting alone can be dangerous
-There are many options to modernize
-Many NonStop users are already modernizing
-Modernizing can in fact save money

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Modernization"

Let us try to summarize why we believe you should work with comForte in the area of
“Modernizing your NonStop applications”
-we do have a proven track record of successful projects. While we can not name many
customers publicly, we are happy to provide more details about any of the scenarios shown
here
-no other vendor in the NonStop space comes even remotely close do our breadth of
products and expertise
-unfortunately, the Gartners and Accentures of the world have very little understanding of
the NonStop platform

comForte CAN help in these areas

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Modernization"

Finally coming back to the opening evolutionary theme (and away from the car analogy)…

We are looking at the evolutionary graph of “cats” here with the sabre tooth cat living
about 25 million years ago. Today, the sabre tooth cat is extinct.

Where do you see YOUR NonStop system on this graph ? Will it become extinct ? Or a rare
instance in zoos such as the Tiger ?

Or a very smart, adaptable animal such as cat ?

But please DO remember: right now your NonStop *is* vital to your organization, so some
‘minimal application modernization’ is highly recommended…

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Modernization"

We hope this Webinar was interesting to you. This Webinar is available on YouTube, see
introductory slides.

comForte does welcome any feedback to this Webinar – please see www.comforte.com or
send an e-mail to the author of this Webinar, Thomas Burg, at t.burg@comforte.com

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Survival of the Fittest: Modernize your NonStop applications today

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