Infrasoft looking to 2020 to build on success of 2019 – new products and new partnerships!

While the NonStop community is now very much aware that NonStop is where data is created it’s also fully aware that the data created on NonStop has to be moved to somewhere else. With the need to satisfy regulatory agencies’ demands for reports or with the need to accommodate business analytics processes located elsewhere, communications is every bit a necessity and optimizing the path that data traverses mandates a continuing investment in networking software. Infrasoft Pty Limited is in the business of providing networking solutions and in 2019 we saw an uptick in user interest in the full Infrasoft’s networking product suite.

Of course, the big news had to be the partnership forged with the HPE NonStop team. In collaboration with our sales partner, comforte, Infrasoft has seen two of its uLinga products added to the HPE NonStop’s price book. uLinga for EE is now the sole solution for those NonStop users who relied on the SNAX product on the H / J-Series operating system releases  and who are now migrating to the L-Series operating system and, as such, it’s now the official NonStop networking product supporting SNA APIs and services. Likewise, uLinga for X25 is the sole solution for X.25 APIs and services on L-Series. With uLinga replacing legacy SNAX and X25AM products, uLinga relieves the NonStop team from any further investments in bringing these legacy products across to L-Series and with it, support for the new NonStop X and virtualized NonStop (vNS) systems.

It was early in the year when Infrasoft Managing Director, Peter Shell, made reference to this new partnership with HPE NonStop team. “Infrasoft and comforte have forged an incredible partnership together over the years, with Infrasoft focusing on development and support and comforte providing the sales and marketing,” said Shell. “The unique advantage that comes with uLinga is that the Infrasoft development team is well equipped to accommodate almost any enterprise-specific implementation of SNA applications that you could possibly describe.” Yes, they have seen it all through the years. “There is likely to be still configurations out there that might surprise us,” added Shell “but they are deployed in support of SNA applications and that’s not going to faze us.”

The uLinga products run on NSK, OSS, Linux, and Windows and have done so since they were first introduced. The Linux version of uLinga is in production today at a major southern hemisphere bank. “Support for open platforms made a good business case and we designed the product to support multiple platforms from the beginning,” said Shell. “We have observed that NonStop vendors like NTI with DRNet®/Open and DataExpress (now part of Data443) with DataExpress Open Platform (DXOP) have made similar moves to ourselves, adding primarily support of Linux to platforms they support. From those early days we knew that we just had to position ourselves to better provide uLinga customers with further options to consider when it came time to replace SNAX or X25AM.”

Looking further afield to what we see coming in 2020 with hybrid IT, consideration may be given to deploying uLinga on Linux in its own virtual machine and in so doing, support multiple instances of vNS. While we have not had any specific requests to do so, we are being very watchful of our uLinga users to see how best they leverage NonStop in the future considering vNS is just a collection of VMs. “Should configurations like this be of interest to members of the NonStop community we certainly would like to hear from them to better understand their specific requirements,” said Shell. There are instances where our customers do want to spread the load and having the option to run uLinga on adjacent Linux systems will appeal to some NonStop users as the NonStop community has already benefited from the presence of “outboard CLIMs” in support of communication.

At NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2019 held in Burlingame, California, the presentation on HTTP/2 given by David Finnie, VP of Infrasoft R&D, was of interest to many of the attendees. HTTP/2 represents a major revision of the HTTP network protocols. For instance, with multiplexing (streams) support HTTP/2 allows for simultaneous requests to be processed over a single connection. Therefore, only one HTTP/2 connection is required between client and server. This saves a lot of CPU and memory on both sides, but that’s mostly important for the server-side, because it has to be able to handle lots of clients.

“As a number of enterprises we support are seeing the value from running multiple uLinga processes and they do so to spread the load as well as creating a more fault tolerant environment; should an instance of uLinga encounter unexpected events it will not result in a total outage,” said Finnie. “With the current release of uLinga, each of these uLinga processes listens on a particular IP address and port and they all need to be different even if running on the same system. But now, with the availability of HTTP/2, we can deploy an intermediate process whereby uLinga operators interact with all the uLinga processes by “listening on a single IP address / port combination.”

As we look back at previous years and the many user events we attended we took advantage of our time with customers and prospects to develop new product features based on their requests – a process that continues to this day. In 2019 it was also a time to work with our partners and to build on newly formed relationships – our partnership with the NonStop team being very important for the company. When it comes to 2020 we are anticipating many more Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to be undertaken as the NonStop team encounters more NonStop users wanting to migrate to NonStop X and vNonStop.

In the meantime, should you like more information about Infrasoft products, particularly our uLinga replacements for SNAX and X25AM on NonStop X or vNonStop, please reach out to your NonStop salesman – they will be only too willing to help answer any questions about uLinga that you may have.

And of course, you can always contact us here at Infrasoft at any time.

Peter Shell | Managing Director | Infrasoft Pty Limited
peter.shell@infrasoft.com.au | tel +61 411 105 330
www.infrasoft.com.au