Clouds to strip dongle from Charon servers
February 25, 2015
A physical dongle has been required up to now, but the new Stromasys Charon-HPA licenses for MPE will be designed to use software-only verification. Applications will still be matched against HPSUSAN to prevent any kind of fraud.
“We are moving toward a software license,” said Alexandre Cruz, Stromasys Sales Engineer. “This will prevent any licensing problems that might occur while using a cloud provider. We will create a machine for licensing purposes which has exactly the same structure as a USB dongle. We still require the HPSUSAN and the HPCPUNAME.”
“We finished the testing and we’ve already discussed it for a couple of customers. I have deployed it myself for testing. These customers have not started to use virtualization for their HP 3000s, but we are proposing that they use the cloud instead of a physical server.”
“Our next installations will tend to be dongle-free,” he said. “In the future, when there are renewals, we are planning to replace the USB dongle with a software-based license. When we go to renewal, the customers can get rid of the dongle easily.”
Subscriptions are being sold for Charon HPA on a yearly basis, in either single-year or three-year periods. Licenses would be paid in advance with renewals every year. “This means that every 12 months they have the possibility to stop everything without losing what they have invested in the hardware,” Cruz said.
“We are trying to make it easier and more flexible. We are encouraging our customers to use their own cloud provider. If they do not have a preferred cloud partner, then we can recommend one for their system. We don’t have a current contract established with any specific providers.”
The company has used Rackspace for demonstration and testing purposes. “Rackspace has the flexibility to provide us with the systems we want. The other cloud providers are a little bit closed on their offers,” Cruz said. “They have standard machines, say four cores, 16GB of RAM, 400 GB of disk. For some customers, this might be a little bit on the low side. With Rackspace we have the ability to tell them that ‘we need a system with the following specifications.’
"We did research on several providers, and the relationship of costs and benefits led us toward Rackspace."
Virtualizing an N-Class on high end, for example, “would not even fall into the high end of the systems from many cloud providers. Their normal systems that are provided are quite slow. Most of the time, the big cloud players tend to be a little anemic in their offerings.”
Stromasys also talked to Rackspace about security. “Besides their intense monitoring for intrusion detection, we tested how we could connect to their systems in a more secure way,” Cruz said. “We used a mixture of SSH on the Linux connection side, instead of a normal telnet, and from that point onward it will be forwarded to a specific port to the 3000 system itself. We treat this like a connection to the emulator itself, instead of a normal telnet session.”
If the demand for this cloud product grows, Cruz said that his company “will have the cloud provider implement other forms of security — via some kind of access token that can provide us an extra layer of protection.”