Secure Systems
System Availability
ClearPath MCP servers provide industry-leading system availability – a result of our mainframe heritage. Our customers report that they haven’t had to reboot their MCP servers for months.
Dynamic Partitioning
ClearPath MCP servers feature a dynamic partitioning capability that allows you to reconfigure physical components in real time. This gives you unprecedented physical flexibility in the areas of workload balancing, planned downtime and software upgrades.
Reserve Capacity
This feature offers high-availability reserve capacity in both processors and processing modules.
Policy-based Resource Management Infrastructure
Clear Path MCP servers include a policy-based resource management infrastructure containing:
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Reserve processors
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Reserve IO
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Reserve networking
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Reserve memory capacity
While our Capacity on Demand options and temporary processing capacity have been available on ClearPath MCP servers for years, the Ready IO, Ready Networking and Ready Memory are new. When encountering additional demands, you can easily enable reserve IO, networking and memory capacity by purchasing licensing keys.
Minimized Downtime
ClearPath MCP servers use dual power domains and the redundancy of critical server hardware components to provide industry-leading server availability. ClearPath mainframes have very effective safeguards that greatly minimize unexpected system and database downtime:
A system or its data can also be unavailable due to planned downtime, a necessary outage for system and database maintenance and upgrades. We also provide you solutions that minimize the need for this kind of downtime.
Data Mirroring
The MCP mirrored disk capability enables you to prevent any loss of data and difficult system restoration efforts in the event of a disk crash. If your system has a large peripheral complement that must maintain the highest reliability, we recommend that you mirror all your system-critical disk units, with each mirror served by multiple online paths.
When all of your system-critical disk units are mirrored, your MCP server becomes fault tolerant and will keep running should a problem occur in the IO subsystem.
Even the failure of non-critical disk units can be devastating if these units contain business-critical or important data. To prevent data loss, consider mirroring all of your disks containing important files.
Preventing Denial of Service
At the perimeter of your network, routers and firewalls should be guarding your ClearPath host against external denial-of-service attacks. And user authentication solutions on your ClearPath system should be preventing any unauthorized users from gaining access to your corporate network and systems.
Did you know that, according to industry surveys, more than half of all attacks originate from inside firewalls? So, what can you do about authorized users who usurp – intentionally or unintentionally – so much of your computing resource that other users’ computing needs are unmet? Read on...
MCP Denial-of-Service Features
We’ve implemented these features to reduce MCP vulnerability to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in the latest MCP release:
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Broadcast Storm Filtering
The MCP broadcast filtering feature enables any network broadcast storms to be detected and filtered on your MCP-attached networking devices. Settable thresholds allow each customer to tune the feature to the normal level of traffic of each environment.
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Dynamic Port Filtering
The dynamic port filtering feature enables the TCP/IP Networking software to only allow expected traffic to reach the ClearPath MCP environment. This feature allows applications to start up and begin accepting data from the network, while filtering out all traffic to TCP or UDP ports which are not active. This also mitigates the performance effect of port scans on an MCP networking environment.
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TCP IP Rules Wizard
The TCP/IP firewall (part of the TCP/IP Networking software) has a wizard interface that lets you create TCP/IP rules to allow or deny network traffic entering and leaving the ClearPath environment. This provides firewall protection at the server level to augment your perimeter firewall protections. All packets received by the firewall which are not allowed into the ClearPath MCP environment are logged for security auditing and remediation.
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