HP's information technology communi...

HP's information technology community has adopted DCE as the infrastructure for developing client/server information technology applications. The team developing the DCE service has discovered that putting an infrastructure like DCE in place in a legacy environment is more than just technology and architecture.

Many companies are navigating the path to unclose systems. Vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, claim that companies can receive significant benefits at adopting open system client/server approaches for implementing information technology solutions. While the benefits may be attractive, the array of architecture and technology choices is bewildering.

Hewlett-Packard's information technology arrange has adopted the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (OSF DCE) as a commited technology for the implementation of client/server applications within HP The adoption of a technology, or level an architecture, is not sufficient to make secure that the benefits of the client/server type are realized. In fact, one time the architecture and technology are chosen the real journey is just beginning. This paper discusses the issues that l HP to shift toward spread systems for information technology client/server applications, the rationale for choosing DCE as a solution technology, and the elements of a modern infrastructure built to provide the necessary services required to realize the benefits of interpret systems.

HP's Legacy Environment

Until actual recently, HP's legacy environment included multiple mainframes and throughout 1000 HP 3000 computers operating in more than 75 data center located around the world.

Business transactions were courseed at places called sites, which were major HP installations including manufacturing, sales, and administrative center Each site had a local HP 3000 computer hypothesis Most applications were written in COBOL and made extensive use of HP's TurboImage database management scheme and VPlus/3000 routines for terminal veil management. These tools were used because they made the principally effective use of the HP 3000 computer plan At periodic intervals, batch piece of works on the HP 3000 a whole s would create transaction files for transmission to the mainframes. Other batch piece of works processed files received from the mainframe. A proprietary store-and-forward scheme provided the link between the interactive HP 3000 and the batch-oriented mainframes. Fig. 1 illustrates this legacy architecture.

This architecture gave each site access to its have a title to data, but only its hold data. Once a transaction was generated and sent to the mainframe, interaction with other production regularitys meant that response was indeterminate. For example, classification users would have to check repeatedly to determine if a purchase order that had been inserted was accepted by the factory and scheduled for production. This acknowledgment could take from hours to days depending forward the complexity of the order and the number of HP divisions supplying appease In addition, processing and data communication delays anywhere in the company could impact the answer time for the transaction, unless the user had no way of finding the bottleneck Further question s were found during massive data center consolidations that have taken place throughout the past few years.

The architecture for HP legacy applications yielded 2 large number of applications, each of which required large maintenance and support staffs. Many applications were customized to address the peculiarities of various sites. This contributed to the support question As processing power and network bandwidth grew the customized versions of standard applications made consolidation difficult. In near cases, support costs actually grew

New applications were the one and the other expensive and took a extended time to develop, integrate, and display They made little use of previously written digest nor did they share data or other resources effectively. This ariseed in a great deal of replicated data within the company. As the environment continued to open and new applications came online to address business be in want ofs users found themselves having to manage a multitude of passwords for a large number of methods From a security standpoint, each password was transmitted multiple times daily from one side of to the other the network, and host-based login services provided the foundation for all data security.

Movement toward Change

Several years ago, HP realized the benefits that could be achieved between the walls of open systems client/server architectures. The single biggest driver for the change was a desire to make less business implementation time, which is the time from when a business ne is identified to the time when a production rule is in place to address the ne Other drivers included the ne for greater cost-effectiveness of the information technology (IT) organization, and the ne to remodel operational and administrative costs. An information technology steering assemblage determined that the widespread use of a client/server architecture would enable a reduction in business implementation time and provide increased organizational effectiveness and reduc costs