Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

When the Asian Art Museum decided to move its digs to a new location in San Francisco, IT director Jim Horio wasn't thrilled about reassembling the hodgepodge of older Intel servers that had been running the museum's core applications. Each application required its own server, preventing a move to one of the large Intel-based symmetric multi-processor machines. Then Horio, a System/32 guy from way back, ran the numbers from an iSeries point of view and found them quite pleasing.

The Asian Art Museum is one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian art. The organization, which is actually an agency of the city of San Francisco, maintains 15,000 pieces of art--worth an estimated $4 billion--spanning 6,000 years of history.

Last year, when the museum moved from Golden Gate Park to an old library overlooking Civic Center Plaza, Horio and the museum's administrators decided it would be a good idea to update its IT infrastructure. The museum had been using a mix of five-to-six-year-old Dell servers running various iterations of Microsoft Windows that required more than their fair share of babysitting. The museum was also looking to upgrade its phone system to a new IP-based phone network using Cisco products, and it had other Web projects in the works, as well.

"We were looking to ramp up a whole lot of software," Horio says. "But museums are kind of weird. There are no midrange software packages [built exclusively for museums], which is what I wanted. So we had to stick with a lot of PC software."

With the platform decision already taken care of, Horio gave consideration to which Wintel server would best suit the museum's needs. His biggest concern was ensuring a suitable environment for the variety of Windows applications the museum was already running. These included VISTA, a ticketing application developed by the TM VISTA subsidiary of Ticketmaster; Retail Technologies' Retail Pro point-of-sale system; Blackbaud's Razor's Edge accounting, fundraising, and membership management application for nonprofit organizations; the ARGUS asset management system, developed by Questor Systems; and an accounting package for nonprofits developed by MIP, a subsidiary of Best Software; as well as Windows-based Web, fax, Citrix, and IBM Lotus Domino servers.

Each of the applications required its own physical server because of the different database management systems they were using. Some of the applications used Sybase, some used Microsoft SQL Server, and one had an SQL Server database embedded in it, or Domino. To make matters worse, the applications were all based on different, incompatible versions of the databases. By giving each application its own server, the museum would be saddling itself with at least eight different Wintel boxes.

Then Horio took a look at the proposed environment from an iSeries perspective. If he installed each application in its own Integrated xSeries Server, he wouldn't run into database conflicts, and would gain the manageability benefits of a much larger single-system image. The superior manageability materializes in several respects, including better utilization of disk space, better scheduling of jobs and backups, and better reporting capabilities.

In October 2002, the Asian Art Museum switched over to its new iSeries environment. The new iSeries servers and IXS hardware was purchased from Key Information Systems, a Woodland Hills, California, company that also assisted Horio in the integration. The organization has one iSeries Model 270 running Lotus Domino and serving e-mail. A second iSeries, a uniprocessor Model 820, is equipped with two Integrated xSeries Server cards and is connected to three additional side towers, each of which houses two more IXS cards, for a total of 8 IXS cards (in effect, 8 different Windows servers). The museum is also running one four-way xSeries server, for Citrix, that is attached to the iSeries via an Integrated xSeries Adapter card, and four additional separate xSeries servers for the new IP phone system, its Web filtering tool, and fax applications. It also installed a new IBM SurePOS 500 point-of-sale system.

The museum bought during IBM's GreenStreak deal last year, which saved it a bundle, and Horio didn't run into any resistance to the change from management. According to Horio, the museum has already recouped its costs, based on "soft dollar" costs related primarily to the iSeries' better utilization of disk space, its better scheduling of jobs and backups, and its better reporting capabilities, compared to the old Dell system.

Horio says it became a hassle to keep up with the disk needs of the eight or so Wintel servers the museum used before the move, especially with the four-way Intel server used to run the Citrix emulation software. "I had a lot of problems running out of disk space, going out and buying another cage. It became a hassle," he says, adding that he was replacing disk drives once or twice a month.

Some of the museum's applications required only 8 MB of disk space, while others required much more. "When you look at the system using individual servers, they have underutilized disk space," Horio says. "That's why the iSeries made more sense. I was able to partition disk space according to how much disk each application needed."

Horio would gain the same type of benefit by using the Integrated xSeries Server cards as blade servers within an iSeries chassis as he would from using the iSeries disk. If one of the Intel IXS cards suddenly died, it was a simple matter to unplug the broken one and put a new one in its place.

Before moving to the iSeries-Windows environments, it used to take Horio and his part-time administrator about 12 hours to perform 17 separate backups to ensure the recovery of the Windows application from an 8mm tape drive, he says. After writing a simple CL routine for the OS/400 job scheduler, the backups take only an hour to an hour-and-a-half. The organization also saved money by purchasing an LTO tape drive, for about $1,500. Another 8mm tape drive would have cost about $7,000, he says.

The overall manageability of the system is also improved now that OS/400 is watching over it, according to Horio. All error messages have been centralized, which means that Horio is notified more quickly of any problems, and it's easier to track down the problem after the fact. "The utilities on the AS/400 are better," Horio says.

Horio is now using his skills as an RPG programmer to get the most out of the museum's data. By moving data from the Windows applications into the DB2/400 database, Horio is able to write queries using Query/400 to generate reports and find trends in the data.

The museum has a loyalty program that allows members to gain extra benefits. Part of that loyalty program involves cards that track the activities of those members through the museum, such as purchases made in the museum's gift store. Using Query/400, Horio is now better able to identify those members that would be prime candidates to receive additional benefits. He's also generating green bar reports, which can be converted into graphical reports or imported into Microsoft Excel for the museum's managers to work with.

While the Asian Art Museum isn't running native OS/400 applications, that will soon change. Horio is working on a Java application that will allow people to receive information about the museum through e-mail and over the Web. Horio is also in the early stages of outlining a new Web-based archive of museum images that will be served from the iSeries. The museum is currently in the middle of a project to digitize its collection, using an Apple Macintosh workstation.

Overall, Horio is quite happy to let the iSeries handle many of the tasks that used to occupy his time and that of his colleague. "Before, we always had problems. We always had to restart a server," he says. "Now we come in in the morning and make sure the applications are still running. We don't even look at it unless something goes down. It just runs."