Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Menora Insurance, one of Israel's top five insurance carriers, knows firsthand about risk. Employees at the Tel Aviv company still remember Saddam Hussein's Scud missile strikes during the first Gulf War, and, more recently, the suicide bombings down the street from its data center have reminded them of the sacrifice of their nation's struggle. But when it came to the risk of losing data on its iSeries servers, Menora decided that was a risk it was no longer willing to take.

Menora Insurance was established in 1935 and offers life, auto, and health insurance from its center of operations, in downtown Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial center. Menora is a large company, with 700 employees, half a million customers in Israel, and revenues equivalent to about $400 million last year. The company uses several different computer platforms to manage its insurance products. General insurance policies are housed in a client/server system, and the company maintains some mainframe applications as well. OS/400 servers are used to manage the life insurance application, a packaged 5250 application originally developed in 1990 that the company has modified and now supports itself. The life insurance application runs on a four-way iSeries Model 830.

In June 2001, Menora's OS/400 server suffered an outage that knocked the computer offline for three working days, says Dani Zytner, Menora's director of operations. "After this, Menora decided to implement a high-availability solution for the production AS/400," he says.

Zytner led the search for the high-availability solution. In Israel, 96 percent of OS/400 high-availability implementations involve Vision Solutions software, Zytner says. That's because Vision is the only high-availability solution represented by IBM Israel, he says. Menora also examined the high-availability offerings of another player established in the market, DataMirror. However, Zytner says, he was not impressed with these solutions, so he decided to look elsewhere.

Taking chances is a trait of Zytner's. Under his watch, Menora's IT department has become known for taking calculated risks with its product choices. Zytner earned this reputation because Menora was the first OS/400 shop in Israel to implement several new technologies, including logical partitioning (LPAR), non-IBM external storage (its uses EMC disk arrays), and non-IBM printers (it uses Oce and Bull printers). Also, Menora implemented Aldon Computer Group's OS/400 change-management system, even though Aldon offers no local support in Israel.

Zytner's reputation for being a maverick in his product decisions led him to Maximum Availability, a young New Zealand high-availability software company that is somewhat of a maverick itself. Maximum Availability has been making inroads against its larger competitors by selling software that is arguably cheaper, easier to install, and more streamlined than its established competitors' offerings. While Maximum Availability's product, called *noMAX, doesn't offer the same breadth of functionality of its larger and older competitors, Maximum Availability officials say most customers, especially small and midsized shops, don't need extra capability as much as they need an affordable and easy-to-use product that replicates their data and objects to a backup machine.

Despite the fact that *noMAX was untried in Israel, Zytner considered the software a very good fit for his company's needs. He downloaded a trial version, played around with the software, and was impressed. In mid-2002, he sold Menora's board of directors on the product. The company bought a new two-way iSeries Model 820 for the company's Tel Aviv data center, and began the implementation.

Zytner says the installation went well, requiring only a few hours, without the need for any special support from Maximum Availability itself. The software was used to replicate 17 journals from the primary machine, including 20 apply groups on the backup machine, which totals approximately 6,500 files. During the installation, the IT staff relied on Aldon's change-management system to protect ongoing development work, and also made use of some homegrown utilities to move several "odds and ends," Zytner says.

Early in the morning on Friday, February 28, 2003, Menora's primary iSeries server suffered another outage. Zytner says the outage occurred when an operator was unable to end some jobs before the regular backup was performed, which locked several print files and eventually brought the machine down. At 2 a.m. local time, IBM support recommended that the operator IPL the machine, which he did. It wouldn't be back online for another nine hours.

Luckily, the company had been replicating its OS/400 data from the primary Model 830 to the backup Model 820. "We switched to the backup machine, which was running the *noMAX software," Zytner says. "This enabled us to access the replica database until the problem on the main processor was corrected." As a result of having the replica database available, Menora continued to run its business as if nothing had happened. Menora's billing process stayed online, which meant no delays in receiving payments on premiums. There was no loss of time, money, or productivity.

Zytner was so impressed with the performance of the *noMAX failover, and the performance of the software in general, that he configured *noMAX to replicate his OS/400 Web servers, as well. This was Menora's second *noMAX environment, and brought the total number of iSeries machines involved in replication at the company to four.

There are more changes in store for Menora's *noMAX environment, stemming from an incident in Tel Aviv more than a year ago. On May 22, 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself at a park about 100 yards from Menora's main office. Two people died and 30 were injured from the bomb, which was encased with shrapnel and nails. Had the terrorist ignited his bomb any closer to Menora's office, it could have had a dire effect on the company's business, as both the primary and the backup iSeries servers are located on the same premises.

As a result of that incident, Menora officials are looking into moving their backup iSeries server off-site. The company is currently in talks with IBM to move its backup *noMAX configuration to an IBM data center. This will increase the cost of Menora's disaster-recovery strategy, but considering the political uncertainty in the Middle East, minimizing the risk of data loss is a wise move.

Overall, Zytner is very pleased with the high-availability software and the developer. "*noMAX has performed exceptionally for us, on both a day-to-day basis as well as when it was put to the test with the outage we had recently," he says. "The software was simple to install, and the technological skill and professionalism of the Maximum Availability staff has been superb throughout."

Sponsored By

TRAILBLAZER SYSTEMS

ZMOD Exchange EDI-INT connects you to all your trading partners.

Wal-Mart, UCCnet, Meijer, Lowe's, Food Lion, Dollar General, Ace Hardware, Target, The Home Depot, Linens 'n Things, Michael's Arts & Crafts, Do It Best, Menard's, Aafes, and more. They all have learned how easy and secure it is to make EDI connections directly on the AS/400.

ZMOD Exchange EDI-INT was written in C and C++, specifically for the AS/400, to provide the highest efficiency, speed and easiest implementation. It fits right into your environment. Unlike other EDI-INT solutions, ZMOD allows you to run secure EDI-INT transacting in your existing network infrastructure without putting private keys and unencrypted data in your DMZ. You save money and configuration time by reducing the need to rework your network or write bridging processes.

With ZMOD Exchange, your EDI-INT transacting can take place securely in your LAN right next to the EDI translator. Security is ensured since no data or keys are accessible by intruders. TrailBlazer Systems went the extra distance by writing its own clients and servers for EDI-INT transacting. What does that mean for you? It means our EDI-INT server can run wherever you want, like behind your firewall. However, for those who wish to stop incoming transactions in their DMZ, ZMOD comes with an AS2 server for your DMZ that only stores encrypted AS2 transactions. Those transactions can either be retrieved by or redirected to your EDI-INT software in your LAN.

ZMOD Exchange EDI-INT comes with a suite of AS/400 based E-Commerce tools.

ZMOD Exchange EDI-INT:
· Run your EDI-INT directly on the AS/400
· Secure transactions behind the firewall for ultimate security
· Eliminate network changes by using firewall navigation tools
· Integrate transactions directly with any EDI translator
· Support AS1, AS2 and UCCnet requirements

For more information, visit us at www.trailblazersystems.com/ms