| Editor: | Alex Woodie | Managing Editor: | Shannon Pastore | |
| Contributing Editors: | Joe Hertvik | |||
| Timothy Prickett Morgan | ||||
| Shannon O'Donnell | ||||
| Dan Burger |
|
Volume 1, Number 6, sponsored by:Original Software SoftLanding Systems RJS Software Systems, Inc. Maximum Availability Limited Tramenco
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In Search of More Affordable Disk Capacity by Alex Woodie
Alliance Shippers is one of North America's largest independently
owned providers of global logistics and transportation services.
Through regional and international sales and operating facilities
strategically located in the United States, Canada, and Mexico,
the $550 million company from Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, offers
customers a full-service/single-source team approach to providing
shipping solutions via state-of-the-art rail, highway, ocean, and
air transportation services.
Alliance manages its clients' freight using a customized RPG-based
logistics package running on a two-way AS/400 Model 730. Four
hundred employees in 50 locations access the application using
MochaSoft's client-to-AS/400 software running over a TCP/IP-
based frame relay network, while customers send shipping notices
via electronic data interchange.
Another AS/400, a Model 720, hosts a Web site that allows Alliance
clients to track their shipments. This second AS/400 also serves
as a backup to the first, which is facilitated through the use of
Lakeview Technology's MIMIX data replication software. Both
of the AS/400s are running OS/400 V4R5.
Staying Ship Shape
About a year and a half ago, the company needed to add disk to its
production AS/400 to keep up with its 5 to 10 percent growth rate.
The company chose BCC Technologies' disks at the time, mostly
because they were cheaper than IBM's disks. Currently, the
production AS/400 is loaded with 36 disk drives--a mix of 4 GB disks
from BCC and IBM. The second AS/400 uses IBM disks only.
Alliance's production AS/400 is configured for optimal performance,
which is measured by the number of operations per second (OPS) that
the disks can provide. To determine what disk configuration delivers
optimal performance, people commonly refer to IBM performance
worksheets, available on the IBM Web site. These worksheets determine
the number of disks and disk controller arms that are needed for the
given CPW rating of the box, the type of workload that's running, and
the size and speed of the disks in question.
To keep the box running at the optimal level, the company will need
to add more disk, said Jonathan Lefcourt, Alliance's vice president
of information technology.
"I'm getting close to disk capacity now," Lefcourt said. "If I stick
with my 730, I would have to buy older technology disks. Is it wise
to add older technology? I think it's a dead-end path."
Instead, Lefcourt decided to upgrade the production server early next
year to a new two-way iSeries Model 830 running the latest version of
OS/400, V5R1. While he has generally been happy with the performance
of BCC's disks, he decided it would be wise to spec out IBM's disk
drives, too. What he found somewhat surprised him.
Sticker Shock
IBM recommended that Alliance install IBM's own 8 GB, 10K RPM disks
on the new iSeries Model 830. To achieve optimal performance levels
with the freight application, IBM recommended the purchase of 79
disks, Lefcourt said.
However, because the iSeries Model 830 can hold only 45 disks in the
system unit, 34 of the disks would need to reside in an IBM sidecar
expansion tower, which itself can hold a maximum of 45 disks. To
maintain peak performance levels, one disk controller arm is needed
for every 15 disks, which means Lefcourt would need to spread six
disk controllers between the Model 830 and the sidecar. When it was
all said and done, this configuration would be able to deliver 4,898
OPS.
Then BCC made its bid. The Irvine, California, company recommended
that Lefcourt install 30 of its latest 8 GB, 15K RPM FAST Extender
disks in order to achieve his performance requirements. At 4,500 OPS,
this setup would come in just under IBM's OPS rating, but it would
allow him to add up to 15 more disks without installing a sidecar.
"Thirty BCC drives won't give you the same performance as 79 IBM
drives," said John Gimpl III, BCC's vice president of sales. "We
built it just a tiny bit smaller than we had to, based on IBM's specs.
But we have room to add more disks for performance increases."
BCC's 8 GB FAST disks are really 17 GB disks. By using the FAST "short
stroking" technology, in which only the outer half of a disk platter
is used, the disk controller arm doesn't have as far to go to access
data, which results in higher OPS than a non-short-stroked drive. IBM
doesn't offer short-stroking capabilities on its iSeries drives, and
while BCC uses IBM's Ultrastar 15K RPM drives, IBM hasn't yet made
available the 15K RPM disk to iSeries customers; they are available
only to pSeries and xSeries customers.
The published list price for BCC's 8 GB, 15K RPM FAST disks is $1,500.
The current list price for IBM's 8 GB, 10K RPM disks is $1,400. If
Lefcourt had chosen to outfit his new Model 830 using IBM disks, it
would have required the purchase of 49 additional disks, which would
cost $65,600 more than the BCC drives alone.
Price an Object
However, the cost of drives isn't the only factor in such circumstances.
The IBM setup would require the purchase of additional hardware,
including the sidecar, four additional disk controllers, and two 30-disk
expansion chassis, which are needed to open up the Model 830 and the
sidecar to use their full 45-disk capacities. The BCC setup would require
the purchase of one additional disk controller (the iSeries ships
with one) and a single 30-drive expansion chassis for the iSeries.
When Lefcourt factored in the cost of the sidecar (about $18,000), the
additional expansion chassis for the sidecar (about $9,000), and the
four additional disk controllers (about $6,000 each; the sidecar ships
with one), he found that it would require a substantial premium to go Blue.
"That adds up to some real big numbers," Lefcourt said. "When you say the
upgrade cost will be in the low $200,000 range, but the extra disk itself
would be another $100,000, that's a 50 percent price increase."
Lefcourt hasn't yet made his upgrade. But, when he does, he's going with
BCC disks on the new iSeries Model 830 and in the Web server when it's
upgraded. "I'm going full-blown BCC the next go around," he said. "I
have nothing against IBM drives, except that they don't perform like the
BCC drives."
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FlyByNight Software Releases Green Screen Management Tool by Alex Woodie
FlyByNight Software recently released a new management
tool that allows AS/400 and iSeries administrators to configure
OS/400 settings by using the 5250 command line interface and
bypassing the Windows-based Operations Navigator GUI.
"Do you think it peculiar that the AS/400 and iSeries requires
a PC in order to configure and manage the system?" the FlyByNight
Web site asks. "We do! A GUI can be a very useful method of
interacting with a host system, but it makes no sense to manage
the host using a GUI interface."
ONcmd includes a series of commands and "work with" panels that
allow systems administrators to control settings for a range of
host functions, including NetServer shares, TCP servers, Network
File System servers, Web servers, and validation lists, including
point-to-point entries.
Company sources say ONcmd commands are easy to remember and
enable administrators to quickly perform functions that would
require multiple steps using OpsNav, IBM's systems management
utility that ships with Client Access. The tool's commands
conform to OS/400 standards and can be embedded into CL
programs, according to FlyByNight literature.
"Serious system administrators want to run native commands to
manage a system," the company maintains. "Commands have many
advantages over a GUI, provided the system administrator has some
idea of what they are doing."
FlyByNight, an Australian company, is selling ONcmd for $1,980
Australian, which is about $990 U.S. The company supports North
American customers via telephone and email. To get more information
on ONcmd, to purchase software, or to view FlyByNight's humorous
"Microsoft Free Zone," visit the company's Web site (powered by
OS/2 Warp), at www.flybynight.com.au.
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Hype Breakers? Two Vendors' Web Services Plans for 2002 by Alex Woodie
While no two people seem to have the same definition of what
Web services actually are, the analyst groups and e-commerce
software companies nevertheless seem to agree that, whatever
they are, they'll serve as some kind of panacea to cure any
integration problem that ails you.
Conventional wisdom has it that, by mid 2002, when Web services
are forecast to be in use at 75 percent of large ($100M-plus)
companies, Web services will begin solving a number of business
and computing issues, ostensibly the following:
* The creation of industry standard protocols for worldwide
application integration
It seems you could almost add the elimination of international
terrorism to that list. Nevertheless, considering the popularity
that Web services are generating, it would be foolish to dismiss
this new trend out of hand. If the drive toward Web services
does nothing more than generate a set of industry standard
protocols that help applications talk to one another--which is
well on its way to happening--then that in itself would be worth
the hype.
In the AS/400 and iSeries space, a community known for its
pragmatism in sticking with proven technology, software vendors
are beginning to announce Web services offerings. Two independent
software vendors that could be considered leaders in the AS/400
and iSeries middleware market have Web services offerings waiting
in the wings
Early next quarter, SEAGULL and ClientSoft expect to
release software that will allow AS/400 and iSeries shops to make
applications available as Web services. Basically what this means
is that the two companies have built support for the primary Web
services technologies into their products. Those technologies are
Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration
(UDDI).
ClientSoft is taking a two-pronged approach to Web services. On the
one hand, the company is offering development tools for AS/400 and
S/390 shops that are planning to use Microsoft's Web services
environment, called .NET. The company recently released ClientView
Builder for Visual Basic, which provides some .NET capabilities, and
it is planning to offer another ClientView Builder product bundled
with Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET when Microsoft releases that
product in February 2002.
On the other hand, the Miami, Florida, based company is building an
add-on component that will allow users to build Web services in the
non-.NET sphere of things, which is usually differentiated by a heavy
reliance on Java technology. This add-on component will take the form
of a menu-driven wizard and will provide companies the SOAP, WSDL,
and UDDI compatibilities they need to deliver OS/400 and S/390 logic
as Web services with a minimum of code tampering, sources with the
company say.
This wizard, called simply Web Services, will work with ClientSoft's
other family of development tools, which includes ClientBuilder
Enterprise, ClientBuilder Advanced Server, and ClientBuilder Wireless.
Pricing for ClientSoft's Web Services wizard has not been announced.
The ClientBuilder software development kit costs $15,000, while the
ClientBuilder Advanced Server starts at $42,000.
Robert Evelyn, who was promoted to ClientSoft chief operating officer
at the beginning of December, says developers will need some
understanding of how to work with COM calls or Java classes to reshape
application logic as Web services.
"The original hype was, you just sit down, attach a Web service, and
you're off and running," Evelyn said. "The reality is, it takes a
programmer or some type of tool to build it. The biggest thing is that
you have some industry-standard way of defining the interface, and
generating that interface quite easily. Next in line will be automatic
generation at run time."
SEAGULL is building WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI support into Transidiom, which
the Dutch company first released one year ago as an enterprise
application integration development and runtime environment for
AS/400 and S/390 shops. Transidiom 2.2 will support Microsoft .NET and
Java Web services environments and is slated for general availability
by February 2002. Pricing for Transidiom has not changed since it was
released: The software development costs $10,000, while the Transidiom
application server starts at $40,000.
"We definitely see Transidiom as the first step into the new application
development paradigm," said Andre den Haan, SEAGULL's vice president of
product strategy. He said the next step will be to completely separate
the user interface from the application logic and database, which is the
current goal of SEAGULL's secretive research and development project,
code-named Williamsburg. He said to look for several such technology
announcements from SEAGULL in the first half of 2002, but would not
elaborate further.
SEAGULL and ClientSoft are on the leading edge of Web services in the
OS/400 marketplace, but they're not the only companies with Web services
offerings. Red Oak Software and Killdara Corporation recently
announced a joint Web services offering for the OS/400, OS/390, and Unix
platforms, called the Web Services Solution Pack. Amalgamated Software
of North America is working with Microsoft to integrate its ASNA Visual
RPG development tool and Acceler8DB database software with .NET, and expects
to release the software in late summer 2002, ASNA officials said.
"It's a very cool thing to say these days," said den Haan, referring to
supporting Web services. "The difference between SEAGULL and rest of the
market? We walk the walk and talk the talk."
Although each company claims to be the first legacy middleware vendor to
support Web services, neither SEAGULL nor ClientSoft has delivered anything
more than a beta version as yet. Ironically, both companies separately
presented their new Web services software at a recent Gartner Group
symposium in San Francisco, but apparently neither saw the other's demo.
For more information on these companies, go to www.seagullsw.com or www.clientsoft.com.
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Resolutions, Accelio Partner for OneWorld Documents by Alex Woodie
J.D. Edwards & Company has recertified a document
management system, jointly developed by Resolutions
and Accelio, to run on its OneWorld and OneWorld XE
ERP suites. The software, called eResolveDMS for Accelio
Present Central, gives OneWorld users document management
capabilities that are easier to use and more powerful than
the native Report Design Aid component JDE ships with
OneWorld, sources with the companies said.
eResolveDMS for Accelio Present Central is made up of three
components. Accelio Design, developed by Accelio, is a
Windows-based, WYSIWYG program for shaping document appearance
in its final format. eResolveDMS (called eRP Output Wizard
until last Friday) is developed by Resolutions, runs natively on
OS/400, Unix, and Windows platforms, and acts as the communications
director and interface between OneWorld and the Accelio print
engine. The Accelio print engine, called the Accelio Present
Central, also installs on any OneWorld platform and delivers a
document in the required format, including print, email,
fax, and HTML, or prepares it for archiving.
OneWorld uses PDF as its native document format. When
eResolveDMS detects that OneWorld has created a document,
it "reads" the PDF data and applies any additional delivery
or formatting information that the user has programmed into
it. For example, users can add a rule that documents
associated with a specific customer be distributed via email,
fax, the Web, hardcopy printout, or any combination thereof.
eResolveDMS then hands this enhanced metadata to the Accelio
Present Central print engine to execute the delivery.
This functionality is substantially more robust than what JDE
offers with its Report Design Aid, said Steve Luke, president
and CEO of Resolutions. "RDA is very good at producing the
actual data that needs to be put on the page. But it's not
good at creating a visually appealing document or a dynamically
changing document." Additionally, changes to the system don't
require the services of a high-priced consultant; users with
three to five days of training can be proficient, he said.
Resolutions is a Duluth, Georgia, company that writes document
management software for ERP and MRP systems running on major
platforms, as well as utilities for AS/400 and iSeries servers,
such as Tools/400 and WizPak400. Formerly known as Enterprise
Resolutions, the company and its founders have had close working
relationships with the Accelio organization for years. Resolutions
has also sold document management systems for JDE's RPG-based ERP
suite for OS/400, WorldSoftware, since 1993, and has sold products
integrated with OneWorld, which runs on OS/400, Unix, and Windows
operating systems, since 1998.
Accelio is an Ottawa, Ontario, company that offers a range of
document management solutions and print engines for ERP systems
from such vendors as SAP, PeopleSoft, and
Oracle, as well as JDE. The company changed its name from
JetForm Corporation to Accelio, and announced new names for all
of its products, on September 12. JetForm has used OS/400 print
engine technology developed by Resolutions for years.
eResolveDMS for Accelio Present Central is being sold and
supported in North America by Resolutions. Accelio is selling
the product in Europe and relying on Resolutions personnel stationed
in Ireland and Germany for support. Pricing for eResolveDMS for
Accelio Present Central ranges from $20,000 to $39,995. For more
information, go to www.eresolve.com or www.accelio.com.
Enfish has announced an enterprise portal application
that runs under OS/400. Working hand in hand with WebSphere,
Enfish Enterprise, a Java-based Web serving application, will
take requests from users over the Internet and coordinate the
access to information residing in the DB2/400 database or other
back-end subsystems, such as the Domino mail server. For more
information, go to www.enfish.com.
Dimensional Insight has announced that its entire suite
of business intelligence applications are now supported on Linux
running on IBM's iSeries and zSeries eServers. Following
successful testing at IBM's iSeries Terraplex center, in Rochester,
Minnesota, and zSeries Terraplex center, in Poughkeepsie, New York,
Dimensional Insight released its DI-Atlantis, DI-Diver, DI-WebDiver,
and DI-ReportDiver offerings for Linux on iSeries and Linux on
zSeries. For more information, go to www.dimins.com.
Lanier has introduced a high-volume monochrome laser
printer for OS/400 and other platforms. The AP3200 can hit speeds
of up to 32 prints per minute in simplex mode and up to 25 prints
per minute in duplex mode. It features numerous finishing options,
and PCL and PostScript support, and has a large paper supply to
minimize reloading. The printer features an Ethernet network
interface out of the box and is compatible with OS/400, Unix,
Windows, NetWare, and Macintosh networks as well. For more
information, go to www.lanier.com.
I/NET is venturing where no other AS/400 software vendor
has gone before. The Kalamazoo, Michigan, company recently signed
its second contract with NASA, a $70,000 deal to write a prototype
conversational interface that will allow applications to make use
of voice recognition technology. The publicly traded company, which
wrote the first Web server for the AS/400 in the late 1990s, hopes
to someday apply this technology to home appliances and automobiles.
In March, I/NET signed its first contract with the space agency, to
develop a computer system that would analyze complex situations in
hostile environments and automatically find the appropriate response,
for use in unmanned voyages deep into untrekked regions of the solar
system. For more information, go to www.inetmi.com.
Andreas Goering, a German iSeries consultant, has developed a new
OS/400 utility that automatically generates Microsoft Excel
files from DB2/400 database files or any other object in the Integrated
File System. Called iExcelGen, the software's core feature, the IXLSGEN
command, gives users the capability to convert a range of OS/400
resident data, including Query/400 definitions or any spool file,
into an Excel spreadsheet file with up to 64,000 lines and 250 columns.
iExcelGen runs natively in batch or interactive modes and requires
OS/400 V4R2 or higher. Pricing ranges from $650 to $4,000. Goering is
currently looking for a partner in the United States to support this
product. For more information, go to www.goering.de.
Things aren't going great for SEDONA these days, but a goof by
Nasdaq officials only made things worse. The company, which writes CRM
software for OS/400 and other platforms, was mistakenly kicked off the
Nasdaq SmallCap Market on December 5, causing a temporary halt in
trading until the company was able to get its stock relisted the
following day. The company was notified by Nasdaq officials in
September that the value of its stock, which had been trading below
the magic $1 mark since June, was too low. However, on November 15,
according to a story published on the Dow Jones Newswire, SEDONA
received a letter from Nasdaq officials saying the company could remain
on the Nasdaq stock market.
You've seen Dharma & Greg. Now how does Dharma & DENON strike
you? DENON Electronics, a maker of high-end radio and
television equipment, has announced it has chosen an e-business
integration solution from Dharma Systems to extend its OS/400-based
ERP suite to the Web. DENON plans to use the Nashua, New Hampshire,
company's eUnify software to build a self-service extension to its
J.D. Edwards application that will allow sales reps and
distributors to get real-time inventory information and to place orders.
DENON executives say their decision was influenced by eUnify's support of
the Simple Object Access Protocol, a key ingredient in the Web services
protocol stack. For more information on eUnify, go to www.dharma.com.
Intentia announced two customer wins last week. TAL Apparel Limited,
a clothes maker based in Hong Kong, will use Intentia's Java-based Movex
Fashion Apparel suite on iSeries servers at production centers in Hong Kong,
China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan. The deal includes
installation services and is valued at more than $4.5 million, $2 million
of which is for software licenses. The Swedish ERP vendor has also announced
a deal with Vienna Beef, maker of "the original Chicago-style hot dog." Vienna
Beef will install Intentia's RPG-based Movex Food & Beverage enterprise
software suite on iSeries servers located at various production sites, and is
reportedly considering Intentia's supply chain offerings as well. For more
information, go to www.intentia.com.
Fiserv Inc. has announced that its Fiserv Colombia Limitada
subsidiary has bought the FACT 400 credit card application from its developer,
Compania Latinoamericana de Software S.A., for an undisclosed sum. Fiserv
already sells an OS/400-based financial package with credit card issuing,
processing, and other capabilities similar to those in FACT 400. The company
said it would initially sell FACT 400 only in Latin America, where it has
already been deployed in 19 companies. But Fiserv hinted in its press release
that it would roll some FACT 400 functions into other offerings, which
wouldn't be hard, considering FACT 400 was written using Computer
Associates' powerful COOL:2E high-level-language development environment.
For more information, go to www.fiserv.com.
Did you know that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
is affecting the way companies in the healthcare industry can use
electronic data interchange? If you didn't, it might behoove you to check
out a new white paper released by EXTOL, an EDI software provider
for OS/400 and other platforms. You can request the white paper--which
tackles technical issues related to integrating HIPAA-specified transactions
with IT infrastructures and tells you how to avoid fines--on EXTOL's Web site,
at www.extol.com.
iSeries Nation members will be "chatting with Citizens" by telephone
next week. Brian Wyatt, IT manager at CR England, North America's largest
refrigerated freight carrier, will discuss how WebSphere on iSeries
is helping him to solve some important CRM issues at his company. The
event is scheduled for Friday, December 18, at 10:00 a.m. EST. To register,
go to www.premconf.com or
call 800-289-0579 and reference confirmation number 479804.
In other eServer and iSeries news this week, Primus Knowledge
Solutions, a software company with more than one branding issue to its
name, announced plans to integrate its Primus eServer software, a powerful,
proprietary search technology, with IBM's DB2 database. Faster than
you can say "Windows sucks," it was discovered that eServer will be
supported only on Windows NT and Windows 2000 implementations of DB2, and
there are no plans to support it with other flavors of DB2. For more
information, go to www.lesclaypool.com.
Speaking of iSeries development, Segway has announced that the
iSeries version of the Segway Human Transporter, the first self-balancing,
battery-powered transportation machine, will be available for public
consumption in late 2002. You've probably already seen this nifty scooter,
which looks like a cross between a step ladder and a pogo stick with wheels,
on the television. As you might imagine, the pSeries version of the Segway
HT--a smaller scooter designed to transport users through densely populated
areas, both indoors and out--is already receiving heavy play in the press,
right behind the powerful Segway HT eSeries, designed for business
applications where it is necessary to carry cargo, reportedly up to 75 pounds,
in addition to the rider. The iSeries version of the Segway HT, as you might
have guessed, is already being relegated to "jack of all trades" status. This
column predicts that the versatile Segway HT iSeries, with its "optimization
for range and speed across a variety of terrain," will fail to resonate with
users or generate market share in competition with its more differentiated
scooter brethren: the workhorse eSeries and the nimble pSeries. Some things
never change. For more information, go to www.segway.com.
There were other important new products announced late last week that,
unfortunately, we won't have enough time to give the attention they deserve.
As you know, this will be the last issue of Midrange Stuff, OS/400
Edition, until we resume publishing the newsletter on January 8, 2002.
Happy Holidays!
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Web Infrastructure with Linux, xSeries, and iSeries by Dan Burger
In e-business, it's the infrastructure that makes the difference.
That's the core belief that drove Tommy Hilfiger Corporation to
choose IBM, eOneGroup, and Linux for its new e-business
infrastructure. That combination is central to Hilfiger's strategy
for expanding its presence among thousands of U.S. specialty
retailers, as well as its worldwide manufacturing facilities and
employees.
The Tommy Hilfiger strategy can be laid out on the table as a
plan with three basic objectives.
It begins with a new B2B portal (www.tommyb2b.com) that allows
Hilfiger's specialty retailers and sales force to view, via the
Web, available inventory in real time. Additionally it allows the
placing, tracking, and shipping of orders.
Part two of the strategy involves a business-to-plant Web site
that links Hilfiger production facilities around the world.
Expectations are for faster design-to-product times and
significantly decreased costs.
Part three is a virtual employee store that allows Hilfiger
personnel to shop online 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For the incurably geeky readers who may be wondering who this
guy is, Tommy Hilfiger is a fashion icon and one of the most
widely recognized brand names around the world. The company
and its many subsidiaries design and market men's and women's
apparel under the Tommy Hilfiger trademarks. Extensions of this
New York-based company's main line of clothing include
accessories, such as footwear, fragrance, and home furnishings.
Its products can be found in stores throughout the United States
and North America, Europe, Central and South America, and the Far
East. When people talk about the company, it's always on a first-name
basis: "Tommy." The company Web address is www.tommy.com.
Dating back to its inception, in the mid-1980s, Tommy has always
been an AS/400 (and now iSeries) shop. Inventory, manufacturing,
and accounting data resided on the '400. So, when it came to building
the B2B portal, the task involved providing customers and suppliers,
using a variety of platforms and architectures, with accessibility
to the company's legacy data. The key word? Interoperability.
The job of designing and building the Web infrastructure that would
carry it off was designed and built by eOneGroup, a relatively
young firm specializing in interactive Web content, based in Omaha,
Nebraska.
Coincidentally, eOneGroup already had a customer, right there in
Omaha, with a proven Web infrastructure that was a close match for
what Tommy desired. That company--Omaha Steaks, a fair to midland
brand name in its own right--took in $10 million in online orders
during the 2000 holiday shopping season and expects to bite off a
juicy $75 million in online business this season, according to
eOneGroup president Dan Watson. The Omaha Steaks site is B2C and
receives a lot more traffic than Tommy's site, but the integration
was the key to making it work. "Omaha Steaks was very similar to
Hilfiger on the back end, with a lot of home-grown RPG stuff,"
Watson said.
The Omaha experience sold the IT gurus at Tommy, even though the
Linux experience within the Tommy IT department totaled up to zero.
Funny thing is, the same was true at Omaha Steaks when it began its
own infrastructure project.
So why is Linux even in this picture?
"We've done a lot of Web sites," Watson said. "Linux, from a price/
performance perspective, is a much faster operating system because it
is very lightweight. It's made for the Internet and Web access. It is
our technical staff's platform of choice."
Keep in mind that, according to International Data Corporation,
Linux is currently the fastest-growing server operating system. Linux
accounted for 27 percent of operating system server shipments in
2000, up from 24 percent in 1999. Those statistics do not include the
free or shared copies downloaded from the Internet.
In building both companies' Web infrastructures, eOneGroup made use
of IBM eServer xSeries servers running Linux to handle Web-based
transactions. The xSeries servers are integrated online with IBM
eServer iSeries servers running Java, which are tied to wholesale
and warehouse management systems. The connection between xSeries
and iSeries is made via the Integrated xSeries Adapter.
"Our application is very lightweight and XML-intensive," Watson said.
"It runs better on Linux." And, according to Watson, benchmark tests
showed that Linux performed best when running on the Intel
processors inside the xSeries boxes.
John Reed, IBM's director of iSeries product management and marketing,
pointed to the affinity that exists between the xSeries and the iSeries
because of the Integrated xSeries Adapter and the general
interoperability that exists between them.
"In general," Reed said, "companies want to have physical security
between the levels of their enterprise. They want to keep their database
transaction servers separate from their Web app server." This creates a
three-tiered environment, with multiple physical platforms doing different
functions. "You can do it via partitioning--separate Linux partitions,"
Reed said. Or you can do it with physical separation and multiple
redundancy of physical products--for example, two or three small servers
in the middle--so that, at any one time, if the load gets too great, you
can fill in with others."
At Tommy, the back-end database resides on an iSeries Model 840 12-way
server. Partitioning comes with the operating system, and Linux is
available to run on the iSeries.
Watson said it's the "customer's choice whether to run on xSeries rather
than iSeries. We have customers running it all on iSeries, including all
the Web stuff." The May Department Stores Company is one example, he
noted.
Tommy's vice president of application development, Brent Findon, said his
shop made the decision to run Linux on the xSeries rather than the iSeries
"because it was cheaper to have three redundant servers on the xSeries. In
addition, by integrating these new Web portals with our existing back-end
systems, we saved significantly on the time and expense of deploying this
total infrastructure."
Watson also noted that memory is much cheaper on an Intel box. "Linux on
the front end allows a lot of memory for not as much cost; plus
performance is excellent because of the lightweight operating system."
Reed's advice about making the decision to run Linux on the iSeries or
the xSeries comes down to such things as the initial cost of the hardware
and software, the cost of the skills needed to run the product over a
period of time, and the replacement costs.
"A lot of customers in the last six months have looked at the total cost
of ownership and the cost of managing the complexity of the system,"
Reed said.
Also to be considered are the sources of the specific applications
needed to gain access to information from disparate platforms. That's
why companies such as eOneGroup are designing software with the capability
to accommodate almost any option.
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Lazy Software to Debut New Database for OS/400 by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Lazy Software is a British startup company created
by three of the founders of former OS/400 application development
tool maker Synon who have banded together to create a new
database management system that is not a relational database,
like OS/400's integrated DB2/400 database and other similar
products, but which is based on a different, associative database
model that Lazy Software says is better than the relational model
because it simplifies the programming necessary to create databases
and applications. This seems like a natural affinity with the
OS/400 platform, which has always prided itself on its ability to
mask many of the complexities of relational databases and the
management of their features from programmers. The interesting bit
is that Lazy Software's associative database, called Sentences, is
written entirely in Java and, more significantly, has been labeled
ServerProven for the iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries eServer platforms
from IBM. That earns the Sentences database the distinction
of being the first commercial non-IBM, non-DB2 database available
for the OS/400 platform.
After selling Synon to Sterling Software in 1998 for just
under $80 million, Simon Williams, CEO of Lazy Software, thought
about what problem he wanted to tackle next in the software business.
Williams conceived and developed the Synon/2 computer-aided software
engineering and object-oriented programming tool and its follow-on,
Obsydian. The Synon tool was acquired by about 5,000 OS/400 software
houses and OS/400 user companies and was one of the most popular
development tools in use on the platform. Sterling was quickly
absorbed into the Computer Associates empire after Synon was
sold to Sterling, and the Synon tools are still available today as
Jasmine Developer 2E and COOL:Plex.
Having a little bit of experience in the application development
field, Williams came to the surprising conclusion that the
relational database model of storing information was one of the
big problems making application development more complex, more
costly, and more difficult to maintain. The name Lazy Software
comes from the idea that applications should be easier to create,
and also that it is often the seemingly lazy mathematician who
thinks up the best solution to the problem. Both Albert Einstein
and Niels Bohr, for instance, were not known as the sharpest tacks
in the drawer, until they completely turned our view of the universe
inside out after putting some thought into it. The Lazy Software
name pays homage to all the nerds and geeks who fully think a
problem through before applying brute force.
To turn Sentences from an idea into a real product, Williams asked
two of his former co-founders at Synon, Melinda Horton and Simon
Haigh, to join his company. Horton built and ran Synon's Professional
Services Division and established the company's support and training
operations; eventually, she took over the job of managing the
development of Synon/2 and Obsydian. As executive vice president of
engineering at Lazy Software, she has managed to take the ideas
developed by Williams and make them a reality implemented in Java.
She is getting lots of help from a team of database developers from
the former Ardent Software, which was acquired by Informix
a few years ago, which itself is now a part of IBM. Haigh, president
and chief operating officer of Lazy Software, was Synon's first head
of sales and marketing; he built the Synon channel that enabled Synon
to hit annual revenues of $34 million in six years.
Lazy Software is headquartered in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and
has recently opened offices in the United States, in Chicago and
Dallas, to begin a marketing push here last week. The company, despite
these troubled times, has been able to secure $11 million in venture
funding in the past year from Advent Venture Partners, Commerzbank AG,
and Metropolitan Venture Partners. The company has 40 employees and 45
customers, all of whom are early adopters of a new database technology.
The ideas underpinning Sentences are sophisticated, and they are not new.
They are new with a practical twist. Sentences is based on an associative
model of data that was developed at IBM's Hursley labs in England many
years ago called Triple Store. (You'll remember that IBM researcher Edgar
Codd invented the relational model of data, an idea that Oracle stole
and implemented with minicomputers and then built into a huge driver of the
application and server business.) With relational databases, you build
many tables that contain data in columns and keys for data running down
the rows. These tables have varying sizes of rows and columns, giving them
different shapes and keys. Program components of applications that are based
on relational databases have to be built with the shape of tables in mind.
If you change a table, you have to change the application programs that rely
on that table; if you change an application, you have to make sure the
table's structure is changed to match it. This is a lot of busywork to
Williams' way of thinking. Getting two databases to talk to each other is
also problematic, since they have different structures--hence the need for
data transformation middleware.
Moreover, applications based on a relational model must also deal with
many different tables simultaneously. Back in 1969, when IBM developed
the relational database, a big application database might be comprised
of 50 tables. Juggling and dicing and slicing these tables as part of
the application was not that big of a deal. Fast-forward three decades:
The mySAP.com and R/3 ERP suites from SAP AG contain between 16,500
and 19,200 tables in their databases. Indexing, joining, and performing
other operations on these database tables eats mountains of MIPS.
With the associative model, a database table has four--and only four--columns,
which Williams says is necessary and sufficient to describe any and all
kinds of data and relationships. Each row is assigned a numeric key that is
associated with a bit of data; complex associations between data are spread
out across multiple rows, with pointers linking these rows together. The
structure of the database never changes. Moreover, because the pointers are
in the database, they show the linkage between data in a different part
of the database, by default and by design; you don't have to run a query to
shake out the columns and rows across many relational database tables. You
just query the data that is associated with a particular pointer. Applications
have one giant table, they know the shape of it, and what you are doing
mostly in an application is surfing up and down that table looking up and
changing the data behind the pointers, which is stored adjacent to those
pointers in the table.
Sentences does not rely on any particular query language or development tool
to create applications. If you install it on an AS/400 or iSeries server
equipped with Java, you can use Java, RPG, or COBOL to create an
application. Sentences is supported on OS/400, Windows, Unix, and Linux
platforms, and only requires a Java Virtual Machine. Version 1.0 of Sentences
was announced in October 2000 and was pushed only in the United Kingdom.
Sentences 2.0 was announced last October in the U.K., and is entering the
North American market now. Reuters and Commerzbank are among the early
adopters of the software, and the associative model behind Sentences has
enabled them to develop and implement applications in a matter of weeks,
instead of a year or more. Lazy Software runs its business on a Windows
server, including sales, support, financial, and other applications, using
a Sentences database that is about 350 GB in size. A lot of that database
is comprised of the 4,000 hot prospects for the Sentences database.
Right now, Williams says that Sentences scales pretty well for databases up
to around 6 GB in size. Having such a large table behind the database makes
indexing more difficult, and the company is inventing a whole new way to
tune performance based on its experience with customers. Sentences Version
3.0, which should be available in the summer of 2002, will focus on making
scalability enhancements, and by Version 4.0, maybe available in early 2003,
Williams says that his product will be ready to go head-to-head with Oracle's
and IBM's relational databases on even the biggest jobs. Williams does not
for a second believe that customers will port to his database just for the
sake of using new technology; companies have more than a trillion dollars
in creating applications for relational databases, and they cannot afford
to easily move. Williams says the situation is analogous to the advent of
the microwave oven. No one wanted one for years, and then people found them
useful for things like reheating food, and then everyone wanted one in
their kitchen. I like this analogy, but there is a better one that Williams
is well aware of: Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just about
everybody used a mainframe for data processing, and they used a flat-file
database from IBM or Cullinet (eaten by Computer Associates decades ago),
such as IMS or IDMS. Then along came Oracle with relational databases, and
over the course of the next decade, application by application, bit by bit,
the relational database replaced the flat-file database. IBM had to put DB2
on its mainframes and a relational database inside the System/38. You might
be looking at changing databases again in a few years if Sentences really
works out.
For new, discrete applications, Sentences seems worth some tire kicking,
and particularly at the price. Sentences Version 2.0 costs $49,500 per
server, with an unrestricted license that is not gauged against the
number of processors, users, or transaction volume. That price also
includes education and consulting services for two months for developing
an application based on Sentences. Under a special new technology
adopters deal, Lazy Software is offering customers the same bundle for
$9,750, and if they are in any way unhappy with the results, they can
keep Sentences under a perpetual license and the application they
developed for this low price. You can find out more about Lazy Software
and download a trial version of Sentences at www.lazysoftware.com.
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Jacada Announces an XHTML First
by Alex Woodie
Jacada's latest release of Jacada Interface Server has
XHTML-generation capabilities, a collection of middleware for
developing and delivering a range of client interfaces for OS/400
and mainframe applications. Jacada claims that Jacada Interface
Server Version 7.1, which began shipping last Monday, is the
first piece of legacy middleware to be able to generate Java as
well as XHTML from the same initial WYSIWYG design effort.
XHTML is a hybrid of HTML and XML specifically designed to
keep the presentation and layout of screens looking the same
across various Net devices running on different platforms. XHTML
was written using XML, so it's an XML application, but it uses
the HTML document type definition tags to describe data.
Jacada is using XHTML to allow its users to develop ultra-thin
clients that mimic Java applets in some respects, but which
load on virtually all platforms and execute faster and require
less network bandwidth than Java. According to Jacada, a fully
customizable XHTML client can be developed for an AS/400 or
S/390 screen in a matter of days.
It took two weeks for an Interface Server 7.1 beta tester, Her
Majesty's Land Registry, to convert its entire land registry
system to XHTML clients, according to Gordon Vickers, IT Development
Centre Manager for HMLR.
"Our initial Jacada deployment included a Java graphical interface
to our mainframe Land Registry system, which we have been very
pleased with in terms of functionality," Vickers said. "However,
we were excited to learn that Jacada now provides an XML-based
HTML solution, which matches the richness of the Java interface
while offering more options for deploying to our users regardless
of their bandwidth or desktop configuration."
While the main benefit of using XHTML is its ability to maintain
appearances across practically any client device, users will find
that XHTML also improves keyboard utilization when compared with
vanilla HTML clients. With XHTML, standard function keys can now
be used within a browser interface, a feature that will undoubtedly
appeal to employees who unwillingly gave up their old 5250
green-screen display terminals when their company switched to
browser-based interfaces.
Pricing for Jacada Interface Server 7.1 starts at $4,500 for the
Interface Developer Kit and $30,000 per server for deployment.
Jacada Interface Server runs on Windows NT, OS/400, S/390, and
Solaris servers. For more information, go to www.jacada.com.
Follow this link to a vital new source for how-to
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Choose from a menu of training options to fit your
needs: onsite seminars, public seminars, mentoring,
consulting, books, CBTs, and Web-based training.
And make plans to attend the 2002 iSeries Connection
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