The Eden Application Hosting System
by RMS, LLC
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Legacy Systems and the IT organization The application systems that have been developed for mainframe computers over the past 40 years are built around the traditional Legacy System architecture of a batch COBOL system that is supported through an OLTP, which is almost always CICS. In fact the predominance of such Legacy Applications cannot be overstated. Even in 2008, nearly 75% of existing business software applications follow this model. The business requirements for IT organizations have of course, changed through the years, as has available technology. Remaining essentially the same over time, though, legacy applications are still the core of most organizations, however the need to integrate new platforms with corporate applications and data, cut IT costs, develop internet strategies and new architectures to support future needs have all combined to further complicate today's environment. In addition to these more technical issues, there are other considerations that must be recognized as being equally important. The ability to attract and maintain a qualified staff to handle increasing workloads on mainframe hardware has reached the point of concern in many metropolitan markets. Some organizations have found it necessary to train their own programmers due to such critical shortages of available skill sets. This trend is forecasted to increase in the future, as educational institutions from technical schools to universities are no longer including mainframe-based technology in their curriculum. Financial issues, especially in a post 2008 economy are also of paramount concern to organizations. Application Transformation and Migration Today, in an effort to move legacy applications forward, there are several approaches being used in application transformation and migration. Application Transformation, as it is defined today, is essentially an application development effort designed to convert COBOL, and in some cases CICS, source code to another language / platform / architecture. Generally, these conversions concentrate on moving applications to Java via rules mining; a process whereby the logic of a COBOL program is extracted and used to create an Enterprise Java Bean. Transformations using these techniques do result in platform independent, web enabled applications, however the cost and time required for a complete working solution is extremely high and for most organizations is not a viable alternative. Direct migration, the task of moving an existing application to another hardware platform, such as moving a COBOL CICS based application from a mainframe to a UNIX platform has historically involved making significant source code changes. Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the various levels of COBOL, platform dependent compilers as well as emulators for BMS (IBM's 3270 based display layer, a.k.a. Basic Mapping Support) as well data access requirements has generally made moving from one platform to another difficult. Further complicating potential migration is the lack of software to replace mainframe functionality such as JES, SAR, CA7 to name a very few. Additionally, while non-mainframe based CICS software has in recent years grown beyond simple use as a development environment for mainframe programmers, the majority of available vendor solutions for COBOL and CICS applications do not adequately address the needs of running an entire IT department. Primarily this is due to two reasons: 1) lack of features and functionality and for larger organizations, 2) the ability to scale to support very large workloads. Eden Server has been designed to address both these areas of concern. First, Eden Server includes all the components most organizations require including full support for COBOL, CICS, JCL, Security, Job Scheduling, Lights Out operations, Thick, Thin and Browser based client versions and much more. Second, and more uniquely, Eden Server is designed specifically to exploit multi-core technology to the fullest. In fact, with Eden Server's included Server Clustering capabilities, a single Eden Server installation can scale up to a total of 128 servers, each with 32 CPU cores for a total of 4,096 cores. Note that as of this writing (December, 2008) initial benchmarks using a 16-core Xeon server a maximum of 1,800 transactions per second was achieved, with a continuous rate of 1,750 per second. Each transaction consisted of 30 random file IO's (read, write, delete, etc) against an indexed sequential data set. The Eden Server approach Starting from day one, the goal for the Eden Server system has been to provide organizations an alternative approach to legacy system operations, management and support. In order to achieve our goal, Eden Server's design focus centered on two primary ideas:
The results are impressive. After just 8 years since it's first production install during December, 2000 in Omaha, NE, Eden Server has hosted over 10 million lines of COBOL, both batch and CICS at 13 locations. Every customer reports at least a two-fold improvement in online response times, and up to 5 times faster nightly batch runs. Significant cost savings are also an added benefit. True to it's design requirements, Eden Server has evolved considerably since the first release. Now at version 5.0, Eden Server's feature list includes: Three separate versions of Eden Server. First is the primary Eden Server install, which hosts up to 5 CICS regions and up to 50 additional regions used for batch jobs. Second is a Process Server install, which may be used to host the internal processes required for Thin and Web client connections. And finally a Communications Server, which offloads network communications overhead from the primary Eden Server install to a secondary, direct attached server machine. The imbedded clustering technology in all three server installs allows an Eden Server install to scale up to a total of 4,096 processors. Three separate versions of Eden Client. First is the Eden Thick Client, which is a self-contained install, intended for locally attached Windows desktops. Using the Thick Client, the desktop hardware is used to execute the CICS application, with IO taking place across the network. For larger installations, the Eden Thin Client is recommended. The Thin Client is similar to a Thick Client, however Thin Clients actually create a process on a server, which executes the CICS application. Only display and keyboard data are transmitted across the network. Lastly there is the Eden Web Client, which is similar in architecture to the Thin Client, except the actual user interface is the end-users web browser. The Eden Web Client is recommended when access is required either from a non-Windows PC or from the internet. All client versions include a customizable toolbar. Full support for BMS maps and CICS API's. BMS support is provided at the IBM 'FULL' level for ASCII based systems. Also supported are native 3270 data streams. Ongoing maintenance of existing BMS macros is supported via the Eden BMS preprocessor, however the included EScreen BMS editor is the recommended approach as it provides the ability to greatly enhance existing BMS screen images with GUI's. Full featured job scheduler provides fine grained control over job execution, including numerous conditional execution capabilities and automatic backout and email notifications following failures. Complete and secure control of batch systems via either the primary Eden Server or Eden Client. Server based JCL processing and job execution control system supports up to 50 concurrent jobs. Extensions to Windows Command File statements provide support for such JCL based items as dataset dispositions, GDG datasets, print report control, tape backup, job and or proc step restart and many others. The ability for after hours operations staff to modify JCL following a failure and submit changes only from a staging area helps to further secure batch operations. All Eden Server features are controlled at some level by one or more security controls. Access to CICS regions may include day of week and time of day settings, password expirations and individual security settings per user account. Ability to limit access to CICS transactions on a per-user basis is also provided. Eden Server also includes the ability to generate pre-defined email warnings detailing attempted security breaches. Access to the batch features of Eden Server are controlled on a per user basis, with the ability to provide each user with from no, to full support on a feature by feature basis. VSAM COBOL
API's SUPPORT The Eden Server system is a Windows application that serves as a TCP/IP based OLTP to support COBOL CICS legacy applications. The features of Eden Server are:
As this brief feature list begins to show, Eden Server is built to handle the needs of even a very large organization. Because of pricing and on going cost saving potential, however, even the smallest organization will find that Eden Server is an extremely viable alternative to the status quo. Technically, Eden Server provides organizations with a means to an end. By designing Eden Server as a three tiered application in and of itself, legacy applications are automatically positioned to take advantage of new technologies without the need for screen scrapers or other middle-ware. Tasks such as developing a new presentation layer to replace character BMS screens in languages such as Visual Basic are now possible and due to the common platform of Windows can even be done in a staged approach one screen at a time. By using any readily available web server and Java client software it is possible to immediately deploy legacy applications on the internet. In addition to being full featured Eden Server exploits Windows NT and 2000 architecture with it's own multi-threaded and multi-process framework so it is an extremely stable platform. Surveys of current Eden Server clients indicate it to be much faster than recent predecessors such as UNIKIX, MTS and CICS/NT. Unfortunately accurate performance comparisons are not available due to the lack of such information from other such systems. Eden Server, produces a full range of performance measuring figures, including number of transactions per day and average "terminal" response time. On systems as small as 10Mbs Ethernet, 333Mhz single CPU servers, Eden Server typically processes 50,000+ transactions per 8 hour shift with average response times of 0.5 seconds; with an average server CPU load of 20 percent.
About us At RMS, our customers range from SMB's to Fortune 100 corporations we have first hand experience with the issues we've discussed here. Combining this knowledge with our technical expertise in applications development, mainframe operating systems and programming and PC's and networking, we have been able to bring together a unique collection of knowledge and talents, without which a system such as Eden Server would not be possible. For more information on Rosebud Management Systems products and services and an evaluation of whether Eden Server might be the right tool for your needs, please visit their web site at http://www.RosebudUSA.com |