Dutch airline KLM is rolling out a management
infrastructure to lower the cost of running its IBM MQSeries
middleware, which links mainframes, Unix and Windows servers
running vital business processes.
The project, which started two-and-a-half years ago as KLM's
Enterprise Wide Messaging Service, has seen the airline standardise
on MQSeries as its middleware platform.
The middleware is essential for linking internal and external
applications to provide services such as baggage handling and
flight planning.
KLM had to acquire specialist tools to run its MQSeries middleware.
A standard implementation would have required separate engineers to
support the middleware for each of the airline's operating system
environments: the OS/390 and TPF mainframe operating systems and
Unix and Windows server environments.
This would have proved neither efficient or practical, so Hans
Rietman, information services operations team manager at KLM,
deployed Q Pasa, a real-time middleware monitoring tool from
MQSoftware. The product provides users with a single view of the
MQSeries environment from one console.
Rietman said, "We wanted to manage the whole environment and make
it easy for our IT staff, without the need for an MQ specialist for
each platform."
Using Q Pasa, Rietman said his team of four MQSeries mainframe
engineers could monitor MQSeries across mainframes and 60 Unix and
30 Windows servers. He said, "This makes our operations much
simpler."
In November, KLM will begin implementing end-to-end service
management based around monitoring MQSeries to support baggage
handling and electronic bookings.
Glitches in middleware have a far greater knock-on effect than
other IT failures as they affect transactions across multiple
systems, according to analyst group Forrester.
KLM joins with MQ Software to develop monitoring
aid
When KLM decided to standardise on MQSeries middleware, IBM
provided no monitoring agents to probe the airline's highly
specialised IBM TPF (transactional processing facility)
environment.
TPF is an operating environment geared towards high throughput
transaction processing and is used exclusively for credit card
authorisation and hotel and airline booking systems.
KLM decided to work in a joint development project with
MQSoftware to write a version of the Q Pasa agent software to do
the job.
Phil Hardy at MQSoftware said a team of MQSoftware developers in
Minneapolis worked with a TPF specialist from KLM to build the
software. KLM provided access to its TPF mainframe for
testing.
The tool is now on the market and KLM will receive payments for
each TPF agent sold. Hardy said, "There are only about 120 sites
using TPF. It is a very rare skill."
Hardy said he was talking to Amex, WorldSpan, Amadeus, SNCF and
Holiday Inn about the TPF agent.