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Photo by Brent Isenberger |
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The decision to move core applications from a
legacy
mainframe to a newer, more open, and
more cost-effective environment is never taken
lightly. The decision to engage in a wholesale
migration, with the aim of completely eliminating a
legacy architecture of 17 years’ standing, is an even
more serious affair. Yet this is precisely the ambitious
plan that Iowa-based SHAZAM is successfully
executing. In a groundbreaking project informally
dubbed RTS (for “Rewrite the Switch”), the company
is on track to move its core switching business,
card authorization services, terminal driving business,
and key customer enhancement modules to
the HP NonStop platform.
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| As a member-owned regional switch, SHAZAM
provides financial services to a variety of large and
small community financial institutions. The company
offers a full suite of electronic funds transfer (EFT)
solutions—including card authorization, ATM,
automated clearing house, Federal Reserve, and
switching services—as well as gift cards and a
robust merchant product portfolio.
SHAZAM is the sixth-largest EFT network in the
country, has 1,669 financial participants, and has
been in business for 28 years. “Our goal is to bring
superior, cost-effective products and services to the
community financial institutions, allowing them to
compete with the larger nationwide institutions,”
explained Terry Dooley, senior vice president of
Information Technology and CIO. “NonStop technology
from HP is strategic in helping us achieve this goal.” |
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| SHAZAM operates in an extremely challenging
environment, with mergers and acquisitions of the
larger processing centers driving the price per
transaction down as volume increases. To remain
competitive, EFT switch providers like SHAZAM
must add features and functionality that will give
their customers a competitive edge. “As the large
networks combine, they will drive core EFT switching
to the commodity level,” stated Dooley. “Our challenge
is to add value to our products and services,
allowing us to compete on more than price alone.”
To meet this challenge, SHAZAM needs what HP
NonStop technology offers. “The primary reason
SHAZAM is moving to the NonStop platform is to
restructure our applications and code, and to create
an infrastructure that supports rapid deployment of
new products and services,” continued Dooley.
“This will also allow us to add functionality to those
products, without the massive effort that was
required to introduce changes to the legacy code
and older technology.”
Dooley pointed to the Open System Services
(OSS) subsystem of the NonStop environment, with
its support for C++, Java™ technology, object-oriented
CORBA, and other open standards, as a critical element
in improving time to market. By contrast,
SHAZAM’s ability to implement these higher languages
within the legacy mainframe environment
was limited.
Continuous availability was another important
consideration in the decision to move to the
NonStop platform. “When we looked at the uptime
of our mainframe system—and at our capability to
improve that uptime—it became clear that a different
approach was warranted,” said Dooley. “With
the linear scalability of the NonStop platform, we
can increase capacity without replacing the entire
machine. This is a very big benefit, because we
don’t have to go down for an extended period of
time to do a machine swap. And it allows us to
reduce our costs, because the NonStop server is less
expensive to run as the transaction rate increases.
Moving to the NonStop platform is going to save us
money, and it’s going to improve uptime.” |
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| The first core application moved to the NonStop
platform was card authorization services (CAS),
which enables SHAZAM to provide community
financial institutions with low-cost ATM and debit
card programs.
Here’s how it works: The institution sends the
card base and balance file to SHAZAM. When a
customer uses the ATM or makes a point-of-sale
purchase, SHAZAM authorizes the transaction on
behalf of the institution, based on the data provided.
Once a day, a posting file is created; the bank
retrieves this file and updates its accounts.
“By giving our member institutions access to
card programs—including MasterCard debit cards,
Visa debit cards, and ATM cards—CAS makes them
competitive with much larger institutions,” commented
Dooley. “What SHAZAM brings to the table
is our network presence, our capability to integrate
with any of the switches throughout the country
and route those transactions nationally.”
CAS is the first module that SHAZAM will release
on the NonStop platform. Next will be the terminal
driving, switching services, and various “single
point of entry” customer enhancement modules.
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| As a result of its in-depth analysis, SHAZAM
projected that the NonStop system–based CAS
solution would deliver cost savings of approximately
30 percent as compared with the corresponding
mainframe solution. Although it’s too early
to quantify actual savings, the company stands
by its projection.
According to Dooley, lower maintenance costs
for the NonStop system will account for most of the
savings. “When we did the initial comparison, we
found the legacy mainframe to be a bit less expensive
in one-time cost, but much more expensive in
software licensing, especially as overall capacity
grows,” he said. “The NonStop system was a little
more from the perspective of one-time cost; however,
the overall increase in licensing cost is insignificant as
the system grows from 1 processor to 16 processors.
As capacity grows, the savings with the NonStop
platform really start to kick in.”
SHAZAM also expects to lower costs through an
increase in developer productivity, using C++, Java
technology, and object-oriented code design. “The
open standards support of the NonStop platform is
absolutely key to what we’re doing,” Dooley noted.
“As we develop our solutions in the NonStop system
environment, we must be able to integrate our
existing legacy solutions, Web-based applications,
and security solutions. The open standards support
of the NonStop system allows us to integrate
technologies with minimal customization.”
The inherent availability of the NonStop architecture
is another important source of cost savings.
“The NonStop system is cost-effective because you’re
not paying extra for fault tolerance,” stated Dooley.
“If fault tolerance is not built in at the hardware
level, you have to put application fault tolerance on
top of it—and whenever you do that, you increase
the complexity of your application considerably.”
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| The NonStop architecture delivers continuous
availability by design, making it possible to write
single-threaded versus multi-threaded programs.
This simplifies the programming and implementation
of solutions on the NonStop platform. |
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| Continuous availability is critical in the EFT
processing world. “We want our processing infrastructure
to be up all the time,” said Dooley. “When
customers submit their transactions at ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, or the Internet, we want them to
be confident that the transaction will be authorized
and settled without fault. Uptime is key to consumer
happiness, to reputation, and to growing market
demographics. To be in the financial services
processing game, you must be able to process
transactions at all times.” SHAZAM’s target is
99.9999 percent application availability, which
amounts to less than five minutes of downtime a year.
Scalability is also important to SHAZAM. “The
NonStop architecture allows us to add processing
power without taking our system or applications
down,” continued Dooley. “To upgrade a CPU in
our existing environment requires a full CPU
replacement. With the NonStop system, customers
can simply buy processors, plug them in, and create
copies of the application on the new processors,
effectively increasing capacity by the number of
processors added.”
The ability of the NonStop system to handle a
complex mixed workload is especially critical in
the EFT processing environment. “We will run both
the online and back-office settlement and billing
applications on the same server, and the prioritization
capabilities of the NonStop platform are key in
making this possible,” explained Dooley. “If we’re
running 50 percent CPU utilization and we submit
a batch job, we can assign a lower priority to the
batch job to ensure that online transaction response
times are not impacted.”
SHAZAM has two NonStop S86000 servers,
including a four-processor development node and
an eight-processor production node. NonStop SQL is
a critical part of the system, as are NonStop CORBA,
iTP WebServer, and HP Atalla network security
processors. SHAZAM runs the SequeLink product and
uses the Enterprise Toolkit (ETK) for programming
and integration of Visual Studio .NET. A key
NonStop system partner, Insession, provides management
software for the systems. SHAZAM also
uses many other HP products throughout the company,
including HP ProLiant servers, laptops, desktop
PCs, and printers.
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| TERRY DOOLEY is the senior vice president of Information Technology and CIO for the SHAZAM network.
An 18-year veteran of the EFT industry, he has extensive experience in LAN and WAN networking,
mainframe, Web, open systems integration, and IT security. Terry’s industry experience allows him to
bridge the gap between business need and the technology required to support it. |
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HP and SHAZAM enjoy an effective partnership. “We
have worked very closely together,” said Dooley.
“Although we did encounter some significant bumps
and roadblocks—not unexpected when you’re
pushing the envelope with new technology—HP
has been very supportive of our requests for fixes,
enhancements, and product changes. The company
has responded quickly to ensure that, as we roll
out the next generation of payment solutions, they
will be state-of-the-art. SHAZAM couldn’t ask for a
better technology partner than HP.”
The partnership delivers benefits in both directions.
“HP has realized the quality and detail that
SHAZAM puts into reviewing issues before we
submit them,” continued Dooley. “Our feedback
has helped HP improve its overall product capabilities,
which will benefit other customers as well. Both
sides win—we get best-of-breed solutions using
HP products and services, and HP gets valuable
feedback that will help the company make its products
stronger and more effective in the marketplace.
It is a very tight and successful partnership.”
Dooley returned to the partnership theme in
summing up his main message. “I would say that
HP is a technology partner that you can trust and
rely on,” he concluded. “If I have an issue, I know
I can call my executive team at HP and they will
take it seriously. The partnership is marked by
mutual respect, recognition that each company is
the expert in its field, and a clear understanding
that we need to listen to each other. I think we do
that very effectively.”
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Real-time focus
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SHAZAM’s entire implementation on the NonStop
platform will adhere to HP’s Zero Latency Enterprise
(ZLE) architecture for real-time movement of transactions
to the company’s settlement and billing process.
For Terry Dooley, CIO at SHAZAM, it all comes down
to the database.
“The foundation of ZLE is the NonStop SQL database,”
he asserted. “It provides one relational engine underneath
all the applications, keeping the information in
a central store and prioritizing the workload as the
system accesses the database. This allows us to bring
the transactions in and authorize them using the
relational database; at the same time, that information
is immediately accessible to the back-office systems.
The result is less data replication and reduced complexity,
because it’s no longer necessary to synchronize
the data between platforms. This makes us more
adaptive in responding to market demands and our
customers’ needs.”
The ability to implement the real-time architecture
in an incremental fashion has helped reduce risk at
SHAZAM. “When we rolled in the new NonStop system,
our end users did not know anything had occurred,
beyond the notification that SHAZAM provided,” noted
Dooley. “The phased migration allowed us to validate our
approach in parallel runs before we went live, making
sure that everything settled and posted correctly, and
that all the funds were moved appropriately. We were
able to ensure that things were right before migrating
the product set off the old system.”
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