International Software Products - DARSTRAN - PA-RISC to Integrity Server

ISP

International Software Products

ISP's experience with the Conversion from PA-RISC to the Integrity Server.

We would like to thank Hewlett-Packard for the opportunity to become a Business Partner through HP's Developer and Solution Partner program. Under this Program and the related Development Systems Loan Program, we were offered the loan of an HP rx2640 Integrity Server free of charge with which to port our current software from an HP PA-RISC C200 system to the Itanium-based HP-UX 11i V2 rx2620.

The porting of the software was absolutely transparent with no code changes required. Because our software does process mainframe generated EBCDIC files, we expected some minor issues but none surfaced. Our software, DARSTRAN, provides replication of CA-IDMS mainframe data to various Relational Database Management Systems(RDBMS) running under HP-UX and other UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Linux and z/OS Mainframe systems. In the case of porting our code to Itanium, the prime RDBMS is Oracle 10g. In addition to Oracle, IBM's MQSeries is an integral part of the replication process where the user needs updates applied to the RDBMS as quickly as is technically possible. i.e. sub-second. Again, we experienced no problems with the installation and operation of Oracle 10g and IBM MQSeries Version 6 for Itanium.

The rx2620 provides us with an in-house system for performing the porting and testing. This alleviated the issue of having to purchase yet another system, we currently run 18+ different platforms in support of our clients differing target systems. Further, it eliminated the tedious and limiting option of placing software on a Vendor's remote server. Scheduling test time, the issue of installing Oracle, IBM's MQSeries and other third-party products on non-owned systems can result in intolerable licensing issues. As any developer knows, an on site system provides the access, flexibility, backup and recovery options that is not available remotely.

We are a member of IBM's Partner World for Developers for our mainframe software components but the system required for running z/OS, z/VM and VSE are third-party provided and contain non-IBM third-party emulation software which means that we must purchase or lease the system?

With the advent of the HP-UX 11i Version 3, we see a very real opportunity to exploit the new virtualization features that currently have on the Microsoft Windows and Red at Linux AMD/Intel platforms in using one system to provide multiple operating system development and test facilities for Itanium versions of various HP or HP Partner provided operating systems and RDBMS.

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