Hennepin County streamlines inter-departmental communication through infrastructure consolidation and business integration

In addition to handling approximately 30 percent of the adult probation and parole population for the state of Minnesota, the Hennepin County DOCC also provides pretrial services and runs the Adult Corrections Facility, Juvenile Probation and Parole, Juvenile Detention Center, the County Home School, Sentence to Service and Family Court Services.

DOCC AFS probation and parole agents work closely with district courts, state government and the county sheriff’s office. Because cross-agency communication plays a critical role in the department’s success, DOCC participates in a statewide initiative called CriMNet to interconnect justice data systems. Existing systems and interfaces within the county have evolved over several years, and each application often ran on its own separate physical server—resulting in a complex, distributed infrastructure that was costly and inefficient to manage. While Web-enabling and reworking interfaces for their applications, DOCC IT also wanted to retain the many benefits the mainframe had provided in legacy applications. In addition, they wanted to avoid buying new hardware and spending developer time maintaining server infrastructure.

To address these challenges, technology officials began searching for ways to consolidate the IT infrastructure and standardize the interfaces among systems. As part of this process, they compared the county’s existing application server, Sybase EAServer software, with IBM WebSphere® software. They also considered analysis from Gartner Group and performed a cost of ownership analysis that projected startup costs and operational costs for both platforms for three years.

Linux virtual servers on the mainframe offer both flexibility and high reliability
At the time of the study, Java™ developers at the DOCC were already using WebSphere Application Developer software and giving it favorable reviews. In addition, DOCC was in the process of implementing the IBM Rational Unified Process® platform and several legacy systems already ran on IBM mainframes. Because Hennepin technology officials valued the reliability, scalability, security and disaster recovery capabilities of these mainframes, they elected to evaluate server consolidation onto Linux virtual servers.

From this evaluation, Hennepin officials concluded that a System z-based system could offer disaster recovery, manageability and scalability benefits that a distributed system could not. Today, Hennepin County runs WebSphere Application Server on an IBM System z 900 server using two Integrated Facilities for Linux (IFLs). The IBM z/VM® operating system supports virtual Linux servers as guests, while IBM DB2 Universal Database™ software supports critical data.

In addition, the Hennepin County data center includes an IBM System z 800 server and an IBM TotalStorage® Enterprise Storage Server® storage system. IBM Global Services provides disaster recovery services.

Standardized interfaces help simplify information access for public safety officials
With its data sharing applications running on Linux on System z, DOCC can securely share information among justice system applications using a single, standardized interface developed on WebSphere Application Server. Because administrators no longer need to maintain several separate interfaces, the department can more easily manage and update the system, as well as provide information to public safety personnel more rapidly.

“It was a plus that WebSphere would work seamlessly with the infrastructure we already had in place,” says Tammi Kolasa, information technology supervisor for Hennepin County. “With the consolidation of applications onto virtualized mainframe servers, the potential for county-wide savings is in place. We have spent an immense amount of redundant staff time and money licensing, patching and upgrading all our Microsoft® Windows® servers. The decision to run WebSphere Application Server on Linux on System z has given us a flexible, enterprise-quality environment that helps free developers to write applications instead of supporting server infrastructure. Operations can create a new server for us within minutes—without requiring us to purchase more hardware and software.”

Consolidated systems help facilitate improved manageability and low costs
“In the distributed Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environments, each server would use maybe two to ten percent of the available processing power—the rest would remain unused,” says Duane Pepin, information technology technical supervisor at Hennepin County. By migrating its J2EE-based information systems to Linux on System z, Hennepin County can take advantage of the mainframe’s resource sharing capabilities to help improve processor utilization. System administrators also can generate new Linux virtual servers on the System z server within minutes—giving the department the flexibility to make changes and deploy new applications quickly and easily.

A consolidated environment also helps decrease server maintenance time by enabling Hennepin County to manage fewer physical servers. With fewer servers, the department also has reduced its space and power consumption requirements. “We created eight new virtual servers without consuming additional data center resources,” says Pepin.

In addition to manageability and recovery, Hennepin County has achieved cost benefits as well. “Software license charges for WebSphere are significantly less in a virtualized environment than they are in a distributed environment,” says Pepin. “In a non-virtualized environment, we would need at least six licenses to support test, development, quality assurance and production. Now we only hold two WebSphere licenses—one for each IFL on the System z 900 server.”

Extending the benefits of Linux on System z to all county systems
Based on the success of the DOCC project, Hennepin County is now consolidating all of its key J2EE-based citizen service and back office applications onto the mainframe. Mike Zimmerman, manager of development for Hennepin County, summarizes the benefits: “WebSphere Application Server, running on Linux on System z, has the potential to harness the positive attributes of mainframe technology with the flexibility of non-mainframe software. Server proliferation, software licensing costs and technical personnel support costs can be reduced—and our critical systems are protected by full disaster recovery services.”