BG-Phoenics extends the benefits of mainframe computing

BG-Phoenics GmbH offers a comprehensive set of IT infrastructure and software services to social security institutions and professional associations in Germany. Combining years of experience in IT services with deep industry knowledge and advanced technological capabilities, BG-Phoenics provides innovative solutions ranging from complete IT outsourcing to the development of new business software. The company operates out of two data centers and 12 offices in major cities throughout Germany, serving a total of 5,800 users in more than 130 locations.

As social insurance institutions, many of the organizations that BG‑Phoenics serves have statutory obligations to their members to ensure efficient, effective and secure information processing at low operational costs. To support these clients, BG-Phoenics aims for extremely high standards in the availability and performance of its IT infrastructure. It also aims to ensure maximum security for sensitive data—this is especially important for ‘multi-tenanted’ environments in which different clients are hosted on the same physical infrastructure.

To keep pace with evolving demands from customers, BG-Phoenics needed to build a new IT infrastructure that would combine high flexibility with low cost of ownership. Randolf Sigmund, Team Leader Operating Systems/Systems Management at BG-Phoenics, comments: “Our vision was to have a single platform that would combine the best features of the three architectures we were already using. We wanted the security, robustness and scalability of the mainframe, with the processing power and broad enterprise application support of the Unix world, plus the low costs and scale-out capability of x86 systems.”
As the number and scale of multi-tier applications at BG-Phoenics grew, the company was seeing a corresponding increase in complexity and management costs for its existing infrastructure. In general terms, BG-Phoenics observed that hardware acquisition costs were falling over time, that software costs were relatively static, but that personnel and other operational costs (including powering and cooling hardware) were rising steeply. The company’s vision was to simplify and integrate the different elements of its infrastructure in order to reduce costs and ensure higher quality of service for its clients. The key challenge was to achieve this while maintaining the flexibility and optimization of the existing multi-platform approach.

“By adding the new zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) to our IBM zEnterprise 196 servers, we have gained a single, fully integrated solution that can meet a number of different requirements,” says Sigmund. “We can run z/OS® and Linux on the z196 servers, IBM AIX® on Power Systems™ blade servers in the zBX, and both Linux and Microsoft Windows on Intel-architecture blades in the same zBX. All the hardware can be monitored and controlled using zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, and we benefit from having the application servers physically and logically close to our core DB2® databases on the z196 server.”

zBX in action
The new environment at BG-Phoenics is built around three key components: the IBM zEnterprise 196, which is optimized to host mission-critical workloads; the zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension, which can house selected IBM POWER7 and IBM System x® blade servers; and zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, which simplifies management of resources across all elements of the zEnterprise ensemble.

BG-Phoenics has two z196 servers housed in separate data centers that are four kilometers apart. The company added two zEnterprise BladeCenter Extensions, one to each z196, each containing two IBM BladeCenter PS701 servers with IBM POWER7 processors and two IBM BladeCenter HX5 servers with Intel Xeon processors. Both types of blade server within the zBX are fully virtualized as standard, with IBM PowerVM as the hypervisor layer for the Power Systems blades and an integrated hypervisor based on KVM—Kernel-based Virtual Machine technology—for the System x blades.

BG-Phoenics is already running two production systems on the zBX, both on AIX on PS701 blades. The first of these is IBM License Metric Tool, part of the IBM Power Systems Software suite. It provides vital information on the utilization of resources by different pieces of software across the entire Power Systems landscape—including BG-Phoenics’ standalone IBM Power 770 and IBM Power 595 servers. The second production environment on the zBX is IBM Tivoli® Enterprise Monitoring, which plays a key role in assuring quality of service by enabling BG-Phoenics to monitor and manage its complete infrastructure, including the distributed servers outside of the zEnterprise ensemble.

“We wanted to validate our vision for zEnterprise, and to prove to the wider business that the zEnterprise ensemble is already working and delivering the expected benefits,” says Sigmund. “We judged these two production environments to be relatively portable, and recognized that they offered a good way to build up confidence and expertise in using the new zBX solution. Both production environments are running well, and we are looking forward to migrating more systems in the coming months. As the scale of the zBX environment increases, the benefits in terms of cost and ease of management will become very significant.”

The HX5 blades—currently running test environments based on Linux virtual servers—will be used to host a number of different Linux-based systems, including a content management solution, an IBM WebSphere Application Server landscape, and some additional Tivoli Monitoring servers.

The standalone Power Systems servers—Power 770 and Power 595—will continue to provide a ‘scale-up’ option for AIX-based systems, while the Power blades in the zBX provide a new ‘scale-out’ option.

BG-Phoenics runs Lotus Domino servers for email and collaboration on Linux, hosted on z/VM on the z196 servers. These Lotus Domino servers are connected to IBM CommonStore for Lotus Domino Server, which runs on AIX on the PS701 blades. This is an early example of what BG-Phoenics plans to exploit far more extensively in the future: the ability to run different parts of a multi-tier environment on different elements of the zEnterprise System.

The organization continues to use z/OS for business-critical services, including a number of large IBM DB2 databases serving multiple SAP ERP landscapes, to ensure the required quality of service. While less critical, email is still highly important; using Linux makes it cost‑effective to run this service on the ultra-reliable z196 hardware with the efficiencies of virtualization on z.

As a technical proof of concept for the zEnterprise ensemble concept, BG-Phoenics tested the use of IBM InfoSphere DataStage to accelerate the population of its data warehouse with data from multiple sources. The test was highly successful, achieving a 30 percent reduction in runtime from 551 minutes to 383 minutes for one particular client environment.

Flexibility and simplicity
With three different architectures in a single physical environment, managed through a single set of integrated management tools, the IBM solution meets BG-Phoenics’ strategic requirement for flexibility combined with simplicity.

“A key driver for adopting zBX was to have the same method for implementing new servers across AIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows,” says Sigmund. “Standardization brings a host of benefits: faster and more transparent processes; reduced administration and lower training costs; improved quality; easier automation; and greater consistency, translating to reduced long-term cost of ownership. For example, by creating a set of ‘golden copy’ virtual server images, we can almost instantly deploy new servers that are precisely tuned to meet the requirements of a variety of different workloads. As well as avoiding hours of installation and testing work, we then also have a consistent target for software updates and security patches, so we continue to make savings in time and effort over the full life of the server.”

Focus on workload management
IBM zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager gives BG-Phoenics a new, workload-focused way to manage its multi-tier, multi-platform application landscapes, creating an ensemble of integrated IT resources. As the key piece of technology that ties together the different elements of the zEnterprise ensemble, Unified Resource Manager provides a broad and granular view of resource usage. It also enables automated prioritization of resources to critical workloads based on goal-oriented policies for applications running on POWER7 processor‑based blades. It also ensures flexibility, consistency and uniformity in server virtualization, and provides complete control over the highly secure low-latency internal network that connects the z196 with the zBX. As the company migrates more applications to the zEnterprise environment, Unified Resource Manager will provide a single point of control over service levels, significantly simplifying IT administration.

“zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager is a key element in the overall value proposition of the zEnterprise and zBX solution,” says Sigmund. “It will enable us to manage a multi-tier application running on completely different architectures as if it were a single workload. As a provider of software as a service to external clients, quality of service is just about the most important thing to us. Unified Resource Manager will make it far easier to ensure that all parts of an application are functioning correctly and delivering the desired service levels.”

He adds, “The combination of zBX and Unified Resource Manager brings control back to the central infrastructure function, where previously we were often forced to arrange things to suit each different application group. That tends to create a fragmented and decentralized approach, in which it is hard to control costs or benefit from standardization. With zBX and Unified Resource Manager, the hardware decision is no longer dictated by the application or the preference of the application team. Rather, the infrastructure function can build a set of optimized resources, then place each tier of each application on the most appropriate and most cost-effective platform. Standardization brings significant economies of scale, which helps BG‑Phoenics to deliver high quality of service at very competitive pricing.”

Fast, efficient, flexible
With a diverse set of optimized platforms, centrally managed and controlled from within the mainframe environment, BG-Phoenics can be far more responsive to the changing needs of its clients and to new requirements from the internal business. Faster time‑to‑market for new services will help the company to create new revenue‑generating capabilities faster than its competition, and the increased standardization will help maintain downward pressure on operating costs. Equally, the adoption of end-to-end virtualization across the mainframe, Power Systems and System x environments will enable BG‑Phoenics to achieve higher utilization, getting more useful work out of every Euro invested in new hardware.
“The zEnterprise 196 with zBX supports our vision of hardware‑agnostic positioning,” says Sigmund. “Put simply, it will enable us to choose the most appropriate operating system and architecture for each system, but also allow us to freely change the platform as business requirements change. For example, we might decide to run a certain WebSphere environment on Windows on a System x blade. Later, we could easily move it to AIX on a Power Systems blade, or to a Linux virtual server running on z/VM on the z196.”

He adds, “Equally, the ability to seamlessly run and manage all of these distinct environments within the zEnterprise enables us always to select the most appropriate combinations of platform for multi-tier solutions. In a distributed environment, there is often a need to compromise for the sake of simplicity and to avoid high management costs—so you might choose to run all tiers on a single type of platform, even though you would theoretically get better performance by choosing an optimized platform in each case. The zBX provides the best of both worlds: the flexibility of choosing the right platform for each workload, with simplicity of management that keeps long-term costs low.”

Sigmund concludes with a look to the future: “With a large number of mission-critical services running across multiple architectures within the zEnterprise landscape, there are some interesting future possibilities for disaster recovery. As new features are released by IBM, we intend to streamline and consolidate the way in which we protect systems against failure. This is part of our overall future vision: to have a single platform, managed and protected with a single set of consistent tools, yet fully capable of supporting the very diverse, multi-platform, multi-tenant solutions that we host.”