About Securex
The Securex Group operates across Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands, providing a broad variety of services related to human resources. Securex has 30 offices and employs 1,500 people offering payroll services, health and employer's liability insurance, human resources management and more to large corporations, small-to-medium businesses, and to private individuals alike. The Securex clientele includes more than 70,000 companies and over 105,000 self-employed and individuals.
Challenge
In terms of financial revenues, the largest part of the Securex business in Belgium is the provision of outsourced payroll services to enterprises. Since the 1960s, the company has run its payroll calculation and management systems on a mainframe platform. After deploying Web-based applications for front-office payroll administration on Intel-based servers, Securex needed to replicate payroll data from its master databases on the mainframe to local databases on the Intel servers.
The replication process—which involved moving data from DB2 running on z/VSE to DB2 Universal Database for Microsoft Windows—put heavy demands on the mainframe's processing resources, making it a relatively costly option. Any updates made by Web users were then passed back to the mainframe using message queuing technology, where a separate process would reflect the changes in the master databases. This set of processes was not entirely reliable, and data was frequently lost on the Intel side, requiring Securex to re-build tables and re-run the replication.
Securex wanted a solution that would improve database performance, reduce administration and provide more reliable data to its Web-based applications.
Novell Solution
Working with IBM, Securex considered its options for resolving its issues with data replication performance and reliability. Migrating from z/VSE to the newer z/OS operating system would have resolved some functionality issues in DB2 and improved the flexibility, but would have significantly increased the total cost of ownership. Instead, Securex chose to adopt Linux on the mainframe, creating a separate logical partition on its IBM System z platform and installing SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server.
Following testing and optimisation work with the IBM DB2 development team in Toronto, IBM successfully made the required enhancements to the DB2 Connect technology that links the Linux-based databases with those on the z/VSE partitions of the mainframe and Windows servers.
"We were confident that SUSE Linux Enterprise on the mainframe was the best solution in terms of price-performance, reliability and flexibility, so we worked closely with IBM to optimise the DB2 part of the solution," said Johan de Bruyne, Technical Manager at Securex. "The data managed by DB2 in the Linux partition can now be easily and reliably shared with batch and transactional systems on the mainframe and with the Web-based systems on the Windows side."
Securex is using the IBM z/VM operating system to run four virtual SUSE Linux Enterprise Server instances—one for the 50GB of production databases, one for database testing, one for user acceptance and one for systems testing.
"When selecting a Linux distribution, we looked at the installed base and experience in Europe, and concluded that SUSE Linux Enterprise would give us the best support and easiest access to expertise," said de Bruyne. "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the mainframe gives us a stable, high-performance environment for our critical corporate databases."
Results
The introduction of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the IBM mainframe platform enabled Securex to completely eliminate its previous data replication processes, along with all the effort previously required to maintain the replication logic. By removing the replication workload from the mainframe, Securex freed up around 30 percent of the total processing power, enabling it to postpone a planned hardware upgrade by two years.
"With DB2 on SUSE Linux Enterprise on the mainframe, we have extended the useful life of the existing hardware by two years, significantly reducing our total cost of ownership," said de Bruyne. "The solution also improved the performance of mainframe-based transactions for the 1,000 people who use applications linked to the corporate databases."
Now that data is no longer replicated from the mainframe to databases on the external Windows servers, Securex has eliminated its earlier reliability problems, improving the quality of data and eliminating the need for lengthy repairs to database tables.
"It's now much easier to maintain the links between various systems and the corporate databases, which has certainly reduced our administrative workload and enabled us to provide a better service to users," said de Bruyne. "Our strategic model for the future is that any data that we need to share between multiple platforms will go onto DB2 on SUSE Linux Enterprise on the mainframe."