- Boston College meets user demand by ensuring the course management and financial systems have current data from the VSAM component in near real time.
- Batch updates VSAM while CICS is online and writing to the same files.
- Automated recovery reduces the batch window and decreases the number of manual decisions staff need to make.
- Boston College was able to use SYSB-II as a development tool to quickly assume responsibility for the changes made by the federal loan administration with their current staff.
Introduction
One of the features making the greater Boston area so attractive is that it's home to numerous prestigious institutions of higher learning, including Boston College. Boston College today offers 50 fields of study to its 14,500 undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom are high achievers. These students have collectively earned distinguished honors such as the Rhodes Scholarship, Goldwater Scholarship, and Fulbright Grant. Boston College has also placed highly with U.S. News & World Report, which ranked it 39th among national universities for 2024 And the school reported an impressive endowment totaling $3.8 billion.
Meeting user demand for access to timely data updates without deadlocks
In Boston College's IT environment, some applications are hosted off of the mainframe but have a tie to mainframe components. These applications could perform updates during the day for some tasks, but other tasks had to wait overnight for VSAM updates. The VSAM updates occurred after the CICS system that accessed the same files closed down for the night.
One of these applications was the course management system, which helped professors manage classes and helped students with tasks like homework. The application would generate several hundred potential updates that weren't finalized until overnight VSAM updates ran. Another application was the financial system. Tasks that required VSAM updates were delayed until the next morning because of their tie to overnight batch processing. Getting these financial documents faster by writing transactions and having scores of staff do data entry wasn't realistic because the software generated 4,000 invoices, requisitions, and purchase orders every day.
Deans, professors, and staff didn't understand the delay in getting information, and it hindered their ability to work efficiently. So, IT had brought in and installed a solution. As time went on, they faced two issues: an increasing numbers of deadlocks and end of support. “Several times a month, we would have some sort of intervention or outage because of a deadlocks in the solution,” said Jack Spang, Director of Production Services at Boston College. “But we tolerated the deadlocks due to the fact that we needed the functionality.” Then the situation deteriorated after an upgrade to a new version of z/OS. “We were up to once a week that a deadlock was happening, and it was happening at our busiest, most critical times.” The situation spurred Boston College to look for a different solution.
Considering potential solutions
One alternative solution was dismissed due to architecture requirements. Rewriting wasn't an option because Boston College had 3,000 batch jobs and 2,500 online transactions. And, the current system was stable and working. That's when Boston College took a fresh look at SYSB- II, which it considered previously. “If I had compared both SYSB-II and the product we originally went with four or five years after we did, SYSB-II would have won hands down in functionality,” said Spang.
Getting into production quickly, with good business results
After deciding to bring in SYSB-II, Boston College installed the product with the help of H&W employees and ran through extensive testing. And how did the implementation go? “Scarily quickly,” said Spang. “I had a vicious test series set up. It was probably a month with our previous solution to make it through my test cases. I went through the test case for SYSB-II in probably a day and a half. From the minute H&W employees got off the plane at Logan airport to when I started moving programs from our previous solution to SYSB-II was probably a week.”
After SYSB-II was in production, Spang noticed an improvement in terms of approval from his internal customers. “It was a huge bump up in terms of customer satisfaction,” said Spang. “There's huge elasticity from letting us access the VSAM files using a DBMS-like mechanism.”
Spang has had time to experience the flexibility of SYSB-II for varying job needs. Occasionally, jobs that run at night need to run during the day. So, he can just make a JCL change to add the SYSB-II functionality, and the job simply runs.
The opposite situation is also easy to handle. If a daytime job doesn't run due to a process that fails or an unavailable file, staff can run that job at night using SYSB-II. “I didn't want people changing JCL at two o'clock in the morning,” said Spang. “So there's just a parameter in SYSB-II that said if CICS wasn't available, the job would run, and it would skip to native mode. SYSB-II is just out of sight out of mind. It's just the power of the system.”
Automated recovery reduces batch window, simplifies decision process
Boston College also discovered a surprising benefit of SYSB-II was its recovery. Previously when the CICS system was down at night, staff backed up the VSAM files associated with a batch job and then ran the job. If something went wrong, staff just restored the files from the backup. With filesharing capabilities, staff could run batch jobs during the day while CICS was accessing, and possibly updating, the same VSAM files. However, if the batch job abended, recovery wasn't just a matter of restoring from backup files because several CICS transactions could have changed the files since the backup.
With Boston College's previous solution, recovery was tedious because it didn't know if CICS had also changed the files. Staff had to figure out which files to recover. That changed with SYSB-II. “SYSB-II's recovery method is much more real time,” said Spang. “SYSB-II actually intelligently tried to recover files. It went back and looked at whether a file had been committed by the batch job and then updated by CICS. I had the ability to inspect the recovery and put the file back the way it was or keep the CICS update. I ended up needing to make a lot fewer decisions that I didn't want to have to make, deciding whether a business update should be undone or not, with dozens of them.”
SYSB-II recovery allowed Boston College to reduce the time needed for the nightly batch run. “SYSB-II's recovery options really are head and shoulders above what anybody else had and save us a lot of scheduling time,” said Spang.
Although recovery works well, Boston College doesn't need it very often. “The other nice thing about SYSB-II is it almost never fails,” said Spang. “I think I've used the recovery once. It's so automated. Recovery's a nice insurance policy to have, but now that the patient is much healthier, I may not need the life insurance. The time savings from fewer backups is very important to us.”
An unexpected task: rapid development for new federal loan requirements
Now, Boston College has discovered a second, unforeseen use for the software since its initial acquisition.
Boston College had to prepare to assume this task, which involved a batch process residing primarily on the mainframe, and it had to do so rapidly. When the government gave the final go-ahead, it thought schools had months to implement. In reality, they had about six weeks due to when students needed loan notification. “This was like an all- hands emergency,” said Spang.
“For the first time in several years, we actually did new development on the mainframe, and SYSB-II was a big piece of it,” said Spang. “SYSB-II was nice to have as a design feature instead of a fix because we could build batch jobs almost as if they were transactions.” Spang made it easier on the programmers by building three or four stock setups for the JCL, which they could just copy and paste into the code.
“We could've done some front-row work, like message queuing, but being able to accept the existing batch from the government and process it like CICS transactions saved us weeks of development,” said Spang. “It was critical to actually meeting a tight deadline.
Conclusion
Boston College has been able to achieve its goal to provide updates for VSAM data to ensure that its users can see important information, like enrolled students or invoices, in near real time. It has also allowed the IT staff to recover from abends quickly and reduce the nightly batch window. “With SYSB-II, an essential mainframe component doesn't become a limitation,” said Spang. “If SYSB-II went away, we'd probably replace it with about 2 person-years of programing to rebuild workflows. Without SYSB-II, we would have to literally be moving applications and data to a different environment.”
SYSB-II does all of this with only minor technical changes, and once installed it works day in and day out. “It's been perfect, honestly” said Spang. “It literally just runs. It's like it's just a part of CICS.”
Since installing SYSB-II, Spang has noticed the ongoing investment in enhancements. “The fact that H&W is still working on SYSB-II, that you still have people actively looking to make it better, makes a difference,” said Spang. “H&W staff were showing me some of the functionality that came out in different releases of SYSB-II. You could just see the work. And some of those additions were critical to our reliability.”
Support was also a factor that Spang came to appreciate. “H&W's support was top notch,” he said. “The reputation of a company lives and dies on support. If someone asks for a recommendation, H&W has earned it.” About his experience overall, Spang said “As vendors go, H&W has been the top of our list just for quality. SYSB-II has done H&W credit. We could not be more satisfied with the product or support.”
About H&W
