Upgrade to a new Version of Control-M and Integration with the Business Continuity Plan
Control/M up-grade and solution integration in the production DRP
In the setting of a heterogeneous IT environment, ARTESYS supported MAAF in its version upgrade of Control-M, managing an almost seamless transition thanks to a proven migration methodology and an advanced PCA approach.
With 7,000 people in France across almost 600 agencies, MAAF Assurances’ data centre manages an average of 11,000 tasks every day, relying on an operations team of 160 people, directed by Pascal Brosseron, the departmental head of IT at the heart of the Information and Telecommunications directorate, which brings together more than 600 people under the direction of Jean-Pierre Giquel.
MAAF runs on the scheduler Control-M from BMC Software in order to schedule distributed processes, the applications which manage the human-to-computer interface for the whole group. The architecture, which consists of two Control-M schedulers on Unix servers, three on Windows and two on z/OS servers – these last two assure the connection with the centralised scheduler – represents a heterogenous environment.
At the beginning of 2009, MAAF’s IT management team decided, in the light of its policy for managing the obsolescence of strategic elements of its IT, to upgrade its version of Control-M. “The version of Control-M that we were using had come to the end of its maintenance contract” explains Patrick Cezerac, IT project leader. “The anticipation of this deadline led us to look at a broader approach to developing our IT infrastructure, which meant an upgrade of equipment, operating systems, and therefore scheduling tools.”
Patrick Cezerac continues, « a migration project like this has several key aims. Firstly, the new solution had to be integrated with the existing systems, while respecting the original functionality. Next, the version upgrade of a strategic IT application such as a scheduler, which runs 24x7, requires a break in operations which had to be as short as possible so as to avoid impacting on the users, including the “internauts” – or regular web users. Finally, the migration of data had to be an entirely separate focus of attention – their conversion and the necessary tools represented a complex stage in the project which demanded a solid level of know-how.”
In order to effectively meet these objectives and to avoid taking any risk of causing the new system to fail, MAAF’s IT management team decided to seek support from a company specialising in IT infrastructure and management.
ARTESYS was chosen as partner due to its Control-M expertise and its experience of mainframe and distributed environments.
Following a review of IT services companies offering the required skills, MAAF turned to ARTESYS. Patrick Gauthier, head of IT, commented, “ARTESYS is one of the leading Control-M specialists in the French market and has proven experience of projects based on this solution. The company has also demonstrated its ability to work in the different environments of which our IT system is composed. Finally, ARTESYS offered us an extremely compelling data conversion methodology, which represented a very important aspect of the migration process.”
The project began in July 2009. ARTESYS initially began with an audit of the existing version, 6.1.03 of Control-M from BMC Software. In order to offer MAAF an architecture that would integrate the business continuity plan, ARTESYS then helped MAAF with the configuration and integration of version 6.4.01 of Control-M with the new operating system and the new hardware infrastructure.
As an integral part of the project, a new team of administrators was put in place by MAAF in order to manage the new IT infrastructure effectively. ARTESYS supervised the training and skills transfer to the new team, also providing MAAF with dedicated support.
Data Standardisation and Business Continuity
For the data upgrade, ARTESYS had to deal with an IT landscape consisting of Control-M databases which were not always standardised, and with inconsistent coding, some having been implemented according to a proprietary method five years previously. “ARTESYS used a conversion methodology and proven and highly effective transfer utilities. We were able to standardise the entirety of the data used by more than 600 scheduled application servers,” emphasises Patrick Gauthier.
“ ARTESYS was able to integrate the scheduler into the business continuity plan thanks to innovative technologies such as the Windows cluster and Oracle Data Guard. This approach was possible largely because the product supported these innovative technologies perfectly”, explains Alain Leclair, senior scheduling consultant at ARTESYS.
On completion of an operation which allowed the integration environments to be validated, the transfer to the new system took place on the 8th December 2009. “The system down-time lasted 60 minutes, which represents a very satisfactory level of quality”, commented Patrick Cezerac. “In a project that was complex and difficult to carry out, given the numerous issues, the support of ARTESYS was a vital element and was the key to the overall success of the project. Today we have at our disposal a new IT infrastructure which allows us to offer our employees a very high level of service on an entirely reliable basis.”
