Customer Background
Our customer is a trust worthy manufacturer and retailer of leading basic apparel
under some of the world's effective apparel brands. Our customer has companies
in various parts of Europe and Eastern Europe, including the United Kingdom,
Italy, Germany, France, and Spain.
Technology Used
The products and technologies used in this effort by our team and the customer
were,
- IBM Integration Bus v10
- IBM MQ v8
- IBM WebSphere Message Broker v6.1.03
- IBM DB2 v10
The Business Requirement
With evolving integration needs and limited functionality with existing IBM
product set, our customer wanted to upgrade and migrate to higher versions of
the products to harness the maximum benefits of technology in current
environment and respond quickly to market trends. To enable this, customer
wanted the following,
- Monitor business transactions in IBM Integration Bus, track and report the
lifecycle of a payload message through an end-to-end enterprise
transaction
- Universal connectivity includes standards, de facto standards, industry and
custom systems
- Support Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), auditing or data capture for
potential later replay
- Exposing and invoking RESTful services using an Enterprise Service Bus
- The existing IBM tool version was obsolete and even IBM is not supporting
those products, so migration to advance version of the IBM product was
mandatory
- IBM Integration Bus surpasses Open Source and commercial competition
with superior performance and usability
Migration Activity
To support the business requirements of the customer's integration platform the
following migration and upgrade activities were executed by our team
successfully,
- Migration of IBM Message Broker from version 6.1.0.3 to IBM Integration
Bus 10.0.0.3
- Upgrade of IBM WebSphere MQ from version 7.0.1.2 to version 8.0.0.4
- Upgrade of IBM WebSphere DB2 from version 9.1 to version 10.5.0.7
Our Solution and Support
Miracle has a rich history of delivering innovative and cost effective solutions
around IBM's Integration Product Set including being awarded multiple times as a
leader in the space of SOA, Connectivity and Middleware. Over the last 16 years
we have partnered with IBM on numerous engagements and have helped
customers enable themselves with robust and future-enabled integration
platforms.
Our team was able to quickly understand the needs of the customer and deliver
with high standards of service. The migration and upgrade team consisted of two
admins and two developers, who analyzed the current configurations of MB, MQ
and DB2 to make sure that we have a perfect understanding of all the dependent
artifacts.
The entire effort took around 16 to 20 weeks within the development
environment, with another 4 to 6 weeks of time to check the development testing
results in QA environment and finally push to the production environment.
Customer Benefits
Some of the features and benefits that the customer experienced after the
migration to IIB were,
- WebSphere MQ is no longer a prerequisite for using IBM Integration Bus on
distributed platforms, which means that they can develop and deploy
applications independently of WebSphere MQ - They can also run and
administer integration nodes without requiring the WebSphere MQ
Explorer
- Efficient and scalable caching using ESQL shared variables in IBM
Integration Bus was possible
- DFDL can be used as SOA artifacts and can be used with other WebSphere
product due to its open standard feature
- Ability to reprocess the failure message by implementing record and replay
feature
- Quickly get started with a radically simplified, single-package installation
and improved support for unit test
- Flexibly interact with WebSphere MQ using connection policies
- Simplify administration of Integration Bus by using the improved web
browser user interface which includes new capabilities for deployment,
creating, editing and attaching policy documents
- Rapidly create REST APIs and use the new, graphical data mapper to
support the transformation of un-modelled data structures
- Reuse common resources, such as message models, sub flows, Java, and
ESQL code in shared libraries
- REST API can be called from any HTTP client, including client-side JavaScript
code that is running in a web browser
