IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009 - 20

Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. A second retail banner, PriceRite, was established in 1985 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Wakefern and today includes 36 stores located in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Wakefern supports retailers with product procurement, warehousing and transportation services. Because of this arrangement, Wakefern’s members and their wholesale customers can buy in volume at lower prices. According to Charles Hawalka, manager of infrastructure with Wakefern’s Computer Information Ser vices Division (CISD), “This arrangement allows us to pass those savings on to consumers, making us a market leader in our trading area.” Headquartered in Keasbey, N.J., Wakefern operates more than 2.5 million square-feet of warehouse space and has one of the largest transportation fleets on the East Coast. Its 400 tractors and 2,000 trailers traveled more than 35 million miles in 2007. Wakefern manages all of the IT systems at the ShopRite and PriceRite stores, including each store’s IBM System p 520s and IBM 4690s, as well as its own back-office System p 520 servers and the System z9 EC. As one might expect, there’s much back and forth between these systems— as well as those of Wakefern’s business partners—to support the cooperative. “We r un bet ween 1,000 to 1,500 f iletransfer processes a day,” says Jim Murphy, senior systems programmer with Wakefern’s CISD. These include pricing information, order files and pharmacy information. Additionally, Wakefern conducts complete, daily backups of each ser ver at each store. A ll together, “close to 50 gigabytes of data a day” are backed up, Murphy remarks. This surely isn’t a trifling number, and is one that demands much bandwidth and a speedy form of data transport. SNA and NetView, as Hawalka points out, simply “weren’t up to that task. It used to take hours just to pull the stores’ terminal log files from the 4690s. We needed an IP solution that would allow us to replace SNA and NVDM. We needed an IP solution to move forward.” its Windows* OS-based boxes and the 4690 platform. “NFM automatically converts the data to an ASCII or EBCDIC format,” Murphy says. A n o t h e r k e y c om p on e n t t o t h e s o l u t i on w a s i t s similarity to NVDM. Both NFM and NVDM use comparable terminology, which made it easier for Wakefern to transition to the new product. As Hawalka explains, “TPS did a good job designing NFM to replace NVDM. And at the same time, they enhanced it, giving it more functionality than NVDM.” One such additional function was the capability for the UP CLOSE CUSTOMER: Wakefern Food Corporation HEADQUARTERS: Keasbey, N.J. BUSINESS: Supplier, warehouser and transporter for retail-based cooperative HARDWARE: Hundreds of IBM System p 520s and older AIX OS-based servers, as well as an IBM System z9 Enterprise Class SOFTWARE: The IBM 4690 point-of-sale OS and TPS/ NetWork File Manager from TPS Systems CHALLENGE: Improving data exchanges between itself, its retail partners and its vendors SOLUTION: Replacing the increasingly outmoded SNA and NetView Distribution Manager and dial-up connections with the IP-based TPS/NetWork File Manager Automatic Conversions With these concerns in mind, Wakefern began examining alternatives to its SNA/NetView mode of communications. Between 2001 and 2003, the company evaluated many replacement solutions, discussed the situation with several vendors and tested some of the products. Most of them, however, “didn’t have the functionality we needed,” Hawalka recalls. Except, that is, for TPS’s NFM. Once Wakefern selected TPS, the company began converting data feeds from NVDM to NFM in March 2003 and completed them within six months without having to change any of the data-processing programming on the mainframe, its many System p servers, 20 M A R C H/A PRIL 2009 ibmsystemsmag.com/mainframe

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IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe - March/April 2009

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