Alan Davies. Scorpio Software Services Pty Ltd

Transcription

1 Alan Davies Scorpio Software Services Pty Ltd

2 The migration of SAS/IntrNet TM V6-V8 TM V6 This presentation covers the migration of SAS/IntrNet TM V6, running on an NT server, to SAS/IntrNet TM V8 under OS/390.

3 About my client The HIC is a Commonwealth Statutory Authority, committed to improving Australia s health through payments and information.

4 The Health Insurance Commission The HIC has access to large amounts of health data. This data is supplied to numerous organisations to improve Australia s health system.

5 SAS and the HIC The Health Insurance Commission (HIC) Australia and The SAS Institute TM have an ongoing relationship which has been growing and evolving for fifteen years.

6 Why did the HIC want to provide information via the internet and how did we decided to go about it?

7 Over the last two years the HIC has been developing web based health information products. This was undertaken to make information more accessible to customers. The information is non-sensitive and individual service providers and customers cannot be identified.

8 Problems Faced It took 6 months to upgrade to V8 Working around webmasters control Moving data structures away from web server to another platform/box

9 Present Environment 1. Stand alone NT server running Lotus Domino Go Webserver. 2. SAS/InrNet TM outside of the firewall. 3. Non-sensitive information

10 Current Implementation NT Lotus Domino Go Webserver SAS/IntrNet COPY NT SAS/IntrNet Style SAS Datasets SAS Datasets HIC SAS COPY SAS Datasets OS/390 Browser

11 So why change? If it ain t broke, don t fix it!

12 Issues for change Scalability Security Simplification (change management) Politics

13 Mainframe SolutionS Lotus Notes NT COPY NT Lotus Notes NOTES OS/390 Media NOTES HTTP Webserver SAS/IntrNet EYE SAS OS/390 Browser HTTP Webserver (Proxy Server) SAS Datasets

14 Security The most secure way to provide Web access to information, was on the mainframe using OS/390.

15 How did we implement SAS/IntrNet TM under OS/ Web Server 2. Broker 3. SAS Application Server

16 Development Environment Which environment should we use HFS or PDS? HFS is new and slow PDS is old and fast

17 HFS and Open Edition More Unix than Unix OS/390 Standard Environment

18 How to implement new features. There are many new features in SAS V8 and we are now testing the new ODS system supplied with SASV8.

19 The site For a business perspective see John Trabingers Paper today in the Concourse at 11.45am

20 SAS Online Doc V8 References Taking Advantage of the SAS System on the OS/390 Platform. David Crow SAS Institute Inc, Cary, NC IBM Documents - refer to O/390 V2R8. 0 Unix System Service Planning (SC ), and Redbook O/390 Version 2 Release 6 Unix System Services Implementation and Customisation (SG ). Ian Castle Mainframe Web consultant (Currently based at the HIC) SAS, SAS/SECURE, SAS/IntrNet and SAS/CONNECT are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. Indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.

21 Questions

22 A bout the Presenter Mr Alan Davies Principal Consultant Scorpio Software Services Pty Ltd scorpio-software-services.com.au Phone: Mail: PO Box 2042, Tuggeranong 2901, Canberra, ACT, Australia

23 V8 LET S REV IT UP! Alan Davies Principal Consultant Scorpio Software Services Pty Ltd This paper covers the migration of SAS/IntrNet TM V6, running on an NT server, to SAS/IntrNet TM V8 under OS/390. It also explains some of the ways that users can utilize the SAS system for OS/390 to provide Web access to information. My presentation will describe some of the new features and how to take advantage of them. I hope to explain to you, how OS/390 and the SAS system can work together to provide stimulating solutions to queries. The driving force behind the migration, that I am going to discuss, was the need to upsize a Web based Application. It became evident, that the more information that was delivered, the higher the demand for detailed information became. The migration process was interesting, and it involved moving operating systems. Restructuring files from the PC to OS/390 provided an interesting outlook on data management and maintainability. This highlighted the importance of data storage consistency and regulation. Implementing change management standards and security were also issues of importance throughout the project. I will also talk about some of the new features of V8 regarding performance tuning, the use of the SAS system as a server and also the use of OS/390 open edition, the new flavour of UNIX. The benefits brought consistency, longterm manageability of data and systems, also the ability to continue enhancement and growth. When providing online data, via both the Internet and Intranet in today s changing environment, it is important to allow for future change. Enabling the site to manage future growth was an important achieved, objective. Moving from V6 to V8, also allowed the use of new features in V8, such as ODS. Now I will tell you a little bit of information about my client. The Health Insurance Commission (HIC) and The SAS Institute have an ongoing relationship which has been growing and evolving for fifteen years. Using SAS solutions enables the HIC to extract, manipulate, analyse and report health information for the benefit of internal and external clients. Innovative products of this partnership are being used to connect the health sector through interactive web sites. Some of these are listed below. Anyone can access the web page for "Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) Group Statistics" on the Internet at These

24 reports produce statistics on requested groups of Medicare items. Users may select item group, report variable, start and end date, and report format. MBS groups (i.e. category, group and subgroup) are described in the MBS Schedule online. The web page for "Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) Item Statistics - Time Series Graphs" is now also available at the same address. This page enables you to produce your own Time Series Graphs of MBS item statistics by selecting start and end date, item number(s), report variable, and report format. The web page for "Medical Benefits Schedule (MBS) Item Statistics - Tabulated Reports enables you to produce your own reports, by following the previous mentioned steps. Other HIC IT innovations include a web page connecting doctors with information via the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register at The HIC has also designed a complex neural net to assist with locating doctor shoppers, and employs sophisticated data mining techniques to analyse information and provide intelligence for use in detecting fraud. The HIC provides consultancy services in Australia and internationally. It is true that more and more businesses are finding that the Internet provides an ideal way to access both new and legacy applications running on OS/390, and in this the Health Insurance Commission is no exception. As you can conclude from the previous introduction, my client is high end user of SAS software and products. When I was first approached about being involved with the V6-V8 migration project, I was interested in the fact that the client was proposing to move form an NT solution to an OS/390 solution. The installation of SAS/IntrNet TM under OS/390 Although I have installed SAS/IntrNet TM many times under directory-based operating systems such as NT and UNIX, I had never installed it under OS/390. With the assistance of operating system staff and a SAS representative on site, the installation, went very smoothly. This was attributed in a large part to detailed planning. I had anticipated many problems with this install, due to it being one of the first sites in Australia to install SAS/IntrNet TM under OS/390. My initial thoughts were to install SAS/IntrNet TM for version 6 of the SAS system and do a staged upgrade to version 8 once version 6 was up and running. However, I but was then persuaded by the SAS Institute to go with SAS/IntrNet TM for version 8. This would allow us to migrate straight to version 8 and use some of the new features, such as balance loading and off course the Output Delivery System (ODS). For more information on ODS, please go and view the Poster by Lesa Davis from Scorpio Software Services, entitled Presentation is everything. Initially the main problem was how to duplicate the working Web site from NT to mainframe. At first, I did not fully appreciate the fact that under OS/390 I now had access to a full UNIX file system. This allowed me to duplicate the same layout on the mainframe, as was on the NT box. The directory structures, aside from back slash (\), were the same, including the path names. We also mirrored the Web virtual server

25 directories. For those in the audience from a Mainframe / MVS background this may be unfamiliar territory. You may be saying to yourselves, why not use a PDS. Well as you may or may not know we could have used this approach, however, this would have made the conversion unnecessarily complex, due to mapping of directory structures to PDS structures. So as a result we chose to use the hierarchical file system. Although it is called the UNIX file system, any job or session can use HFS files. The SAS system fully supports these files, and anywhere that a SAS program uses a sequential dataset, it can utilize a HFS file. This means that we can use the same file layout right down to the SAS datasets and yes you can even store SAS datasets under HFS just as if they were on UNIX. The HFS file system has been available in all releases of OS/390, However, a significant number of traditional MVS shops have not required it. This may mean that you are one of the first developers in your installation, to ask about using HFS files. Some key points to remember are:! HFS files are contained in libraries, similar in concept to a PDS, or a SAS data library. All entries in the directories of a HFS library are either files or other directories. The complete name of a HFS file follows the directory path from the system root to the file name.! Normally, a HFS library is allocated to a single user, and all files and directories created by that user must be allocated to that one HFS library. If appropriate authority has been granted then other users may also access or create files in this library.! HFS files are not restricted to OS/390 UNIX applications. They can be used as an ordinary MVS sequential data set. To reference a HFS file in a batch job, use the PATH parameter instead of the DSNAME parameter on the DD statement. For more information on the HFS file system, please refer to the reference listed at the back of this paper under IBM documentation. SAS V8 support of Open Edition OS/390 goes even further than supporting the UNIX file system structure. It allows the use of FTP and pipe key words in the filename statement, permitting you to read command information and even allowing you to pipe results back from commands such as ls and dir. Using the FTP key word allows a SAS program to read and write to files on other servers such as UNIX, open edition or even NT. To duplicate the site on OS/390 I used a SAS macro to open each directory and upload all the files to the corresponding directory on OS/390 HFS. This program did not create the directories, but was very useful for transporting all the different file structures such as gif, HTML, SAS Output and of course SAS Datasets and Catalogues. If you would like a copy of this code, please visit: As explained earlier we mirrored the whole Web site for the testing phase. Thankfully everything worked first time!! As with the SAS/IntrNet TM installation. After having moved the

26 initial Web site from NT to OS/390 and proving that it would all still work, we set about planning the next stage. We started with a list of problems 1. How to keep the site in sync with the main corporate site (housed on NT) 2. Security 3. Data 4. How to implement new features server on OS/390 via a port in the firewall. This is the customers preferred solution at present (displayed graphically in the diagram below) but may not be possible due to security restraints. This brings me on to the second point, about security. How to keep the site in sync with the main corporate site (housed on NT). The first point, even though it may seem trivial, was a pivotal decision that had to be made prior to any further development being undertaken. The main problem was long-term maintenance issues. The look and feel of the corporate Web server, as well as change control management was to be performed by Lotus Notes. All of which meant that our installation would have to mirror any changes made to style sheets, images security etc. At this time we still haven t made a final decision on this. At present the NT server is not connected to the OS/390 system or even the network. This means that we are unable to implement testing at this stage. However, the server will be connected to the network via a firewall, thus making it theoretically possible to connect to the mainframe. We can set up the SAS Broker.cgi to connect to a SAS/IntrNet TM application At present the SAS/IntrNet TM applications at the HIC are only used with non-sensitive data. There are plans in the future to run an SSL server and use encryption and security checks. This can be used against OS/390 and ACF2 to supply so called sensitive data (data which could identify a person, practice or group). Most of our security issues will be addressed through the use of an SSL Web server. However, data from the SAS/IntrNet TM application server may need to be encrypted across the network if an NT Web server is used, this will be addressed with SAS/SECURE TM, and this directs my discussion on to data. At present the data for the SAS/IntrNet TM solution is downloaded from OS/390 via SAS/CONNECT and moved to the Web server by zip cartridge each month. At present the data is only a few megabytes a month, but as the Web is being used more and more the demand for more detailed data and more sensitive data grows. This is one reason for moving to OS/390, as a

27 compute and data server it is unsurpassed and its security is second to none, not to mention data integrity. When was the last time you heard of a mainframe virus? We are hoping to access larger volumes of data mainly in the form of SAS datasets but there is a parallel project to design and implement a data warehouse in DB2, which we will be accessing for more detailed queries. We are also hoping to submit batch jobs from the net and notify the client by that it has completed, with a link to a web page or FTP site. The future is leading to Integrated Technologies, and being familiar with this, I hope to soon implement the Publish and Subscribe facilities in this new SAS product at the HIC. How to implement new features. There are many new features in SAS V8 and most of the HIC Web development has been done with SAS V6 and the Web publishing macros. We are now testing the new ODS system supplied with SAS V8. Amongst other things this will make it a lot easier to generate HTML with contents listing and a standard look and feel. It will also allow us to give the user the option of various output types such as PS, PDF, PCL, Listing, LATEX, XML, dataset and RTF. There are also many other new features, which will make development easier, such as being able to use long variable names and easy access to other data sources such as DB2. Summary In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that The Health Insurance Commission is at the cutting edge of SAS/IntrNet TM technology and is using it to its fullest capabilities on NT and OS/390 to deliver leading information to allow its clients and the Australian health industry to make fully informed decisions. There have been many impressive changes recently with OS/390, and the SAS system is continually improving, to cater for these new developments. For the development of Web based applications, version 8 has delivered exciting new facilities, such as the opportunity to interact with other platforms, and upgrading of customary MVS capabilities. References SAS Online Doc V8 Taking Advantage of the SAS System on the OS/390 Platform. David Crow SAS Institute Inc, Cary, NC IBM Documents - refer to O/390 V2R8. 0 Unix System Service Planning (SC ), and Redbook O/390 Version 2 Release 6 Unix System Services Implementation and Customization (SG ). SAS, SAS/SECURE, SAS/IntrNet and SAS/CONNECT are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. Indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies. About the Author Mr Alan Davies Principal Consultant Scorpio Software Services Pty Ltd

28 scorpio-software-services.com.au Phone: Mail: PO Box 2042 Tuggeranong 2901 Canberra ACT Australia