Business Operation Improvement through Integrated Infrastructure Management

The constant emergence of new technologies that improve existing ones in one way or another, creates a permanent need to incorporate innovative tools and components into the existing business ecosystem of legacy components, which cannot be discarded and need to be maintained. This paper presents an integration effort between heterogeneous architectures that goes beyond the traditional on-demand integration and creates an infrastructure management framework to give support to present and future integrations. This effort has allowed the interaction between legacy infrastructure, namely IBM Mainframes, and state-of-the-art applications, platforms, and configuration management technologies, also allowing a better management of the available resources. The integration project, called S.G.I.I. (Sistema de Gestion Integrada de Infraestructura, Integrated Infrastructure Management System) is a solution developed for a real business environment: the Spanish bank NCG Banco. The framework is based on two complementary modules: a front-end, designed over a Microsoft Internet Information Server that provides a means of communication between external applications and the IBM Mainframe; and a back-end, developed over the IBM Mainframe to allow the management of its own resources.