[A StarSQL Enterprise Edition and StarPipes Case Study] Nabisco Gets 24-7 Access to DB2/400 Nabisco has improved overall performance, greatly reduced network traffic, and provided enterprise-wide connectivity to DB2 for thousands of NT-based desktop users located nationwide. Nabisco Food Group, the $8 billion international manufacturer of biscuits, snacks, and premium grocery products including Oreo, SnackWell’s and Chips Ahoy!, is a company with a huge investment in IBM DB2. Nabisco runs DB2 on an IBM 3090 at corporate headquarters in New Jersey, while the company’s 30 biscuit and food bakeries spread throughout the United States run DB2 running on IBM AS/400s to manage individual bakery operations. Identifying the Problem Nabisco’s bakeries never close, operating seven days per week, 24-hours per day, so performance, system reliability and secure data accessibility are crucial elements of their success. Along with its commitment to DB2, Nabisco is standardizing on TCP/IP as its enterprise networking standard to replace its current SNA network infrastructure, and will soon be deploying Windows NT as its desktop standard. In addition to an AS/400 which operates as the transaction server, each bakery utilizes a Windows NT Server running SQL Server 6.5, which manages a 20 gigabyte data warehouse for decision support. "We have identical configurations in each of our bakeries that have the ability to operate stand-alone-independent of our corporate computing environment," explained David Calenda, Nabisco’s manager of plant infrastructure. "Nabisco is moving more towards distributing its decision-making process to help streamline its operations, and we deem performance to be critical, so we have adopted a best-of-breed philosophy in putting our solution together," Calenda said. NT and TCP/IP "Our development projects required that our DB2 data be made readily available to our NT environment where the majority of our developers and users reside," Calenda said. "We went looking for an NT-certified driver which led us to StarQuest and its data access middleware software. This successful partnership is allowing us to move from a router-based environment-which added considerable system overhead and impacted our performance-to a true, native TCP/IP environment. StarQuest’s StarSQL driver is providing us enterprise-wide connectivity from our desktops to DB2 via TCP/IP with no need for terminal emulation." In addition to StarSQL, Nabisco chose StarQuest’s StarPipes software as a gateway that provides TCP/IP desktops access to DB2. StarPipes implements IBM's Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) Level 3, which defines a standard messaging format for interfacing to a remote database over TCP/IP or SNA. "Using StarPipes, we were able to gain access to TCP/IP-based clients without making any modifications to the OS/400 operating system," said Calenda. " Our tests showed StarPipes generates smaller packets, resulting in less network traffic and taking up less network bandwidth, which is crucial in our environment." Data Warehousing Nabisco is using StarSQL to enable the movement of transaction data from its AS/400 environment into its data warehouse for applications such as process control and financial cost accounting. Platinum Technology’s InfoPump, an ODBC-enabled application, uses the StarQuest StarSQL driver to retrieve the data from DB2. The data is then transported via TCP/IP into SQL Server where the 20 Gigabyte data warehouse resides. "We provide near real-time updating of our data warehouse using StarQuest’s software," Calenda explained. "As each shift is completed, massive amounts of mission critical data are sent across the network from each bakery. StarQuest has handled this task flawlessly and with outstanding performance." According to Calenda, Nabisco conducted extensive in-house testing in its real-world environment of StarQuest’s StarSQL against two competitive products. "StarSQL delivered better performance, was much easier to use, and will provide us a much more flexible solution going forward." Calenda added that StarQuest’s products also support DB2 native security, which is crucial in Nabisco’s distributed computing environment. "StarQuest’s data access middleware provided us far and away a superior solution," he continues. "And a very innovative licensing scheme which afforded us tremendous flexibility in implementing this solution across the country." Added Value According to Dan Garlewicz, manager of Nabisco’s network systems, an added value for Nabisco is StarSQL's ability to connect to DB2 on its 3090 mainframe system. Nabisco clients connect via the Cisco Transaction Connection, jointly developed with StarQuest, new software that enhances the functionality of Cisco IOS (Internet Operational System) software to provide end users with secure, direct access to DB2 databases via their Cisco routers, providing a scalable, high-speed DB2 access platform for the data center. Said Garlewicz. "One of the main reasons we were attracted to StarSQL was its ability to support DB2 data access from both our AS/400s and 3090 mainframe. It has the potential at Nabisco to bring the traditional advantages of DB2 -namely robustness, high performance and scalability - to our Cisco-based networks. This StarSQL and Cisco Transacti Connection solution will positively impact the entire Nabisco organization."