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Case Studies
BizTalk 2006 Migration Improves Operational Performance
Project at a Glance |
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| RDA implemented a migration from BizTalk Server 2004 to BizTalk Server 2006 for our client's Inventory Management System (TIMS) and Customer Account Management System (CAMS). The new features of BTS 2006 measurably improved operational performance and system maintainability. The system is better positioned to scale to meet future business needs for this utilities leader. |
About Our Client
Our client is a multi-billion dollar master limited partnership with three business segments: transportation and storage of refined products, liquefied petroleum gases (LPGs) and petrochemicals (downstream segment); gathering, transportation, marketing and storage of crude oil, as well as the distribution of lubrication oils and specialty chemicals (upstream segment); and gathering of natural gas, fractionation of natural gas liquids (NGLs) and transportation of NGLs (midstream segment).
Background
RDA's client relies on numerous systems to manage data acquisition, volumetric accounting of product, and customer account balancing to provide critical support for near real-time business transactions.
The two systems responsible for data acquisition are Flow Computer Integration (FCI) and the "Truck Rack" system. FCI is responsible for obtaining data from field metering devices (1). The Truck Rack system manages loading/unloading of trucks with one or more products (2).
The Inventory Management System (TIMS) receives thousands of transactions per hour from these two systems for physical volumetric accounting of product received, stored and delivered from the physical transportation and storage system.
Receipt and delivery data is then sent to the Customer Account Management System (CAMS) (3) which then acknowledges the receipt (4). This system's functionality supports the company's core business through management of customer contract terms and conditions, published tariffs and rate sheets. Based upon stated business rules, customer accounts are balanced, billing for transactions and services are calculated and invoices generated averaging approximately $23 million dollars a month. At 1-hour intervals, the system also sends available customer product balances to the Truck Rack system, minimizing losses due to customers over drafting their accounts (5). It also houses static data that defines locations, products, process conditions, etc. which are replicated back to the TIMS application daily (4).
In 2005, MS BizTalk 2004 was implemented, providing a common methodology and technology for decoupling these legacy systems.
Limitations of the Original SystemThe original interface based on BizTalk 2004 met the business need, but due to limitations in BTS 2004 the interface was not well positioned to scale to meet future business needs. The limitations of the original interface included the following:
- The interface was instrumented using a logging component that intercepts Windows WMI messages and then inserts the information into a database. The component was implemented to facilitate debugging and failed message recovery by capturing additional information not provided by BTS 2004. While the component provided the needed functionality, the instrumentation approach was resulting in a large number of WMI message calls. Since the interface resided on a common production server with other BizTalk applications, the net effect of all the applications using this approach was an overload of the WMI services, resulting in host failures and the inability to accommodate additional interfaces.
- The interface was hosted with numerous other interfaces on a common BTS 2004 production server cluster. The inability to properly group interfaces and hosts created an administrative burden so that an administrator needed to be intimately familiar with each of the applications to effectively manage the servers.
- Failed message reporting and recovery in BTS 2004 was unsatisfactory. To detect an interface failure, an administrator had to periodically search through the error logs looking for warnings/errors or search through HAT looking for suspended messages. A recent workaround was the use of custom pipeline components to capture and write-out failed messages to make recovery easier. These error handling approaches were a time-consuming manual process that did not provide for robust, scalable, or automated error handling.
- Deployment of interfaces on the production servers was difficult and prone to error. Deployments were implemented using DOS-based scripts from the BTS 2004 SDK and were difficult to create and deploy. Also, they did not handle error conditions well.
Solution Detail
RDA first developed a Proof of Concept (POC) that substantiated the technical enhancements in Biz Talk 2006 that addressed the limitations of the existing system. The proof of concept demonstrated how each of the following enhancements would provide improved scalability and administration of this client's BizTalk interface assets:- Improved scalability resulting from the removal of the logging instrumentation in place today.
- Improved interface management. The production server environment had over 20 hosts running nearly 100 interfaces, making the administration of the interfaces difficult. The new application paradigm in BizTalk 2006 alleviated this issue by effectively grouping all related interface artifacts together, simplifying artifact administration and interface management.
- Improved error recovery thanks to recoverable interchange processing, failed message routing, "resume-able" message queues and enhancements in the administration console for error identification and resolution.
- Easier deployment thanks to application deployment features in BTS 2006.
- Capture of valuable operational and performance metrics using the improved Business Activity Monitor (BAM).
- A test environment for BTS 2006 was created. The environment was configured to be similar to the existing production environment in order to effectively demonstrate load balancing and fault tolerant features.
- The existing CAMS - TIMS interface was ported over to BTS 2006
- The interface was repackaged using the new application paradigm.
- The interface was modified to remove instrumentation that leverages the logging component as the features are redundant to new features within BTS 2006.
- The interface was deployed using the new import/export features of BTS 2006.
- A series of test transactions were developed to demonstrate operability of the BTS 2006 application.
As a result of the POC's success, our client requested that RDA implement the migration from BizTalk Server 2004 to BizTalk Server 2006.
Benefits
The business benefits of the migration include:- More efficient utilization of the current BTS 2006 environment. This allows our client to leverage hardware that is in place at their primary data center as well as their disaster recovery center.
- Increased efficiency of administrative staff by allowing them to more effectively administer systems without having to know the intimate details of each application.
- Improved operations by allowing faster recovery of error conditions and suspended messages.
- Operational expansion capability as new terminals and truck racks would have overloaded the existing BTS 2004 application.
- Improved throughput of data acquisition.
