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All the individual post offices and sub-post
offices are linked (via ISDN or satellite)
to two fully disaster tolerant central data
centres based on Sun and Sequent Unix systems,
in Wigan and Bootle.
James Stinchcombe, Distinguished Engineer,
Fujitsu Services commented:
“We recognized right at the start
of the project that given the complexity
of the system, its business critical nature
and level of transactions, that we needed
to proactively monitor and manage its performance.
We looked at products from a number of
suppliers and selected Athene from Metron,
primarily because of its flexibility and
scalability. Athene would allow
us to collect performance data from a number
of different systems, using different tools
and in a range of different formats.
We could then import all this disparate
data into Athene in order to produce a single, consistent, comprehensive and
integrated management and reporting system.”
Metron undertook to develop new versions
of Athene to handle the demands of the Pathway
project, to provide additional reporting
capabilities and to work with Tivoli. Athene
was also enhanced to work with Riposte,
the application used by Fujitsu Services
to run the counter systems.
Metron’s Athene
Acquire product will be used to collect
data from the individual post offices
for sample reporting, whilst Athene Monitor
provides a real-time display of performance
metrics on any of the remote systems.
The Fujitsu Services support team can
use this information to remotely monitor
and manage the effect of instructions
and fixes, which they may give to local
users. |
James Stinchcombe:
“Athene is performing very well and
provides an extremely rapid way of identifying
problems. With a system of this magnitude
and complexity, it is absolutely essential
to have Athene to filter the data and provide
trending information. Without Athene’s
Capacity Planning and Performance Management
capabilities, the Pathway system would
grind to a halt.”
In addition to monitoring a major data warehouse
facility Metron's Athene is being used to
monitor and manage the performance of four
key central systems within the Pathway project.
These are:
- correspondent (or network) servers -
these handle communication with the individual
post offices and maintain a 35 day history
of all the data to provide essential back
up if a Post Office® is out of commission
for any reason, such as flooding, etc.
- application servers - these convert
the data from the correspondent servers
and pass into the Oracle databases
· VPN servers
running various encrypted data applications
- Sequent servers running Oracle databases
The Pathway project to automate the entire
UK Post Office® network represents one of
the largest IT contracts ever awarded. The
network is larger than all the main UK banks
and building societies combined and is one
of the largest and most secure in Europe.
Banking services will be provided in post
offices from 2003 onwards.
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