Coop Denmark is that country's leading consumer goods retailer. The company owns many chains, including Kvickly xtra, Kvickly, SuperBrugsen, Dagili'Brugsen, LokalBrugsen, Irma A/S, and Fakta A/S. (Click here to see Coop headquarters.) Coop runs its enterprises on both System i (two 550s, two 170s, and one 270) and Windows servers. Like many businesses today, Coop wanted a single systems-management tool to cover both of its primary computing platforms. Operationally, such a tool would allow the people charged with keeping the data center running smoothly a means for viewing all the systems, devices, and applications from a single view. From a financial standpoint, a one-stop system would eliminate the cost of running multiple monitoring tools.

Officials at Coop selected eXc Software's Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) System i solution to integrate its System i and Windows platforms. The company determined that MOM, out of the box, would effectively manage, monitor, and automate its Windows servers. The retailer just needed to determine if it would do the same for the System i servers.

Coop's goal was to have System i QSYSOPR messages and Windows alerts merged into a central console so that its operators could easily see both environments in one view. Ideally, the System i solution would allow MOM to have the same functionality as it did for the Windows system in terms of managing, monitoring, and automating. In addition, the System i programmers wanted to be able to create MOM alerts from within their in-house RPG programs. Luckily, eXc Software's System i MOM solution combined with the ingenuity of a programmer working at Coop made it all happen.

Poul Aschenbrenner started at Coop in 1988 as a computer operator. In 1991, he became a programmer on a Tandem system. Also in 1991, Coop brought its first System i, an E10, into production. For the past two years, Aschenbrenner had been using the new RPG IV free-format language. He was the one responsible for writing a program to give other RPG programmers the ability to create MOM alerts from their RPG code. Not only did Aschenbrenner create the RPG-to-MOM interface, but he also wrote a unique monitor to ensure that the System i break-handler job was running.

Once Aschenbrenner and Ove Hermansen, the MOM administrator at Coop, were happy with the System i integration, the two companies worked on one last "failover" feature that has now become a base part of the eXc Software System i MOM solution. MOM can balance its workload across N number of servers called management servers. To implement "failover," the eXc product was installed on both of Coop's management servers. If the primary MOM management server goes off-line, the backup MOM management server picks up the System i monitoring. eXc Software utilized MOM "timed-event" scripts to implement the failover logic.

The good news about using MOM to integrate System i and Windows environments is that both platforms are flexible and easy to develop on. They can co-exist in large-scale data centers.

eXc Software is a Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV) specializing in extending the Microsoft Enterprise Management tools for non-Windows systems and devices. In addition to MOM, the cornerstone of the Microsoft Enterprise Management tools suite is Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS 2003). SMS is an asset-management tool that, among other features, lets businesses collect and report on hardware and software inventory.