The globalization of markets and the Internet has changed our approach to commerce, information exchange and customer relationships. Organizations leverage their profits when they provide an environment that allows the sharing of useful data and wish to gain useful data from other organizations. Providing data exchange and business integration between unlike business technology environments can become a tangled and complicated maze of connections, each one individually crafted to take account of the technology at each end.

Data Trax solves these issues by providing a seamless integration of a wide variety of data among mixed networks and platform environments. The overall objective of the Data Trax architecture was to ensure the exchange of data by untangling the connections and freeing the applications from the constraints of recognizing the connection protocols of other systems and environments. Neither environment needs to know technical details of the other. The data is routed via a map to its destination-using network and business rules and logic, transforming the information to a format required by the receiving application.

The Data Trax concept was developed in real-world environments and tested for years on actual complex networks and applications. Its developers have dealt with and solved a host of applications and network integrations issues. Data Trax is a customer driven solution that was developed with years of application and network integration experience.

Integration of application data by exchanging business data is key to flexibility required in today’s market.

Simply, "All the business wants is the data from point A to be delivered to point B".

Data Trax is an extremely reliable, responsible and versatile data movement manager. It coordinates and facilitates the passing of data between locations and applications. It can manipulate, translate, compress or modify data as it services the transfer. Data Trax secures and protects data under its control to ensure that it can monitor, audit and account for its commissioned tasks. It is designed to quickly identify obstacles such as network stall conditions, unannounced security changes, insufficient storage space and hardware problems and invoke appropriate alternative routings as well as notifying designated parties via journal entries, email, pagers, telephone or combinations of these. Reporting of persistent trouble conditions can be escalated as desired.

Data Trax uses a phase process that consists of

1. Scan the designated local disk system for candidates to process (inbound and outbound)
2. Scan remote disk systems for candidates to process
3. Preprocessing and packaging of the data
4. Schedule a thread within a class for running
5. Submit the thread (job) for batch processing
6. Monitor all threads in-progress
7. Perform cleanup or error-recovery on threads
8. Perform post-processing on completed thread
9. Archive data

Data Trax provides a single interface, standardization, and accountability by managing data transfers between sites, even with no Data Trax software installed. The controlling Data Trax site could manage but not physically possess the data being moved. However Data Trax can assume complete responsibility for data entering or leaving its own site. Data Trax can journal, report, reroute and retry unsuccessful transmissions notifying interested parties of successful or unsuccessful transfers. Data Trax provides for accurate and timely problem determination and problem resolution, by actively checking on the data movement within the threads that have been scheduled. Data Trax has zero data loss as a prime design goal and has never failed that objective.

Data Trax can be configured locally to manage multiple simultaneous data transmissions to utilize available network and hardware resources. There are no Data Trax constraints on the volume of data it can handle. Each site can specify the degree of Data Trax concurrency by class of application to control critical resources while enhancing throughput. This allows Data Trax to keep long data transfers from blocking smaller or higher priority transmissions. Data Trax can invoke file compression to reduce the transmission load. It can send the same file simultaneously too many different locations, managing each transmission individually without cloning the data or usurping storage resources. Extremely large files can be split, transmitted in independent parallel segments and reassembled at the destination for faster throughput while reducing the likelihood of network errors. It can validate transmission against user-supplied measure.

Scheduling, Data Manipulation, Event Processing, and Data Staging

Data Trax can effectively manage scheduled data transmissions as well as unique, on-demand tasks. Tasks can be initiated through a combination of control files and scheduling facilities, the presence or absence of files, the calendar date and time or on arbitrary time intervals. Existing applications require no modification to interface with Data Trax. For instance, an application could create an empty file as a signal that a set of files comprising a unit of work is ready for remote processing. Data Trax, running anywhere, noticing the file, would transfer all the files to the remote site, possibly invoking intermediate processing, filtering or translation in the process. Data Trax can notify the destination site when all the files comprising this unit of work have been transferred to initiate processing at the destination site. The product of the remote processing could then be returned to the originating or any other site. Data Trax can become an integral part of an overall application, coordinating, synchronizing, monitoring, journalizing, notifying and archiving critical data. It dramatically relieves the manpower burden required to monitor and analyze the multitude of disjoint data operations continually occurring throughout the day.

Data Trax is easily installed and administered on common hardware and operating system platforms. It can be monitored locally or remotely via telnet or the web interface. Complex data/application relationships can be implemented through control file interfaces, API (Application Programming Interface), AFI (Application Format Interface) requiring no modifications of business applications or Data Trax code. However Data Trax can utilize customer written specialized scripts in any convenient language. It can handle OS/390 PDS structures, as well as Unix directory structures, and others.

Data Trax is truly a ‘fire and forget’ data management system. It is a fault tolerant design that provides open acceptance of all data formats and media types, independent of platform. Data Trax provides a seamless integration of a wide variety of data among mixed networks and platforms environments. It faithfully and persistently implements business rules and procedures. It is designed to coordinate the transfer of data between business processing units efficiently with as little risk as possible. Its versatility lends itself to imaginative and creative business solutions impractical any other way. It is robust, proving itself daily in the field. Transmission integrity spans power failures. Data Trax can be interrupted for maintenance or enhancement without disturbing the tasks it manages. Data Trax is truly the data transfer agent for all seasons.

Technology Resource Support

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