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Order in the Court

A division of a Florida court consolidated its varied data sources.

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CUSTOMER: Office of the Court Administrator, 17th Judicial Circuit, State of Florida HEADQUARTERS: Fort Lauderdale, Fla. BUSINESS: Judicial system HARDWARE: An IBM System z 890 and an IBM System i 550 SOFTWARE: DataDirect Technologies' Shadow RTE and z/Events, Crystal Reports and WebSphere Application Server CHALLENGE: Consolidating its data sources SOLUTION: Using the DataDirect solutions to move mainframe data to the System i DB2 database in real time

It seems like everyone is talking about server consolidation. And why not? It's much more efficient to administer, say, one or two servers instead of 10 or 20 or more. This not only helps keep maintenance - not to mention staffing - to a minimum, but also decreases the IT footprint and reduces the electrical bill, which can lead to large savings.

However, it's not often that people talk about consolidating their data. This may be because they already are, with all of the data residing on one platform. But in some cases, data may be held on several different platforms, such as the IBM* System z* and System i* platforms. The trick becomes moving all of that data to one or another of the platforms and then making it easily accessible to the average user.

The benefits to this aren't dissimilar to server consolidation. Rather than administering multiple databases, IT personnel just maintain one, again resulting in a lower overhead in terms of both staffing and money. Just as important, it also results in ease of access, with users tapping into one data source instead of several - and using multiple query tools to do so.

That's in part why the Judicial Information Systems (JIS) department of the Office of the Court Administrator, 17th Judicial Circuit, State of Florida, decided to find a way to use its IBM System z 890 and IBM System i5 550 servers together, using the i550 as a central repository for the data from both platforms. This has allowed it to make data access much easier for its end users, who, in the past, had several sources to scour for the information they needed or had to go to the IT department to have queries written and reports generated for them. Now, much of that is Web-based, helping the Office of the Court Administration provide enhanced case management.

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