Scheduler controls investor’s data on 3000

OpCon/xps makes NT, 3000 step together

Far from the financial hotbed of the Northeastern US, a legendary investor has beaten the stock market averages for decades. Fayez Sarofim, an Egyptian fund manager whose investment duties include the Dreyfus Appreciation Fund, operates Fayez Sarofim & Co. out of Houston and relies on HP e3000s to analyze security prices. The company recently began linking its e3000 to a cluster of NT servers, using SMA’s OpCon/xps to manage jobs among all its systems.

Sarofim’s reputation is strong enough to land him on the Ten Investing Masters list at the Motley Fool, a popular Web site dedicated to investment advice. His Dreyfus Fund has crushed the stock market’s average return year after year, and his privately-held company manages more than $50 billion in holdings for institutions such as universities, General Electric and Ford pension funds, and the Houston’s fine arts museum.

The HP 3000s running at the firm aren’t considered museum pieces, even though they’re older 9x7s dedicated to development and financial analysis. George Willis, systems administrator for the company, said the seasoned systems are in step with the firm’s newer NT technology.

“Interoperability is a big advantage to us,” Willis said of the company’s portfolio accounting system, running on a Series 987. “We have an SQL 7 monster database out there which we port information to nightly from the 3000. It’s the interoperability between the two platforms where we’ve found OpCon to be a big advantage.”

About 100 users access the information from the HP e3000 at Sarofim, number crunching analysis and reporting about 6,000 stock prices, as well as dividend information and capital changes each trading night. About 65 jobs per night travel between the systems, flowing through 26Gb of disk capacity. The application has evolved from packaged software to a home-grown program, written in COBOL with PowerHouse reports. “It’s back office accounting for our portfolio department, which is our largest department here,” Willis said.

Willis said the portfolio operations — run on a 24x7 schedule — initiate jobs throughout the night, at synchronous points such as when a key database or table has been updated. OpCon/xps then launches an NT job to “suck the information down to the NT server, and start other processes.” The company is also using Taurus Software’s Warehouse and Bridgeware to update its NT systems from the e3000’s analysis.

“It not only launches the job, but it can launch it within parameters,” Willis said of the scheduling system. If a job hasn’t been launched by a prescribed time, OpCon will page the IT staff with an alert. Failed jobs also alert the staff. “With those two features in the product, it allows us to run unattended most of the night, unless there’s problems,” Willis said. “It allows us to get a good night’s sleep.”

Version 3 of the software has a SAM Planner, a module which lets administrators plan and monitor schedule activity. “We can look ahead at what’s available on the schedule and see what jobs have not run yet, and anticipate when the job schedule could be finished,” Willis said. Problems encountered in the middle of a schedule get handled better, Willis said, “because we can see which programs or processes are dependent on it, and may not run until we clear the condition.”

The SMA software is hosted on an NT system, installed at Sarofim with redundancy for its processors, AutoRAID disks and multiple network cards. “We’ve put a lot of money into redundancy on the NT side, more so than on the 3000,” Willis said. “We’ve fortified the infrastructure on the NT. Hardware-wise, the 3000 hardly gives us any problems.”

The 3000 has been using the contributed shareware program Sleeper to control about 15 jobs. The latest version of OpCon/xps will take over that control.

“We’re feeling pretty confident that OpCon can replace Sleeper on the 3000,” Willis said. “The SAM Planner was something we needed before we could fully incorporate all the job entries from the 3000.”

Jobs which fail on the 3000 are examined by Nobix’s JobRescue, software that examines the $STDLIST on the Series 987. A second 987 is set up as a business recovery site to back up the primary 3000.

Putting OpCon/xps in charge of the data behind billions of investment dollars was a matter of getting a better look at the operations, Willis said. FTP transfers of text files, providing notice of finished jobs, have been replaced by the multi-platform solution.

“One of our objectives was to have centrally-managed jobs: one view to our entire system — no matter what system the job is running on,” he said. “We use the 3000 now more as a backup to OpCon’s alerts.”