Click here for Mitchell Humphrey sponsor message

Of course, Southwest didn’t have technology groundbreaking as a goal of the project. Director of Reservation and Distribution Technologies Terry Hornbaker planned to replace services from an IBM mainframe with his own reservation center. Growth in Southwest’s business and the industry prompted the airline to plow virgin ground in HP 3000 redundancy technology.

Growth in tiers

At Southwest this spring, there’s a whole lot of HP 3000 iron switching on. The company is opening up nine reservation centers each with an HP 3000 Series 959. Each of the 52 cities in the Southwest service area also has a 3000, ranging from Series 959s to Series 918s. The system uses a Series 996/400 with 250Gb of mirrored disk as its main processor.

The system is designed for 24x7 operations, “where we can take an outage on one or more of the boxes in the complex and still be able to process transactions,” Hornbaker said. “This is a feat that’s somewhat challenging in and of itself.”

Hornbaker said Southwest divided its configuration into A, B and C tiers. Updates are on the A tier, which has one primary 3000 and a secondary failover system. The second system receives transactions occurring on the primary system, “and it’s available if I need to switch over in the event that I lose the first A system,” Hornbaker said.

That second A system shadows transactions to the B tier, a read-only tier. This tier exists “because of the way most people make reservations,” Hornbaker explained. “Most people are looking and shopping before they buy. They do a lot of looking before they ever commit a transaction to the database, and we needed a way to handle the extra IO.” The B tier at Southwest buffers these unnecessary reads to the database until the reservation agent commits to a sale transaction.

“We find that over 50 percent of our transactions result in no sale,” Hornbaker said. ”The B tier is to handle the extraordinary read activity we’re anticipating.”

The C tier is the communication link that handles TCP/IP connections, processing transactions from a presentation layer requesting information out of the reservation system. This tier is responsible for distributing information to wherever it needs to get the data and satisfy the request.

The C tier enables Southwest to handle up to 5,000 users online with the system at once, making it one of the largest HP 3000 sites. “It’s a launch entry point, to let me distribute the load across the boxes versus multiple CPUs,” Hornbaker said. “We have a lot of redundancy built in, but part of it is the way we anticipate the system needs to respond under heavy load.”

Netbase advances

“There’s no one we’ve talked to that’s doing [high availability] the same way we’re doing it,” Hornbaker. Custom modifications to Netbase shadowing will get their first field test in the Southwest system. The modifications ensure hot availability on the secondary A tier HP 3000, “so when we switch over I haven’t lost any transactions that were committed on A, and it can resume responsibility for being the master.” The custom code to do this will make its way into the commercial Netbase product, according to Hornbaker.

“What we’re calling a dual master is a unique concept within the 3000 Netbase agreement,” he said. “A lot of the third-party shadowing hooks they’re putting into MPE/iX 5.0 and 5.5 in the HP labs were specifically designed to support some of what we’re looking for.” The changes will let any Quest customer do logical transactions across multiple databases once they’re incorporated and tested in the Netbase/Shareplex product.

NT is the current bridge between Southwest’s current reservation system [hosted on IBM big iron] and the ticketless system hosted on 3000s. Data is “screen-scraped” from the reservation system and sent over a TCP/IP socket to a 3000 listener. NT can act as a presentation layer in the future, a platform where Southwest’s agents can get to the reservation system. The NT bridge won’t be needed when the 3000 reservation system goes online, using an RPC from Netbase to talk to the ticketless system directly at speeds up to 100 megabits per second instead of 56Kb.

Operational expansion

Southwest is developing a reservations solution that is totally integrated, unlike the IBM heavy iron it’s been using. “Box to box, we’re pretty close to that [Saabre] system in size, but they have more capacity because the IBM [3090] mainframes can do more cycles,” Hornbaker said. “But they’re paying a couple million dollars more for those than what we’re paying for our 3000s.”

Operationally the company has moved its staff from one part time operator to 10, and Southwest has ramped up its HP 3000 programming staff from two to 25. “We are desperately looking for qualified people in operations, supporting the database using tools like Adager, install products, monitor and support the HP 3000,” Hornbaker said. He’s working hard to find HP 3000 experience in people who want to specialize in one aspect of an IT strategy. More common is the seasoned MIS expert who’s done it all with an HP 3000 installation, because the system needs so little staff in most sites.

The scope of the Southwest installation demands a different staffing approach. “We don’t want to do it that way,” Hornbaker said. “Our achilles heel in this project is our operational readiness. We want people responsible for running the application and knowing the hardware, and people responsible for building the application and knowing the business.”

Operational staff wants to work with Unix and Oracle, Hornbaker said, “and if they’re not, they’re panicking. Everybody thinks if they’re not a Unix administrator they don’t have a future. If you want to have a successful career, you need to adapt to the what a business is trying to do. In my opinion, Unix is not going to win, because there are too many Unixes. Businesses can’t afford to have that many slightly different things in the infrastructure.”

Integration advantage

Hornbaker believes the NT 5.0 version, running SQL Server, will win out over Unix. In the same way, he sees the 3000’s integration as a strategic advantage. “The way the [IMAGE/SQL] database is integrated with the operating system helps reduce my costs and the finger-pointing when I’m having a problem,” he said. In contrast, he says, databases that claim more connectivity on more platforms are less open than they claim.

“If you get pregnant with Oracle, you can’t abort it unless you’re willing to throw a lot of money at it,” Hornbaker said. “What they tell everybody isn’t true – I haven’t successfully ported an application from one database to another yet. I balk when I see the price tag, and I get over being mad at the vendor. I live with it, because I don’t want to spend the half million dollars.”

The Southwest system, three years in the making, is ten times the size of its initial 3000 investment in ticketless travel. Executing an advanced business idea like ticketless with proven technology fits the Southwest model. Today most carriers offer ticketless options. Having proven the 3000 can do ticketless well, Southwest has moved its 3000 experiences and testing into a more volatile transaction arena with reservations.

“In ticketless, if we get behind we can deal with it or make it up,” Hornbaker said. “If I lose your reservation, I’m dead. We need to be able to manage our inventory, because we want to make sure we have satisfied customers. We don’t necessarily embrace the latest technology, but that’s saved us a lot of money.”