Product set summary information for the SOA Suite / ESB acquisition

The following are summary extracts and descriptions from the Contractor’s proposal for the SOA Suite acquisition.

Summary of Product Set

The Contractor’s proposal includes a full ESB stack at the Regional and Central systems and an option between a full ESB or a lightweight ESB at the Local sites. The proposal uses IBM‘s WebSphere Message Broker application stack for Central and Regional data centers, and the option of WebSphere or Mirth at the Local sites, all of which are supported by Layer 7‘s Networking Gateway and CA Technologies monitoring and capacity management products.

At the Central and Regional levels, the Contractor proposes a full-featured suite of SOA software from IBM including ESB, messaging, rules, and business processing. The open solution suite includes the IBM WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) Connectivity Pack for Healthcare that provides out-of-the-box integration capabilities and healthcare-specific standards based on Health Level 7 (HL7). At the Local level, the Contractor proposes Mirth Connect to provide messaging for health connectivity. At all levels the Contractor proposes the Layer7 Networking Gateway for security and ESB features.

The software and licensing is proposed to be dynamically scalable through the use of clustering and hardware load balancing, allowing additional installations to be added, with the purchase of additional licenses, if increased capacity or reliability is needed.

In addition, the Contractor will deploy CA Wily APM at all Local sites to which the SOA solution isdeployed. The CA Wily APM software can natively monitor Java Virtual Machines upon which Mirth is built. CA will monitor each Local site‘s Mirth, with the ability to isolate bottlenecks in the application right down to individual Servlets, JSPs, EJBs, Classes and Methods. The Layer7 Networking Gateway provides its own gateway health monitoring capabilities as well.

A summary of products supporting the WebSphere Message Broker, and the roles for these products, is listed in the table below.

COTS PRODUCT / ROLE
IBM Business Process Manager (I-BPM) / Advanced Business Process Management services including BPEL capabilities, application choreography, and human task management / workflow.
WebSphere Services Registry & Repository (WSRR) / Services registry including full capabilities for services metadata management, rich discovery, search and notification, impact analysis, lifecycle management and services governance. Also includes advanced capabilities for ESB Federation services.
WebSphere MQ/MQ File Transfer Edition / Messaging service providing assured delivery of messages and files.
WebSphere ILOG JRules BRMS / Business Rules authoring & management. ILOG provides comprehensive capabilities for developers and architects to build and deploy rules-based applications. In addition, ILOG provides an extremely robust rules engine enable SOA based sharing of rules across a variety of applications and infrastructure components. The VA currently has an enterprise license for the WebSphere ILOG JRules BRMS.
Layer7 XML Networking Gateway / Lightweight ESB including routing, orchestration, protocol translation, XACML, federation, and SAML. The XML Networking Gateway provides a means for consistent enforcement of policy in a distributed SOA at a granular XML or SOAP message level. The Gateway provides TLS .
WebSphere Transformation Extenders / Data conversion services for SAP, Siebel, etc.
CA Application Performance Management (APM) for SOA platforms and WebSphere / CA APM for SOA and WebSphere is an enterprise application performance management solution that enables IT to monitor complex SOA and web applications, 24x7, detect problems before they affect end-users, and resolve these issues quickly and collaboratively.
CA Capacity Management and Performance Suite / Provides prescriptive insight into the infrastructure components needed to optimize IT operations, supports ongoing planning and includes capabilities to plan new enterprise application deployments and changes in a virtualized environment.
Mirth / Messaging engine that provides local site HL7, X12, SOAP, File Transfer and other messaging capabilities. It also provides data transformation capabilities.
iTKO LISA / Agile SOA testing tool.

Summary of Licensed Product Names:

The following is a list of IBM software license titles for the main SOA Suite software:

  • IBM WEBSPHERE MESSAGE BROKER
  • IBM WEBSPHERE MESSAGE BROKER CONNECTIVITY PACK FOR HEALTHCARE
  • IBM PROCESS SERVER ADVANCED
  • IBM WEBSPHERE DECISION SERVER
  • IBM WEBSPHERE SERVICE REGISTRY AND REPOSITORY
  • IBM WEBSPHERE MQ
  • IBM WEBSPHERE ADAPTER FOR SAP SOFTWARE
  • IBM WEBSPHERE ADAPTER FOR PEOPLESOFT ENTERPRISE
  • IBM WEBSPHERE ADAPTER FOR SIEBEL BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
  • IBM WEBSPHERE TRANSFORMATION EXTENDER FOR APPLICATION PROGRAMMING
  • IBM WEBSPHERE TRANSFORMATION EXTENDER PACK FOR HIPAA EDI
  • IBM WEBSPHERE APPLICATION SERVER NETWORK DEPLOYMENT
  • IBM BUSINESS MONITOR
  • IBM RATIONAL APPLICATION DEVELOPER FOR WEBSPHERE SOFTWARE
  • IBM INTEGRATION DESIGNER
  • IBM WEBSPHERE TRANSFORMATION EXTENDER DESIGN STUDIO

To provide for disaster recovery, the licensing allows the software to be installed at backup sites as long as the software is not running (cold and warm standby – hot standby licensing is extra). The standby definitions are as follows:

  • COLD - a copy of the program may be stored for backup purposes on a machine as long as the program has not been started. There is no charge for this copy.
  • WARM - a copy of the program may reside for backup purposes on a machine and is started, but is "idling", and is not doing any work of any kind. There is no charge for this copy.
  • HOT - a copy of the program may reside for backup purposes on a machine, is started and is doing work. However, this program must be ordered. There is a charge for this copy and was not licensed by the Harris Team to reduced costs.

Computer Associates and its subsidiaries iTKO and Wily will provide three applications in support of the SOA Suite solution:

1. CA Capacity Management and Performance Suite – This tool provides the MHS and VA with a capacity planning tool.

2. CA Wily Introscope – A performance monitoring tool to allow the VA and MHS to know the current state and health of the SOA solution during runtime.

3. iTKO LISA – A load testing tool for the demonstration and proof of concept activities.

All CA software licenses include support and training. iTKO will also provided dedicated training services.

Layer 7 Technology will provide an XML Networking Gateway product for the SOA Suite solution.

Mirth will provide Platinum level support for their no-cost open source software through the period of performance as well as provide training materials and support.

Example Server Hosting of Software

The following is a sample configuration of software locations on servers. This shows a proposed layout for a SOA Suite Sandbox environment:

Software / Server Requirement
Central / Regional
IBM Message Broker Advanced with Healthcare pack / 1 servers, 2 cores each
IBM Processor / 1 servers, 2 cores each
IBM WebSphere App Server / 1 servers, 1 core each
IBM ILOG rules engine / 1 servers, 1 cores each
IBM Business Monitor / 1 servers, 1 cores each
IBM MQ Processor / 1 servers, 2 cores each
IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender / Runs on the same server as MB
IBM SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebleplugins / Runs on the same server as MB
IBM WSRR / 1 server, 2 cores each
Layer 7 XML Networking Gateway / 1 server, 2 core CPU
Local
Mirth / 1 server, 2 cores each
Layer 7 XML Networking Gateway / 1 server, 2 core CPU
Note: Hardware environments can be virtualized to reduce hardware costs

Deployment Topology of Products and Existing Interfaced Systems

The following is the Contractor’s proposed deployment topology.

The following shows detail of Local site locations.

The use of two or more servers for Mirth and for Layer7 Networking Gateway provides failover,redundancy, and higher throughput. Additional servers may be required for high volume sites. The Layer7 Networking Gateway and Mirth are site licensed so additional servers may be addedas required.

The proposed approach supports queuing of messages and files in Mirth, creating a store andforward solution. HL7 messages, X12 messages, files, etc. will be queued persistently untilbandwidth is sufficient to transfer the message to the regional or clinical sites. Messages inboundfrom Regional or clinical sites will be queued using the IBM MessageBroker queues at the Regionor Central location until the destined Local site can receive and acknowledge the message. As seenin the diagram below messages and files can be queued at both the Local site and the Region forlater transmission. This also applies to HL7 acknowledgements.