🚀 go-pugleaf

>We have been using BDBF by Duquesne/Legent for some to collect charges
>from both an MVS/XA and a VM machine.  This product was written using
>SAS 5.18.  Legent is no longer going to support the product and we
>desire to upgrade to a more current release of SAS (6.07).  I have
>a number of questions to start:

We looked that the available field of resource chargeback packages about two
years ago.  Up until that time we had been using a home-brew package that had
been in place for many, many years and times had changed.

We have multiple platforms that we need to bill for: MVS, VM, VMS, Cray, and 3
flavors of Unix.  Since most of our MVS and VM regions had JARS installed, it
looked like we would have a head start by choosing CA's product, ChargeBack.
ChargeBack provided "user defined" record types that we could define for our
non-JARS data.


Primarily because we needed better integration with some of our existing
systems that would take data from the back end of ChargeBack, we decided to go
back to the drawing board and build a brand new home-brew package.

What we came up with is a TCP/IP server program, written in C, that runs on
MVS.  MVS data can be read directly from DASD and data from other systems can
be read over our campus network as the data becomes available.

We have found this system to be quite reliable and its modular implementation
allows quick expansion and modification.  If we need to add a new system, we
write a client program for the new system to send data to MVS and we add a new
processing module to the server to allow it to accept and do the calculations
on the new data.

Our system has been running since January 1992.  The only down side for us so
far has been a bug in the network interface that initially caused the server to
hang during peak system utilization (semester registration).  We have not yet
solved the problem, but we can detect its presence and request that the server
re-cycle itself automatically.

A few questions that I have for you would be:

1. Do you have the legal right to keep the Legent code after they quit
supporting it?  Without this, it would seem that upgrading to the newer SAS
version would not be an option.

2. If you don't have a lot of built in reliance on the BDBF interfaces, why not
consider another vendor's product (like CA-ChargeBack)?

3. If you have the time (can you spend time now in order to save more in the
future), why not write your own system?  Look at your long-term expenses and
see if it would save money or provide features that you cannot get from any of
the vendors.

Rick Huff, Systems Analyst (409) 845-8454 (rick@billnext.tamu.edu)
CSC, Computing Account Services, Texas A&M University