A32-Lanc«ster Farming, Saturday, March 11, 2000
PA DHIA To Shutdown Mainframe
Operations After 43 Years
Pat Toretti
PA DHIA Staff Writer
STATE COLLEGE (Centre
Co.)-After nearly 43 years of
continuous operation that began
in the basement of Old Main
with a card-punch and mechani
cal calculator setup manned by
extension staff and technical as
sistants, Pennsylvania DHIA is
shutting down its mainframe
computer operations. And for
DRPC manager Jim Boyer, it
can’t come a minute too soon.
“This is the culmination of a
project we began about two
years ago, but we really didn’t
get up a full head of steam until
this past October,” says Boyer.
“From now on, the mainframe
we all knew and loved for most
of our careers is history. Penn
sylvania DHIA has become the
first Dairy Records Processing
Center in the United States to
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move its entire large-scale oper
ation to the PC platform.” The
list of firsts is not new to PA
DHIA, which was the first
DHIA in the US to test for pro
tein, the first to test SCC, had
the first computerized DHIA lab
in the country, was arguably the
first DHIA to generate signifi
cant MUN testing, had the first
Windows ’95 farm management
programs of any US DRPC, and
was the first American process
ing center on the Internet.
What will the change mean to
Pennsylvania dairymen who use
PA DHIA’s system? “Not much
actually,” says Boyer, “on the
other hand, quite a lot. Not
much, because we’ve actually
been running the new system
parallel with the mainframe for
some months to make sure we’d
worked all the bugs out. As a
matter of fact, many farmers
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have already received their third
set of test results from the new
system. They should not have
noticed a difference at all.”
“At the same time, we’ll be
saving a tremendous amount on
maintenance and other expenses
that are part of the cost of doing
business when you’re dealing in
big iron. We’re not dealing in big
iron anymore. We’ll save at least
10% in operating costs the first
year alone. And in terms of capi
talization, we have gone from
about $lOO,OOO per year we had
to amortize forever, to effec
tively zero.”
“There are huge incidental
costs associated with mainframe
operations,” Boyer continues,
“you have to provide physical
security and environmental con
trols for large computing .cen
ters, and you have to pay a
premium price for software and
operating systems that aren’t
mass produced the way PC’s
are. Here’s just one example of a
cost most people don’t know
about that’s associated with pro
cessing on large platforms: With
mainframes you’ve got to pay
big bucks for a disaster recovery
program. In the nature of the
game you simply must assume
that your computer-no matter
how big or small-is going to
crash. With a large operation
you’ve got to be prepared to
move archives, live files, devel
opers and support people to a
complete backup operation on
retainer somewhere in the event
of a catastrophe. That’s a part of
the cost of doing business. By
contrast, we can now afford to
have multiple redundant sys
tems in the event of failure at a
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fraction of the cost. In the very
worst case scenario-where all of
our equipment is completely de
stroyed-we can go to our off-site
backup, pick up a tape that has
all the cows, all the tests, and all
the lactations ever recorded in
Pennsylvania on a single tape
about the size of a pack of ciga
rettes. And on the way back
from the U-Store we can stop at
Sam’s Club and buy the com
puter we’ll use to resume opera
tions. That’s the kind of
flexibility we now have.”
But the cost benefits were not
the real motivation to move the
operation, Boyer admits. “What
we were interested in doing was
maximizing the productivity of
our developers. Simply put, the
mainframe is no place to de
velop software. It’s a waste of
time and it’s a frustrating envi
ronment for serious program de
velopment. By moving our
operations out of the mainframe
we accomplish two things: First,
those legacy programmers
almost instantly became more
productive. Second, because we
can now focus all of our energy
on the PC-where the future
is-we aren’t wasting half of our
talent in a dead programming
world.”
Does it really matter all that
much where a programmer
plugs his keyboard in? “Yes!”
answers an enthusiastic Joe
Hayes, a former Clinton county
dairy farmer who’s spent the
last twenty seven years in pro
gram development for PA
DHIA. “For the last two years
the people in the mainframe
group have been watching the
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PC developers working on
Heifer ’9B, Barn Owl 2000, and a
number of other projects and
we’ve been saying ‘when do we
get to do these cool things?”
Now, all of us get to code on the
edge. It’s more satisfying work
for us, and if the reception that
we’ve gotten from our Windows
’95 programs at the district
meetings is any indication, it’s a
lot more productive work for
our farmers and the consultants
who support them.”
“You also have to consider
this,” Boyer adds, “the talent
pool to develop dairy records
programs throughout the entire
world is an extremely small, ex
tremely specialized group of
people. With the red-hot job
market for programmers right
now, you’re very lucky to retain
people for more than two, possi
bly three years.
But haven’t people been doing
records on PC’s for a long time?
“Let’s be clear about what we’re
talking about here.” Boyer re
sponds. “We are not talking
about a new farm management
program, or even a pure ‘Official
Records’ system for PC’s. What
we are talking about are all the
functions provided by a dairy
records processing center: invo
icing, affiliate management, lab
analysis, control of the analyti
cal instruments, QCS reporting
requirements, transmissions to
and from technicians, records
sent to USDA, monthly sum
maries for county agents, bench
marks for vets and agribusiness
consultants, breed association
classification and formats, and
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