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APIAS

Introduction

William Data Systems has developed APIAS to address some perceived shortcomings in IBM's Enterprise Extender (are summarized in the APIAS FAQ section and are covered in more detail in the White Paper by Anura Gurugé entitled Enhancing Mainframe-to-Mainframe Enterprise Extender). APIAS enables customers to protect their considerable investment in SNA applications while exploiting the latest advances in IP networking technologies.

What is Enterprise Extender (EE)?

In simple terms, Enterprise Extender provides a means of transporting SNA data over an IP network. It does this by encapsulating the SNA data inside UDP datagrams as the following diagram shows:

Why is Enterprise Extender (EE) Important?

Consider the following:

• IP is established as the protocol of choice to support new network implementations in most enterprises.
• Running SNA over IP can result in significant cost savings especially if the user can secure end-to-end connections across the Internet.
• In 2002, IBM withdrew the 37x5 Communications Controller from marketing. Support is expected to be withdrawn by 2010. It is probable that there will be a diminishing number of spare parts and engineers with the necessary skills and experience to maintain them before this date. This will force 37x5/SNI users to review how to provide a secure, TCP/IP-based alternative to SNI for inter-company networking.
• There remains a huge bank of SNA-based applications in sites which have neither the time, money nor resource to re-write them for IP.

Enterprise Extender provides an innovative and elegant solution to the problem of how to move SNA data across an IP network without having to re-write applications. However, its implementation leaves a number of questions unanswered.

Enterprise Extender (EE) Limitations

Take-up of Enterprise Extender has been slower than anticipated for a number of reasons:

• Firewalls are particularly sensitive to UDP traffic because UDP ports are inherently insecure. Since Enterprise Extender is dependent on UDP datagrams to encapsulate SNA data, this results in EE traffic being blocked by corporate firewalls.
• True, end-to-end security is not possible with Enterprise Extender
• Enterprise Extender can only 'talk' to one stack per LPAR

What is APIAS?

APIAS is a utility, which runs as a z/OS started task. It provides EE users with:

• Enhanced security
• Improved network management through the use of standardized protocols
• Industrial-strength, end-user authentication via Digital Certificates.

It delivers these capabilities through the implementation of one or more of the following features. Click any of the links to find out how.