Phased Upgrades for GuardIEn and CA Gen

When considering upgrades of GuardIEn and/or CA Gen to a new release, a common misconception is that the upgrade has to be implemented all at once with the upgrade of the CSE and GuardIEn software, regeneration of code and deployment of new versions of workstation software all happening as part of the upgrade and development frozen until complete.

For example, you might currently be using CA Gen 8.5 (or earlier) for the encyclopaedia and generated code and wish to upgrade to 8.6. However not all of the applications are able to regenerate and retest their code as part of the upgrade process at present and hence the choice is either to postpone the upgrade or install a new encyclopaedia server and database and selectively transfer projects across to the new encyclopaedia.

This can be further complicated when you wish to use one release of CA Gen (e.g. 8.6) for developing a new release of the application and also maintain the production code using an earlier release (e.g. 8.5). If you implement a new encyclopaedia for the new release, migrating changes between models becomes much more difficult when they are in separate encyclopaedias.

There is an alternative...

The flexibility offered by GuardIEn to generate and install the application code it is sometimes overlooked when considering options for upgrades, especially for upgrading the application code.

GuardIEn can be configured to use multiple versions of the CA Gen generators from a single encyclopaedia. In the above example, you could upgrade the existing encyclopaedia server to CA Gen 8.6 and configure GuardIEn to generate the code using 8.6 or earlier versions of the generators. This would then allow you to selectively upgrade the application code for individual models at at time of your choice rather than as part of the Gen upgrade project.

Similarly you can upgrade the GuardIEn server software to the latest release (e.g. 8.7) but also have earlier releases available as well. This then allows you to phase the roll-out of the GuardIEn client software to the developer's workstations.

IET are able to assist in the planning and execution of both GuardIEn and CA Gen upgrades. If you would like to discuss how we might be able to help, please get in touch.