Mainframe sunset
Our user departments have been talking about getting off the mainframe over the last several years. Recently, our CIO informed department heads that we would discontinue the mainframe by the end of 2007. It is possible that these departments could decide, "we really didn?t mean it" and push back, but the mainframe-associated costs need to be dealt with.
I'd like your feedback on the possibility of migrating downward from zOS to zVSE on a newer box. Currently we run zOS 1.3 on a 7060-H50. Although it's been a few years since I personally dealt with software pricing, I believe this kind of move would reduce software costs by about 45%.
The one large application that poses the greatest effort in migrating to another platform is our criminal justice system, several million lines of COBOL with some Assembler (totaling around 1,000 modules) -- it uses CA's Datacom/DB database. I think we could effectively leave it on the mainframe and provide users with a middleware solution to interface it with other non-mainframe systems.
Has anyone migrated from an MVS-type OS to VSE? I think today's VSE could handle the load. My biggest concern on migrating the justice system to another platform is matching the reliability, availability and performance of the mainframe - I don't think it can be matched. Any comments on this would be greatly appreciated.
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ASKED:
October 5, 2004 11:36 AM
UPDATED:
January 4, 2008 4:26 PM
Answer Wiki:
I challenge the premise of reducing costs by movi9ng from mainframe to other platforms. We just did a study on Websphere TCO and concluded that the mainframe would cost less and the service quality and performance would improve substantially. We are now studying z/LINUX to replace Windows and UNIX servers, especially in light of our "GREEN" initiative. Our facilities analysis shows that mainframe will yield a 20x (YES, twenty) improvement over windows servers, and a 10x improvement over UNIX .
However, we have the advantage of already having multiple mainframes, so adding the new speciality engines is quite cost effective.
We all know that IT departments can spin a business case any which way they want. If you do a really thorough anaylsis of ALL costs, I believe the mainframe would surprise many CIOs. Get IBM to help with a TCO study. Make sure you include an analysis of downtime which requires a valid user determination of the cost of being down (productivity, loss of business, etc.).
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Been involved in an MVS to Client Server migration. But the cost associated with the software will change little. Most licensing will cost the same regardlesss of the platform. Your savings will be in hardware and whatever other applications you can migrate to non-mainframe type of equipment.
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