>Although there may be some 'success' stories the issue I have with most >vendors is where they tout - We migrated this company off the mainframe >and save 10,000+ MIPS. In reality they probably moved a small >application of about 1000 - 2000 MIPS which happened to be the last one >on the mainframe.
Most of the benefits of re-hosting are not achieved until the mainframe is retired. So the vendors don't trumpet a success until this is achieved. In the case of the Clerity migration at the NYSE this was definitely accomplished. In the case of WA DOL, another agencies apps remained behind, but DOL no longer contributed anything toward the cost of that platform. That other agencies stuff was later retired and WA state no longer has a Unisys platform. >What is also interesting is that they only really changed the platform. >My questions are: What is the transaction rate? What response time do >they achieve and/or expect? What SLA do they have for availability? >How many staff is required to support the new environment? Etc. In the case of WA DOL, the processing capacity was greatly increased, response time was improved, and availability has also improved. Fewer staff are now used to support the apps. >I have seen these 'migrations' or 're-hosting' and the final costs >usually end up higher than they were with the mainframe. This has not been my experience with the three successful migrations for which I was involved. But there is a big downside to re-hosting you did not mention. When you re-host with Micro Focus or some of the other tools, you end up in a another proprietary environment, even though you may be running on a seemingly open platform. So if you want to modify or extend your newly migrated app, you are restricted to the migration vendor's tools. For example, if you had a CICS/DB2 app running on z/OS and then migrated to a Micro Focus Enterprise Server environment (on Linux or Windows) with MS SQL or ORACLE, then you would need to use the Micro Focus Net Express tools to maintain and extend the apps. Extending the migrated app with Java or C is only possible to a limited extent and not easy. But if you had used the Fujitsu/Alchemy tools, you would have the ability to extend with VB.Net or C#, as well as NetCOBOL (since NetCOBOL generates Dot Net CLR compliant binaries). BTW, Micro Focus is working on developing a full CLR compliant migration solution (to go with the new Visual COBOL), but they aren't there yet. John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
