Mainframe Application Modernization

The Challenge

Companies worldwide have mainframe modernization initiatives. One key area of focus for these modernization projects is moving high-volume statements and report output off the mainframe to a distributed platform. For years, customers have leveraged software applications like IBM Content Manager On Demand (IBM CMOD) on a z/OS mainframe to store and archive critical documents and supporting data from AFP, PDF, Linedata, CSV, Excel, and XEROX Metacode output. Like any modernization project, moving and modernizing a mission-critical application comes with some risk. The following case study addresses the motivation, risks, and benefits for one of the largest banks in France who wanted to transform their mainframe application to a modernized, distributed environment.

Motivation for Modernization

Like many large organizations, reducing operational expenses and risk are constantly being assessed internally. For a large bank in France, it became apparent that the infrastructure services for the administration, monitoring, and upkeep of one of their critical mainframe applications used in core banking services was out-pacing the total cost of ownership (TCO). In this case, a large bank in France saw an opportunity to reduce technical debt and TCO while attaining an almost immediate projected return on investment (ROI). This could be done by moving IBM CMOD from a z/OS mainframe to a more modern version of IBM CMOD on a multi-platform distributed environment. Working with Arondor Information Technology and Services and Zia Consulting, a large bank in France estimated they would achieve a complete ROI within eight months. Their ROI factored in four key aspects:

1. The MIPS costs (mainframe) versus a distributed Linux environment
2. The full-time employee (FTE) costs
3. Support synergy with their IT infrastructure tools
4. Cost of application extensions and ongoing support

Addressing the Risks and Business Concerns

The customer had between 16 and 17 billion documents stored in their legacy CMOD system, some dating back to the mid 1990s. For every document stored, there were the same number of document metadata entries in the DB2 database on the z/OS mainframe. The source and target database sizes on z/OS and Open Linux were between two and five terabytes, with some compression used for older database tables. That said, over 99% of the database size consisted of document metadata entries.

The chief concern of the customer was that the entire transition had to be done over the weekend with no disruption to the CMOD users who normally operate 24/7. One advantage was that only the metadata needed to be moved—the documents did not move in this case. The team was able to redirect the document pointer, so the new system had direct access. Had the documents needed to be relocated away from the z/OS mainframe to a different storage management application, it could have added a bit more complexity. However, the plan in this case was to move the CMOD document data in large chunks, rather than moving documents individually. This method reduced the document transfer time. The overall methodology used remained substantially the same.

Business Benefits

Using our implementation methodology, the customer was able to successfully transition the CMOD mainframe application to a distributed Linux multi-platform environment with complete data integrity and no loss of productivity. In fact, the ROI on their transformation was realized in six months and the customer saw a 70% increase of the operation performance. The biggest realized benefit is that they were able to replace technical debt with a secure, modernized multi-platform asset.