Industry: Financials
The Challenge
Our Customer is a leading mutual health insurance organization that protects millions of employees working across a wide array of industries including healthcare, education, sports and culture.
The Customer was incurring high operational and maintenance costs due to their legacy mainframe systems and wanted to migrate their old applications to a new OS environment to avoid budget overruns. The goal was to realign their legacy IT environment to a new modern platform in order to improve flexibility and efficiency and reduce operational costs.
The Solution
Given the extraordinary project risks, the project team decided the best course of action was to preserve the mainframe COBOL application code and move it intact to a new Linux platform, thereby minimizing any disruption to the business users.
4SCloud’s tool provided full emulation of GCOS CICS and JCL system functions, while the compiler enabled the team to stand up a new application environment with minimal changes. The GCOS* assembler was also rewritten in C, allowing the same OS systems calls to execute exactly, minimizing COBOL source code changes. The team also migrated the workloads from IDS2 DB environment to PostgreSQL, which allowed them to migrate sensitive customer data securely from the mainframe to Linux.
The Benefits
4SCloud’s mainframe migration tool suite was central to this entire modernization effort, as it enabled the rapid migration of the application code and data off the mainframe to a modern open platform quickly, efficiently and securely.
The operational cost savings of migrating off the mainframe was dramatic. In a large mainframe of more than 11,000 MIPS the average annual cost per installed MIP is about $1,600. Hardware and software accounts for sixty-five percent of this, or approximately $1,040. Consequently, the annual infrastructure cost for a 15,200 MIPS mainframe is approximately $16 million. Eliminating these mainframe costs and running the same application to an open-source system based on commodity hardware directly benefitted the Customer’s bottom line.