Our Replatforming solutions combine the industry’s best software platforms with proven application refactoring, consolidation, and data migration services to ensure your entire mainframe estate is deployed to the target environment in the languages and database models you need.
CHALLENGES
Companies are rapidly moving to DevOps and the Cloud while consolidating their technology stacks to maximize IT performance. Unfortunately, the inflexibility of mainframes has become a growing hindrance to modern, continuously evolving, agile business.
Legacy databases are difficult to integrate with systems on modern platforms. This is because of inherent inextensibility, incompatibility, and rigidity of the underlying hardware and software powering these legacy systems.
Mainframes cost as much as 4,500 percent more to operate than equivalent Cloud counterparts. This figure is compounded by a scarcity of development resources and rising licensing and maintenance fees for ancillary mainframe utilities, applications, and databases.
OUR SOLUTION
You can retain your mainframe application code as-is while taking advantage of the cost savings and infinite elasticity of the Cloud by replatforming your legacy estate with Advanced.
Replatforming, sometimes referred to as rehosting, is ideal for companies whose applications are still meeting their business needs, and who therefore wish to retain their core application development skills while moving away from non-relational databases and expensive mainframe infrastructure. With replatforming, application source code is migrated onto modern, distributed platforms, either on-premises or in the Cloud, without change. Underlying legacy databases are migrated to relational models, configured to seamlessly interact with your applications via the rehosting platform.
Our Replatforming solutions leverage three key service activities to account for the application source code, data and supporting operational infrastructure:
Application migration
During an assessment, our tools and modernization experts catalog the applications running in the mainframe estate, documenting dependencies and all application languages used. We also highlight dead and unused code that can be eliminated in the modernization process to reduce the complexity and footprint of your source code. Core languages such as COBOL, PL/I and JCL are retained and rehosted using target platform rehosting solutions. Leveraging our Automated Refactoring solutions, we consolidate other application languages into a single optimized language. For example, languages such as CA Telon or Natural, which are intermingled with COBOL on the mainframe, can be consolidated to COBOL. This eliminates licensing fees and simplifying maintenance of your application for the rehosting platform.
Data migration
Our Automated Data Migration solution is leveraged to ensure existing legacy data files and databases are deployed in the desired model and optimized for the replatforming environment. Many data types, e.g. VSAM, sequential, GDGs, and relational databases, can be retained in the replatformed environment, however in some cases, a non-relational database is migrated to a relational model. For example, if your mainframe environment contains Adabas or IDMS databases, we would migrate them to SQL Server, Db2, Oracle, or PostgreSQL, depending on the rehosting platform, your preferences, and the nature of your applications.
Platform deployment
Deployment specifics depend on the rehosting platform and migrated estate, but this activity includes target environment sizing and architecture, identification of ancillary components (such as supporting third party solutions and utilities) that require replacement, deployment of the rehosting platform software, consolidated source code, utilities, and migrated databases, as well as testing and post-delivery support.
OUR PROCESS
We begin every modernization initiative with a discovery, free of charge. Our modernization experts work with you to understand and document your business and technical goals and objectives. Together, we gather information about your mainframe estate. Everything from infrastructure to language and database types and quantities are accounted for. The discovery concludes with a workshop where we recommend optimal modernization approaches based on information gathered, as well as rough order of magnitude (ROM) pricing, and estimated project durations and resource requirements.
The assess and design phase is performed using our automated tools to fully catalog and develop a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of a mainframe environment. It exposes mainframe artifacts that organizations did not know they had, relationships they did not realize existed, and assets that are no longer in use. Assess and design activities provide stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernization decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them. At the conclusion of the assess and design phase, all in-scope artifacts are accounted for, a detailed project plan is established, and the transformation process begins.
The transform phase includes the bulk of the application consolidation activities, the database and data modernization, and build-out of the target operating environment. During transform, the replatforming software is deployed and we perform any necessary refactoring in pre-defined work packets. We also perform functional tests and deliver the work packets into the DevOps pipeline. While customer teams build, test, and deploy these work packets in the target environment, we refactor the next work packet, iterating until the entire mainframe estate has been transformed.
The test and deploy phase begins with the receipt of work packets through the DevOps toolchain as they are delivered from iterative refactoring activities in the transform phase. If issues arise, the work packet is passed back to us where we review the code, adjust our tooling, reprocess the work packet, and send it back into the DevOps pipeline to resume testing and deployment. This process repeats until the entire refactored estate has been deployed.
Prior to go-live, we refresh the target environment by transforming a final snapshot of the mainframe environment to account for changes that have taken place throughout the modernization project as part of normal business operations. Fortunately, since all adjustments and optimizations have been made to the automated refactoring tools and not the refactored code, this final refresh can be delivered into production over a weekend, eliminating code freezes.
We work closely with you and your team to ensure a smooth transition into production. Part of this transition includes the cooperative construction and testing of a go-live production cutover plan to reduce the potential risks associated with application deployments. We also provide on-demand assistance during the warranty period following production deployment, as well as appropriate rehosting platform support, and post-transformation support of the modernized applications.
“We needed a platform that would enable us to standardize. We have complex systems that require a more modern type of development. Going forward, we are looking to further expand the student services platform and functionality, and Advanced's solution enables that process.”
Lubomir Bojilov, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Director, Student Information Systems and Technology,
University of California, Santa Barbara
We were able to rehost the Natural/Adabas-based visitor tracking system at the Savannah River Site to a modern Windows environment.
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Over 35 years of replatforming and mainframe modernization experience
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