Firm trades mainframes for Microsoft servers running SAP

By Robert Westervelt, News Writer
11 Jan 2005 SearchDataCenter.com

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Shortly before Air Products and Chemicals Inc. began migrating its legacy applications to SAP's business software suite in 2000, its 17,000 employees had to connect to several systems and applications to view the company's payables and receivables.

Seeing the need to streamline its complex mishmash of legacy applications hosted on multiple IBM OS/390 mainframes and more than 800 servers worldwide, Allentown, Penn.-based Air Products started by taking the least critical applications offline.

Air Products manufactures specialty gases that are used in chemical processes in the manufacturing and health care industries. The company has seen its business grow globally in recent years, prompting management to try to streamline and standardize its IT systems, said Terry Terfinko, senior manager of global IT and production at the Air Products data center.

"We had too many receivables, and too many payable systems, and managing all that got out of control," Terfinko said.

It continues to host some of its most critical applications on three IBM mainframes running OS/390, Terfinko said. IBM's DB2 database software is also used on two of the three mainframes, Terfinko said.

The company is moving away from its mainframe-centric data center, however, and has begun to shift some of the load onto Microsoft servers. When it chose the SAP R/3 business software suite, Air Products migrated nearly all its financial applications onto Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server.

The company also has plans to continue eliminating its 14 Unix systems that ran the company's proprietary software. The company set a goal of migrating old and new applications to Microsoft Windows rather than install additional Unix servers.

"We had more Unix in our environment than we have today and the decision to not develop in the Unix environment was based on the fact that we've become an SAP centric shop," Terfinko said.

As growth continued in the company, beginning in 2000, Air Products turned to an automated job scheduler to handle the skyrocketing jobs each month. In just four years, its number of monthly jobs increased from 75,000 to more than 400,000 per month.

A job scheduler is a program that enables an enterprise to schedule and, in some cases, monitor computer "batch" jobs, such as the running of a payroll program. A scheduler automates the function of processing all the events performed each day.

"With a job scheduler, we now have checks and balances in place," Terfinko said. "We're just gathering together the manual pieces and looking at what pieces can get automated."

Scheduling is important in the chemical industry, where it can have a major impact in the productivity of a process, said Mike Schiff, vice president of data warehousing and business intelligence at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis. Common in most mainframe environments, modern scheduling tools greatly outperform the manual scheduling methods commonly used decades ago, Schiff said.

"Some sorting utilities come with software, but if you're running 400,000 jobs a month, you want to make an investment in what is optimal," Schiff said.

While large tool vendors produce batch scheduling software, dozens of smaller best-of-breed vendors market scheduling products. Air Products chose UC4 because it was a cross platform tool and was a fairly new product, which seemed to perform better on Air Product systems, Terfinko said.

"We took a leap of faith because it was able to grow with our business and was cost effective," Terfinko said. "We're now using it as a global solution for all batch scheduling worldwide."

Ancor migrates from IBM mainframe to Windows

By Luke Meredith, News Writer
10 Mar 2005 SearchDataCenter.com

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Ancor IT director Kelly Colohan had a decision to make. Informed by IBM that it would no longer support MVS 2.10, the operating system he was running on his mainframe, Colohan had two choices. He could either stick with Big Blue by buying a new mainframe, or bump his ancillary servers up to the varsity and migrate.


For Colohan, running two separate platforms -- one on the network, one on the mainframe -- just didn't make sense anymore, especially since he believed migration would eventually prove more cost-effective.


The reason people switch from the mainframe to Windows is that the cost difference is quite large. But in moving mainframe applications over to Windows, there are technological hurdles to overcome.
Ron Langer
languages group senior director, Fujitsu





So Colohan took the 24 servers he already had, added six more and left IBM and its 2003-205 mainframe behind.


Ancor, a Troy, Mich.-based print and production company that provides outsourcing for companies such as Ford Motor Co. and AAA, is a week away from finishing a year-long migration to Windows. The company, which specializes in offering customer communication tools such as database marketing/management, statement processing and direct mail, as well as a suite of eSolutions, added six Microsoft servers to its existing 24 boxes -- 70% of which are Compaq servers, the rest Dell -- and a new storage area network (SAN).


The revamped network will run on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2000 operating systems.


"The first benefit obviously will be cost, just reducing the amount I'm spending on technology," Colohan said. "The other benefits go straight to our customers. With the new platform, we will be more able to create and deploy solutions for them. The quicker I can develop custom solutions for them and get them to market the better."


According to Colohan, running two different platforms presented the challenge of maintaining a staff with two different skill sets: COBOL JCL with DBS on the mainframe side and Visual Basic .NET framework with SQL Server on the network side. He also didn't want to get locked into a three-year mainframe agreement with IBM, which is standard when purchasing a new mainframe from Big Blue.


Futijsu Software Corp. provided the tools Ancor needed for the migration, and spent a week training Ancor's IT staff on using the tools, as well as the differences between the mainframe and Windows.


According to Ron Langer, a languages group senior director with Fujitsu, reliable tools are the key to making sure a migration goes smoothly and to ensuring an organization is able to realize the fiscal benefits that drove the decision to migrate in the first place.


For more information:
Mainframe Migration Playbook


Firm trades mainframes for Microsoft servers running SAP





"The general reason people switch from the mainframe to Windows is that the cost difference is quite large. But in moving mainframe applications over to Windows, there are some technological hurdles to overcome," Langer said. "Our tools) help solve those issues."


Ancor used NetCOBOL, a migration tool from Fujitsu that takes COBOL from the mainframe and moves it onto the network without changing the source code. Using this tool, programs can be backed up and running in minutes.


The migration wasn't without its kinks, however, as NetCOBOL had trouble meshing with Ancor's specific needs early on. But Colohan and Fujitsu's development staff came up with the necessary patches and it was smooth sailing from there.


"It went well. There were some bumps in the road, but I planned on them," Colohan said. "We were able to get around them and keep going."

Publisher saves a million migrating off mainframe

By Joe Spurr, News Writer14 Mar 2006 SearchDataCenter.com
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Simon & Schuster Inc. plans to save $1 million a year on hardware costs and licensing fees as a result of migrating off its old IBM mainframes.
The New York City-based publishing house is in the middle of a three-part changeover from its Cobol-crunching IBM 9672-RB5 to an Intel-based Unisys ES7000 running Microsoft SQL Server.
For more information:
Ancor migrates from IBM mainframe to Windows
Microsoft migration alliance has merit, but won't sway diehards
The decision to switch came about two years ago when officials, already cognizant of high mainframe costs, began to realize the growth of their company was beginning to conflict with the size of its shoes, so to speak. But with stability a concern and the looming task of converting five million lines of code, the pressure was on to make the right move.
"The challenge of rewriting everything -- it was a daunting task," said Mike Grant, Simon & Schuster vice president of application development. "But we needed to do something … We are running flat out on our machine right now. We're almost 90% to 100% capacity all the time."
Mainframes have been around forever and know how to get things done their own way, but, especially for smaller companies, the elegance that makes them useful can also be unwieldy to upkeep.
Advantages of the data center's elder statesman -- stability, the ability to scale and flex in the face of server sprawl and new workloads -- can be offset by premium hardware costs. Complicated architecture that goes back 20 years, combined with a skills base in decline, also means potentially high labor expenses.
Grant said he was surfing for answers when he stumbled across Tokyo-headquartered Fujitsu Software Corp., a specialist in assisting migrations like CICS applications to .NET and mainframe batch applications to Windows.
The latter was a crucial difference when proofs of concept were drawn and discussed with both Fujitsu and U.K.-based Micro Focus Ltd., a similar migration outfit, Grant said.
"We were very impressed with both, but the problem we saw with Micro Focus -- which may have since changed -- was a lot of emulation software," Grant said. "We wanted to standardize our .NET environment, and the Fujitsu model more closely aligned with our vision, in terms of running Visual Studio and having it play well with VB [Visual Basic] and C#."
After recently transferring over its royalty system -- and working with India-based Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. to convert its DB2 to SQL server -- the final hulking shift comes soon for Simon & Schuster -- moving its main order processing system. But the true test will come late summer, a traditional season of frenzy that will test both nerves and networks as publishers push to move product in time for schools reopening.
"Until then, we'll still be kind of nervous -- last year our mainframe was so backed up that often systems weren't coming up until 10 the next morning," Grant said. "But right now we're seeing jobs perform so much better. We are really seeing some performance gains, we've been pleased, and all the vendors are very confident."
Indeed, Andrew Mackenzie, strategic alliance manager for Fujitsu Software, sees no gray in the environment.
"The thing about migrations is you're either a hero or a goat," Mackenzie said. "With mission-critical apps, it can be very scary to turn off the mainframe. But five years ago there was a lot more risk. There's been relentless performance gains in microprocessors. It comes down to if I'm the CIO who's got this thing that's sucking up 60% of my budget -- you're either going to migrate or drown."
IT research firm Gartner Inc. recently predicted 80% of today's smaller mainframe environments will move away by 2010. And though the sentiment of that forecast is nothing new -- bashing mainframes is practically a pastime in some circles. Detractors today predict doom in the face of the system's recent resurgence, exemplified by double-digit revenue gains since 2003 of the IBM's zSeries.
"If someone hasn't looked at a mainframe in a while, they should look again," said zSeries product director Collette Martin. "There's an awful lot of flexibility. And for the customers who are very small, with older mainframes, those who are struggling in that respect but looking for a value proposition to move forward, it is considerably less expensive to run today's mainframes."
Let us know what you think about the story; e-mail: Joe Spurr, News Writer