SCASE STUDYS Migrating from MVS to.net: an Italian Case Study bizlogica Italy
executive summary This report describes how BIZLOGICA helped a large Corporation to successful reach the objective of saving yearly recurring costs by means of moving the production of some business critical MVS COBOL CICS applications to the Microsoft.NET framework. BIZLOGICA implemented a solution based on a Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation technology, specific designed to ease the migration of MVS CICS and batch applications to Microsoft s.net framework in a virtually automatic fashion. Processes undertaken, technology used, problems encountered and solutions applied are synthetically described with the aim of providing other companies with elements to evaluate the possibility to afford a similar process. initial situation 2 Customer was a very large Corporation, leader in worldwide telecommunications arena, with production centers and office branches all over the world. Since early 60 s their IT infrastructure had been based on Mainframes (mainly IBM) that quickly grew-up during 70 s and 80 s to support the dramatic business increase, typical of that economic sector. At that time the heart of the IT systems was totally based on a Mainframe infrastructure, both for transactional (CICS) and batch systems, mainly developed in COBOL language, while data were based on DB2 Databases. In 90 s, because of changes of business scenarios and needs, and because of the availability of new technological solutions, some evolution took place aimed both at improving processes and to avoiding dependence from a sole technological provider. In this respect, new ERP and CRM systems were adopted to replace some business critical legacy system. In the meantime several different systems were adopted too: OPEN SYSTEMS (Linux and Unix), RDBMS (Oracle), PC Client and Server based on Windows, with new languages and development systems. In 2005 IT management started thinking on how to save recurring costs and therefore they considered the possibility of switching off costly Mainframe infrastructure by migrating remaining applications on a more flexible and cheaper distributed platform. In this respect REPLATFORMING was intended as the process of moving an application from an hardware platform to another, maintaining the original source code (with no change at all, or only minor changes). scenario Candidate applications for replatforming were mainly CRM systems, including billing processes, considered as mission critical systems by management. These systems included all processes for
customer management and the invoicing of related services. All systems were COBOL/DB2, CICS and Batch. Involved volumes were: 3 Business needs The most compelling business needs urging the customer to re-platform the applications were: Constant reduction of resources for maintaining applications, both in terms of units and cost; Growing complexity and costs of required support activities; Need of reducing infrastructure cost; Chance of improving technical culture of their internal resources; Need of simplifying processes linked to a monolithic, old fashioned infrastructure; Need to avoid depending from a sole IT technology provider. In more details: Operating cost reduction o Reduction of support from IBM o Developer productivity increase o Added possibilities of recruiting new IT resources o Better system integration characteristics Increased responding capacity to future business needs: o New laws and governance rules o Better system security o Better access to information o Better integration with other systems ( e.g. CRM) Increased capacity of providing services: o Information accessibility o data reliability o fault-tolerant availability at cheaper costs complexity reduction
Project scope Replatforming project also included data migration from DB2 to ORACLE and mechanisms to guarantee data exchange functions among replatformed applications and other systems, running both on Mainframe and on other platforms (OPEN SYSTEMS or WINDOWS). Components within the scope of the project were: Applications o COBOL Batch o COBOL CICS o COBOL COPYBOOK o BMS Macro o JCL Stream (Batch JOB) o Batch PROC Data o Database (Table and view) o Dataset (Sequential and indexed) Multiple external interface with other IT platform 4 Project Requisites Main project requisite has been the absolute no decrease of Service Level either during the replatforming process and afterward, when replatformed applications would have been in production. Further requisites had been: No impact on end user User interface and reports with same look and feel Zero impact with external interfaces Zero impact on information accessibility Security processes active on mainframe to be replicated on Windows platform No decrease of performance level on new platform for both transactional and batch functions Identify a job scheduling function similar to the one on mainframe Guarantee the alignment of source code during the project between production application and migrating application Full respect of.net standard for all migrated code Respect of original naming convention Respect of style and aspect of original source code Maintenance or improvement of code modularization Maintenance and integration of comments internal to the source code migration architecture Guideline of target architecture were setup by the Customer with BIZLOGICA s active support: Microsoft Windows Server 2003. IIS 6.0 Oracle 10g on Unix platform Fujitsu NetCobol for.net C#.NET
Migration approach Based on guidelines and requisites it was defined an approach to the migration based on automatic tools in order to avoid redesign / rewriting of the application. Main advantages were: No need of application understanding : once migrated to the new platform and compiled through the use of specific tools on, the application executed properly; Since only a small portion of the code had to be modified the risk of malfunctioning of the migrated application was minimal; Effort (and then time) needed using this approach was order of magnitude less than redesigning or rewriting the application; Migration process might be undertaken on step by step basis; Test activities are much less both in quantity and complexity Solution adopted The replatforming solution involved three main components of legacy application in moving them to the.net Framework: Data (DB2 databases, VSAM Sequential and Indexed) Source code (COBOL programs, BMS Macro, reports) Script of batch processing (JCL stream, REXX) 5 data Conversion of DB2 database to ORACLE on UNIX has been one of the most critical activity of the whole project because of: different character set between Mainframe and UNIX some difference in field format between the two data bases (e.g. date format) misalignment among physical and logical DB and COBOL tables and view. All binary data have been converted into display ASCII format. Data have been downloaded from the mainframe and reloaded on the new platform using data warehousing tools. Flat files have been migrated using data conversion tools included in Fujitsu NetCobol for Windows. programs Changes to both batch and CICS COBOL programs have been performed by a specific function of Fujitsu NeoKicks. The tool performed the needed changes to compile programs inside MS Visual Studio environment. Further on, the tool changed CICS API commands into INVOKE to correspondent NeoKicks classes. Fujitsu s Dialect Converter and specific code migration tools written by BIZLOGICA and the project team have been used to change possible COBOL dialect differences. Ad hoc tools have been used to resolve: differences between COBOL IBM and Fujitsu NetCOBOL structure depending from EBCDIC coding differences between SQL mainframe commands and NetCOBOL differences between mainframe CICS commands and NeoKicks differences between mainframe JCL and NeoBatch differences between DFSORT / SYNCSORT and NeoSort
batch Utilities on mainframe batch processes MVS JCL stream conversion has been made through Fujitsu s NeoBatch. The tool provides the catalog, the editor and a development environment that emulates mainframe console, SYSLOG and SYSOUT. JCL source code has been transformed into Jscript components. NeoBatch includes also NeoSort that accept all mainframe SORT commands and options. 6 chart shows the migration process flow production architecture Following is production environment configuration: Online Server: 1 Server Wintel with CPU = 4 Xeon @ 3.0GHz; RAM = 4 GB Hard Disk = 2 x 72GB in RAID1 (72GB) Batch Server: 1 Server Wintel with CPU = 4 Xeon @ 3.0GHz; RAM = 4 GB Hard Disk = 2 x 72GB in RAID1 (72GB) DB Server 2 Server Unix with
CPU = 4 UltraSparc IV@1.3GHz or PA-8800@1.0GHz or SPARC64 V@1.8GHz or Power5@1.9GHz RAM = 16 GB Hard Disk = 2 x 72GB in RAID1 (72GB) External STORAGE: Disk space= 5TB (RAID5) Migration infrastructure was based on: 7 Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition SP1 2 Web server in loadbalancing with IIS V6 for Internet services batch scheduler Maestro Oracle 10g DB Server NetCOBOL, NeoKicks, NeoBatch for application development Windows XP Professional SP2 for client workstation approach to the migration project Methodology Project methodology has been widely used by BIZLOGICA based on Requisite Engineering and Project Management standard practice. Following is a short description of the various aspects covered. Project team Human resources had been organized in different sub-teams: Management Group legacy application analysts.net developer Fujitsu s technologies consultants DBA experts Application developers Testers Steps undertaken In order to lower project risks project had been splitted in following steps:
1. Inventory & assessment Migrated a small application, Vessels, which represented the complexity of the environment and the key technical challenges. 2. Architectural and functional analysis, knowledge mining 3. Prototyping 4. Project plan development 5. Code and data migration 6. Test, verification, and launch into production Development tools Following tools have been mainly used: Relativity Technology s Modernization Workbench for source code inventory, and for knowledge mining; Fujitsu s NetCOBOL for.net to compile and generate native MS.NET executable programs Fujitsu s NeoKicks to migrate 3270 screens (BMS) into WebForm ASP.NET and modify CICS programs API into INVOKE to equivalent CICS services Fujitsu s NeoBatch to convert MVS JCL into Jscript. Fujitsu s NetCOBOL File Utility to convert VSAM files Seemore Technology s tools to migrate both DB2 structure and data into Oracle. 8 test Test case project has been entirely set-up by customer. Test have been based mainly about regression test, since code changes had been very few. Business logic code had not be changed at all. Different approach has been taken for performance tests because environments were totally different. conclusions Applications have been migrated and are operational in the new environment. User are receiving an even better service than before, in terms of response time. Recurring production costs have been dramatically reduced and Client Management has reached his objective.
ABOUT BIZLOGICA Established in 2001 BIZLOGICA, has a large experience in helping enterprises and large organization in continuously evolving their legacy applications to stay competitive in their marketplace. We have a legacy culture and all our Consultants have a proven record of successes both in professional and managerial roles in large organizations. We offer our customers consultancy services aimed at designing IT solutions as an evolution of their legacy systems, in order to leverage on their present assets to take benefit of the newest technologies like.net and Web Services. We integrate their systems with new functions in a balanced way, in order to take advantage of the best of the old and the new world. Through our methods, process and technologies applied to legacy applications we are able extract business rules, restructure and isolate the presentation from the business logic. In this way systems can be extended and deployed on new platforms, maintaining the business logic, that is the core of enterprise business, in a fashion easily accessible, understandable, maintainable with no or few changes in people s skills.with the help of powerful tools the legacy modernization process can be highly automated then reducing risks, shortening the delivery elapsed time and lowering the costs. 9 Among the others, Bizlogica is the Italian partner of Alchemy Solutions, the company that distribute the NetCobol product family and the NeoSuite products (NeoKicks, NeoBatch, NeoSort, NeoData, NeoServices) that provide a sound and proven solution to migrate MVS applications to the Microsoft Windows Platform.