Top Approaches to Modernize Mainframe

Coming year 2015 will be the year for legacy modernization. What are the things we need to consider for modernization?

Best strategies in modernization.

Once a company realizes the potential benefits of modernizing mainframe applications to the cloud, and moves beyond the fear of modernization, there are several modernization strategies to consider. 

And while the modernization strategies may not be all that new, they bear repeating in the context of modernizing mainframe applications by transforming them into cloud applications.  Let’s discuss four proven strategies.

1.    Lift-and-Shift

Several technologies exist for recompiling and executing mainframe applications onto commodity servers in the cloud.  Vendors offer emulation platforms to run COBOL, VSAM, ISAM, CICS 3270 green screen, among others as-is within a Linux environment.   Once “shifted” to a commodity server platform, the application can be placed into virtualized workloads, such as Linux running on vSphere, and managed from within a cloud, such as vCloud. 

This approach may be the least risky and the lowest cost option.  Its primary advantage is that it significantly reduces costs by moving from an expensive, proprietary mainframe environment to a commodity-based processing environment. 

However, it brings little value to the modernized application itself as you are still operating within a mainframe context, maintaining brittle application code and relying on mainframe skill sets and experience.

This may be the best modernization strategy if your primary goal is to reduce capital expenditures and short-term TCO. Read more

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