Companies experience savings of up to 70%
The monopoly IBM has on the global mainframe market is dissipating with the announcement that Sun Microsystems has moved over 500 million lines of COBOL code off costly mainframe environments at 300 different enterprises globally.
Using its re-hosting software, Sun, in conjunction with systems integrators and channel partners around the world, has helped companies and institutions increase their flexibility, modernise their IT infrastructures and reduce costs by up to 70%.
"With Amdahl and Hitachi having abandoned the mainframe market, IBM is the only systems supplier in this environment, owning total monopoly of the mainframe architecture," says Tertius Bezuidenhout, national SE manager at Sun Microsystems SA.
This, he says, will worry a lot of enterprises. "Mainframe users are now essentially locked into the monopoly and forced to pay high operating system license fees, applications and hardware costs."
"However, Sun's 'Blue Away' initiative allows mainframe users to migrate to an open Unix platform without any change to the look, feel and performance of the mainframe style that they are familiar with."
Bezuidenhout points out that there are multiple companies in SA using mainframes with COBOL and CICS applications and batch processors that would benefit from the 'Blue Away' initiative.
"The main issue is changing peoples' mindsets, but once that's achieved the migration to a Unix environment, with the associated reduction in costs and openness of the platform, is a very compelling justification," he says.
He stresses that the migration does not change the environment that operators are used to but merely changes the infrastructure that it runs on, maintaining the COBOL and JCL languages as the interface that mainframe programmers are typically used to.
A key component of the program, Sun's Mainframe Transaction Processing (MTP) and Mainframe Batch Manager (MBM) software helps enable customers to run existing mainframe CICS, COBOL and batch applications - such as those commonly found in commercial banking and insurance, manufacturing, retail and government - virtually unmodified in a contemporary computing environment.
Sun's Fire and Sun Enterprise servers, combined with its mainframe re-hosting software, allow customers to maintain the skill sets of their IT staff, saving them considerable time and expense and providing a strong alternative to their legacy mainframe infrastructures.
"We've talked to hundreds of mainframe customers and their greatest pain comes from paying exorbitant monthly bills for their mainframe software. With Sun's solution, customers only pay a one-time fee," says Don Whitehead, director of mainframe re-hosting at Sun Microsystems Inc.
"The numerous success stories we've logged and the sheer amount of COBOL code we've already re-hosted are proof that re-hosting to Sun servers yields greater cost savings and improves data centre functionality."
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