Cleaning The Garage (Mainframe Transformation)

Stephen Hodges

I have moved many times in my life. It always seems a huge effort to pack things prior to a move. I’ll get moving boxes according to my non-scientific evaluation of how much “stuff” I have to move. Then when I’m just plain tired of packing I wonder where all of this stuff came from and, do I really “need” to move it? If you’re moving yourself, it’s easy to (wimp out and) postpone the reduction of stuff.

But when you’re paying someone to move you, minimizing inventory (and cost) is essential. Possibly as important, if not more, is planning the logistics for transition, and preparing the target areas for delivery.

When planning a mainframe transformation project to move your mainframe development, testing, and production environments to an X86 architecture, the same considerations are a must. A distributed X86 infrastructure is now the platform of choice and mission critical for many companies. This is largely due to reduced costs, improved agility, larger workforce market, and greater integration (and selection) of products. Converged infrastructures continue leading the way in simplicity of form with premium function for both hardware and virtualized environment management. Development, testing, and operations management should think in the same terms of automated or “converged” process management. In many cases, this is outside the box of typical mainframe product capabilities. I often speak with clients confirming limited control options from mainframe tools.

Many clients I talk to these days are contemplating mainframe transformation projects to the X86 world, and most ask these types of questions:

• Where do I start?
• How do I determine which applications or components should move?
• How do I identify which application connections are required, which can be severed, or require some sort of bridge?
• How do I understand which applications I’m most invested in, or cost more, from both the development/maintenance and execution perspectives?
• How do I ensure minimal risk and optimal stability in transition?
• How can I minimize disruption to both my IT organization and my end-users or business groups?
• How can I consolidate development language and data technologies?
• How can I optimize my development and deployment processes?
• How can I minimize my application inventory and improve development productivity?

The answers to these questions, or the method to finding the answers, can vary depending on your stage of transformation readiness. There are three stages to transformation readiness:

• Uncertain – This can also be called confused. At this stage, you know something has to be done. There are pains that keep you up at night. You have lots of financial or operational issues that are hindering you from becoming the agile and flexible organization that provides the quick delivery your business demands. You may have read articles or talked to vendors and gotten some ideas of varying solutions, but few can offer the total solution you need, and you are possibly more confused or uncertain on options. Who can you trust to help with your mainframe transformation? Who can deliver the whole enchilada?
• Motivated – You’ve done your initial research and have some idea of what you want to do. Even though the who, how, how long, and at what cost may be elusive, you’re driven to succeed. You want to minimize your risk, and have the foresight to test the waters. You know you need details, a plan, and an experienced reputable partner, a known entity, before you go to “the well.”
• Ready – You have done the assessment, have a general plan, communicated to the troops, and budgeted, or are ready to. You may have a deadline or impending event, such as a product support or contract expiration. You could be part of a merge or acquisition with a mandate or need to transform.

Regardless of your stage, your process should be the same.

• First, assess your inventory and environments, both legacy and target, to determine your physical and operational readiness.
• Consolidate technologies where applicable.
• Construct and configure your target space (and personnel).
• Head ‘em up, move ‘em out (for those Rawhide fans).

No matter your stage, EMC can help. Our Mainframe Transformation Service Offerings adjust to your specific stage. For the Uncertain, our Mainframe Transformation Opportunity Workshop is a quick hit assessment of your environment to provide insight into your requirements and your most appropriate options. In the workshop, we analyze your execution logs and determine which applications are running, when, and how much. We then assess your application inventory and generate reports identifying complexity, flow, and dependencies, and determine areas for transformation focus. Finally, we’ll sit down with and your team to review and discuss the findings and recommendations and determine your best path forward.

For the Motivated, our Mainframe Transformation Advisory Service takes a deeper dive and considers architecture, infrastructure, operations, security, print management, scheduling, and other critical areas to build a transformation roadmap, a general Gantt timeline with a phased approach, and a high-level pricing estimate including hardware, software, training, and support.

In addition to incorporating the analysis functions of the Opportunity Workshop, the Advisory Service adds onsite discovery interview sessions to determine the rest of the story “outside the code.” Our Calibration Service is the ultimate proving ground for showing how your application environment will be transformed. With our automated analysis tools, we can help identify online transactions and batch jobs to highlight the technology, process, and our expertise to help you land safely in the target environment. A calibration can be a small proof of concept, so you can see the output and understand the technology, or a full-fledged pilot to put a subset of your application into production. Now there’s proof in the pudding.

For those who are Ready, we’ll bring the experience of over 100 successful projects to bear. The good news is that with our federation of companies – EMC, VMware, Pivotal, and RSA – and partnerships and alliances such as VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) and Heirloom Computing, you can be confident that our delivered solution will fit your needs.

I’m an old mainframe COBOL programmer. I have been around the block a few times, and have been in the transformation biz for a long time. Even though our automated tools help expedite the process, it’s still fun for me to see how every client transformation has its own nuances. Let’s talk; I’ll help find yours.

In the coming blogs I’ll dig a little deeper into some of the concepts and tools mentioned here. Stay tuned. And speaking of automated tools (and the genius behind them), check out my buddy Steve Woods’ blog “Small Work, Big Data.”

Cleaning The Garage (Mainframe Transformation)
Stephen Hodges