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Datarutin, the service provider for AB Stockholmshem, a major renter of housing in Stockholm, is enhancing the effectiveness of its services by migrating the CICS/COBOL applications from an aging mainframe to Microsoft's .NET environment. While the main objectives of the project are to modernize the application and place it in an environment with a healthy supply of resources, Stockholmshem is also hoping for significant savings and an ROI of less than 2 years. Profile
Stockholmshem
is one of the biggest housing companies in Sweden. The company, a municipal
housing company, is wholly owned by the City of Stockholm. It was founded in
1937, and today is the landlord of 8 per cent of all Stockholm inhabitants. The company's annual turnover amounts to 1.8 billion Swedish Krona (roughly
$250 million) and it employs 316 people. Datarutin,
a leading Swedish service provider, has had a close association with
Stockholmshem for many years, developing, maintaining and taking responsibility
for the operation of Stockholmshem's various systems. Datarutin/Stockholshem's real-estate system was developed in an IBM mainframe environment in the early 1960's and has gradually been enhanced and expanded to its current form. Today the system comprises about 170 online CICS/COBOL programs and 370 batch COBOL programs, using a DL/1 database and VSAM files running on VSE within a VM environment. Problems
For several years, Datarutin has been looking for a way to modernize the technical platform for the Real Estate System and improve its service to Stocksholmshem. Functionally the system was satisfactory, but: * The data storage and the platform were considered to be out of date. * It was increasingly troublesome to integrate new systems to the Real Estate System. * There was growing concern about the diminishing supply of know-how and resources for the environment. Several options were evaluated such as: * Total redesign/rewrite in a new environment. * Finding an off-the-shelf system. * Buying and modifying a system used by some other real-estate company. * Migration of the legacy system in various directions. Datarutin had no joy finding an off-the-shelf system or a system used by another real estate company. A redesign was sized and proposed but considered to be too expensive in both time and resources. So an alternative strategy was chosen. In November 2002 it was decided to take a first step towards migration by converting the DL1/VSAM data into a relational database (DB/2) - still on the mainframe. The plan was then to migrate the system to a UNIX platform. However, as Kjell Hassel, one of the project managers, comments, "By the fall of 2003 we had difficulties finding relevant reference cases using the actual technique in UNIX to migrate legacy mainframe systems, so a broader survey was also conducted to see if any new alternatives had emerged." Hassel continues, "Datarutin found a reference case where tools from Fujitsu were used to migrate a mainframe system of similar size as ours into a Microsoft ASP.NET environment. Such a solution would have major advantages as that would bring the legacy system into exactly the same environment used for new systems recently developed." Solution
A pilot project was conducted with the help of Fujitsu Software in which a representative set of CICS programs and one of the more complex batch jobs were migrated to the Windows and .NET environments. Because the work to migrate to DB/2 was mostly completed, the migration to .NET focused on migrating the DB/2 version of the pilot applications and did not have to deal with any DL/1 issues. The pilot demonstrated that a combination of NetCOBOL, Fujitsu Software's Neokicks and zBatch from Fujitsu Software, along with some partner products like Vortex for enhanced SQL connectivity (see the next section for the full list), would provide a viable and attractive way of migrating Stockholmshem's applications. Participating in the pilot enabled Datarutin staff to plan how the full migration project would be accomplished, putting in place proguidelines covering: * Software installation * Data migration * Source management, including folder structures in the Windows environment and coordination of sources between the Windows-based Source Safe system, used for migrated sources, and any updates made to the production sources being stored on the mainframe during the migration project. * Migrating application sources (COBOL, BMS and JCL) to .NET/Windows * Setting up Neokicks configuration in the .config file
Writing the procedures helped Datarutin think through the migration issues and means that staff assigned to the migration project have very clear guidelines on how to proceed. Managing the Windows servers and establishing security were issues already familiar to the Datarutin staff as they provide a computer operations service for many clients and had already setup other .NET applications for Stocksholmshem. Figure 1 outlines the expected production environment and likely machine configurations.
Figure 1. Proposed production environment Benefits
Datarutin has determined the migration will provide the following benefits: * Substantial risk reduction by enabling phase out of obsolete techniques (Mainframe, VSE Operating System, DL/1). * Significant reduction of production costs. * A more uniform computing environment where the Real Estate System uses exactly the same platform as two new subsystems: "Min lägenhet" (Web portal for tenants) and "Webbfelan" (Web entry for maintenance requests from tenants.) * Easier to maintain adequate competence, system availability and security by consolidation towards fewer techniques and platforms. * A return on investment that should be under 24 months when the likelihood of increased mainframe costs is taken into account. The Fujitsu Software Solution
The pilot demonstrated that the applications would be migrated successfully using the following components:
In addition to the software components, Fujitsu Software provided training and guidance to help Datarutin conduct a successful pilot project. Why Fujitsu Software?
Fujitsu Software was chosen for the following reasons: * A .NET solution, matching Stockholmshem's chosen future strategy * Only .NET-based solution available for CICS * Best positioning of CICS applications for future enhancements * Continuity of application interfaces – the benefits can be realized without disrupting the application users * Highly cost effective platform * Attractive ROI Next Steps
Execution of the transition started in April 2004. The first part of the project is the technical migration – performing all the work to migrate programs and screens to .NET and preparing the pieces for transitioning production to the .NET environment. This is scheduled to complete by November 2004. At that point the actual transition of production systems will commence and is expected to be complete by March 2005.
Fujitsu Software Corporation 1250 E. Arques Avenue Sunnyvale, CA 94085 Phone: (800) 545-6774 or
(408) 428-0300 Email: cobol@netcobol.com Web: www.netcobol.com
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