Mainframe Migration

Mainframe migration. Isn't that what the personal computer revolution was all about in the first place? Assuming of course, that we're talking about migrating from mainframe computers to something smaller and more personal -- like cell phones, I suppose.

Mass migrations that have changed society are fascinating. Migrations from the Dust Bowl to California, the rural South to the urban North, the bogs of Ireland to the streets of New York. That kind of thing. Which is probably why the Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) caught my eye.

Not that you'll be seeing legions of mainframes alongside the road, thumbs out, slowly moving coast to coast on a hot summer day. That's not what the MMA is all about. What it does promote, however, is the migration of workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. All in all, the MMA has more than 100 member companies, all of whom are interested in seeing more migration from mainframes to Windows Servers. In other words, according to Intel's Susan Tauzer, "the MMA represents the leading edge of a larger community that delivers and deploys workloads on Windows that were historically the domain of big iron." Yep, sounds like what we heard at the beginning of the PC revolution.

But an interesting (canned) question is posed in the MMA's FAQ: Why the focus on just mainframes? The answer, of course, is that mainframe usually have special requirements -- near 100-percent application availability, or the ability to handle thousands of transactions per second. And addressing these requirements demands technical depth in both the mainframe and target platforms.

As you probably would expect, the MMA site has a link to the COBOL User Group; that alone ought to put a smile on your face. And then there are the case studies. Stories of companies that have successfully migrated from mainframes to something else, presumably Windows Servers. I don't know for sure because I didn't read all of them. You'll also encounter lots of companies that you never heard of before unless you've been working in the mainframe world. For those of us who are generally PC-centric, they remain unfamilar.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 05:56 PM  Permalink