MAINFRAME FROM PAGE 20 just astronomical.” Publicis has ownership was still “dramatically be running this Windows junk,” across-the-board answers, said
reduced its operating costs by 10 lower,” Anschuetz said. Anschuetz said. “The reality is Robert Rosen, president of Share,
The transition also requires per cent a year. He added that he did have that [our distributed systems] are a Chicago-based IBM mainframe
more horsepower for an applica- Even after considering the concerns about moving off up all of the time, and our actual user group. “Where you get into
tion that consumes up to 300 management costs of a distrib- the mainframe. “I remember [mean time between failures] is trouble is when you try to force-
I/Os per transaction and up to uted system and the cost of the someone telling me we shouldn’t tremendous.” fit a solution,” he said. “Taking
130,000 transactions per day. Intel servers needed to replace get rid of the mainframe, it’s When it comes to dealing with the best of both worlds, that’s the
“Java requires more CPU power the mainframe, the total cost of Five Nines, and you’re going to legacy applications, there are no key.” 060944
than assembler, and as you move
from proprietary VSAM to a
generated database system, you
lose efficiencies. With WebSphere,
MQSeries and DB2, you have to
crank the dial up,” DiAngelo said.
Another question is whether
that strategy will scale for applications beyond a few hundred MIPS
in size, said Vecchio. On the high
end, IT must move to SOA because there are no other options,
he said. “The hope for mainframe
customers is that WebSphere and
Java can perform with the same
quality of service that they have
come to expect from CICS, IMS
and Cobol,” he said.
Publicis Group SA moved
entirely off of an MVS mainframe
and onto an open system. The
advertising agency deployed high-density Hewlett-Packard Co. blade
servers and VMware Inc. partitions
to increase utilization levels.
It migrated the primary application — a financial reporting
system that included client
billing, ERP and reporting that
amounted to 80 per cent of
the mainframe workload — to
PeopleSoft. Other applications
were either ported or retooled
entirely, said CIO Christian
Anschuetz. “It was a Herculean
effort, to be sure,” he said of the
four-year project.
His main motivation was cost.
The mainframe was “
extraordinarily expensive” and not agile
enough for the organization’s
needs, Anschuetz said, and “the
licensing costs associated with
the development tools were
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