The SDC Mainframe migration project
20th September, 2012 Robert Elgaard, [email protected]
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About Corebank
The Modernization project is targeting the entire Corebank application (customers, accounts, transactions, interest calculations etc.) covering all traditional banking products.
SDC Corebank consists of:
14,500 Cobol modules 12,1 mill. lines of code +2,500 online transactions
+1,200 unique batch jobs (expands to +30,000) +49,000 function points (http://www.ifpug.org/)
The only motivation for migrating Corebank from Mainframe to Microsoft .NET was a need to cut operational expenses.
Using in excess of 9500 MIPS, the MIPS payments became a burden for our ability to compete in the market.
The project was initiated as a part of a comprehensive strategic “cost efficiency” program that we run at SDC.
Microsoft gained interest in the project, and eventually it became a part of Microsoft Mission Critical Program.
From autumn 2007 to early spring 2009 a comprehensive pre-study was conducted.
The project was launched in May 2009.
Other benefits
Access to a modern development environment like Visual Studio
Skill shortage - people with mainframe skills are getting harder to employ More agile and flexible infrastructure
Strongly improved procedures and disciplines for server operation Improved monitoring capabilities by health modeling and SCOM Economy of scale
Microsoft .NET
- Two parallel runtime environments - Single source base
- Supporting two technologies - Supporting 138 banks
- Supporting four countries - Minimal impact on developers
- Migration without any stop in development AppBuilder (IDE) Nebula (Source repository) Mainframe Development Check-in Check-out Build & De ploy pre-process Build & Deploy General mainframe migration strategies:
- Replace - Rewrite - Rehost
Phase-1: 70 query transactions and first version of the operation platform
Phase-2: All transactions (employee portal), some netbank functionality, batch and full operation platform
Phase-3: remaining netbank functionality and migrate DB2 to SQL Server.
The entire project has been broken down into these three independent phases, each phase having its own risk-, cost- and benefit profile.
Benefit 4 mill. Euro per year.
Additional 7 mill. Euro in benefit per year.
Additional 4 mill. Euro in benefit per year.
May 2010 May 2011 February 2012 May 2012
Implementation phases
AsWas AsIs
Emulate Corebank communication
progressive implementation
zIIP Implementation first phase
Master Shadow
implementation second and third phase
Central OPC .NET Batch jobs
During the transition process there will be mechanisms in place to facilitate instant fallback to the existing batch job on the mainframe.
At the end scheduling of batch jobs are moved to the .NET platform, either using a traditional scheduler or by implementing workflow based batch procedures.
zIIP Mainframe Batch
Assumptions for business case calculation:
Financial benefit is calculated relative to the as-is situation, where we stay on mainframe until end of current IBM contract, which expires 31. marts 2017.
From experience we know that MIPS consumption grows between 10% and 15% each year.
The benefit is fully realized at the end of the IBM contract, and the calculation did assume 10% as yearly MIPS grow.
The calculation includes reduction for licenses paid to other mainframe software vendors who base their revenue at MIPS. This includes CA, Compuware, BMC and more.
SDC has chosen to let a large part of the MIPS consumption be OnDemand.
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 8000 8600 9000 9500 10400 7400 5550 OnDemand MIPS: 100 % saving on 10400 – 7400 = 3000 MI (2012 MI consumption according to baseline)
75 % saving on 7400 -5550 = 1850 MI ( max- baseline reduction is 25%)
0 % saving for MI consumption below 5550 MI
År
MIPS consumption
Contractual baseline
Contractual limitfor MI reduction
Actual MIPS consumption in 2010 Original forecast (10 % growth per year)
12500
Revised forecast (15,4 % growth per year) Business Case - MI cost model
11500
New conservative forecast
Approx. 18% of current mainframe cost Yearly savings exceeds 18 mill. Euro
Reducing operational cost
Significant operational cost savings:
Mio. Euro
22 (2014) 4,0
3-years software subscription
Hardware is deprecated over 3 years 1.3 mill..
0.8 mill. 0.4 mill..
0.7 mill.
The project cost accumulate to approx. 24 mill. Euro. The overall cost distribution is as follows:
Hardware/Software : 4 mill. Euro
Application migration : 11 mill. Euro
Operation platform, procedures & processes : 9 mill. Euro
Total yearly cost inclusive operations, software and deprecation approx . 4 mill. Euro ROI is approx. 2 years.
Production setup and economy of scale
Production setup looks like this:
Fujitsu-Siemens RX300 S5 Server, 3,33 GHz, 8 Core, 48 Gbyte memory Windows Server 2008 R2, Data Center Edition on VmWare ESXi 4.0 Price less than 10.000 Euro, plus 16.000 Euro per year in OpEx Power of the sizing unit corresponds to 2000 MIPS
Monitoring
Significant funds has been invested in order to establish a “mainframe class” operations environment.
The monitor and operations environment is based on Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) .
The SCOM configuration has been derived from a ”health model”. This model was defined by deep dive analysis of the most important system components.
Monitoring for stability
All application components and system resources are monitored by SCOM.
Performance counters are injected into application components to achieve detailed runtime information at module level (memory-, handles-, CPU utilization…)
Peopleware
Competences and responsibilities - Make responsibilities crystal clear.
Collaboration between highly skilled people from different organizations was challenging. All parties tend to “over-contributes” to the solution.
Sub optimization
Lack of enterprise view. Vendors were occasionally over-focused on designing the Corebank application to perform well. On few occasions the Corebank .NET centric design focus has not been optimal for SDC’s entire application portfolio.
Understand that the migrated application is only one application among hundreds of other applications. Technical
HIS memory leak
Cobol pointer limitation Floating point consistency
Memory initialization for Cobol structures
Legacy applications needed optimization – since they were written for different topology Batch Performance
SQL Server and DB2 differences Interfacing mainframe appplications Business relations
In the beginning of the project it was, for obvious reasons, difficult to convince our facility manager IBM of the benefits of the project. When IBM realized that the migration was for real, they have been working - by the book, and without flexibility - with their tasks and project assignments.
Status
• All +2,500 online transactions are running on .NET.
• All batch jobs are running on .NET.
• All netbanks transactions are running on .NET
• Banks will be migrated from mainframe DB2 to MS SQL Server during September 2012
31st May were the following number of transaction processed on the platform:
The project will offload in excess of 10.000 MIPS
Current financial achievement: + 7,5 mill Euro per year.
Branches 4.867.088 Netbanks 4.505.214 Total 9.372.302
Key learning points
#1: A crystal clear and a rock solid implementation strategy is mandatory. - Best practices
- Parallel runtime environment with flexible transaction routing.
#2: IBM is a clever opponent; they do understand how to protect their business. #3: Hardware is ready, powerful and mature.
#4: The .NET product stack is comprehensive and mature. #5: Be prepared to optimize legacy applications.
- Address this during startup; it is a candidate for a joint design session. #6: Cheaper is better.
Thank you for your attention !
