Tag: Mainframe Modernization

Many companies or institutions still possess legacy non-x86 systems in their datacenters: mainframe, midrange, or UNIX proprietary systems. Migrating these workloads across hardware architectures to the AWS Cloud requires advanced software technology. Short-term migration approaches mainly use hardware emulation, middleware emulation, automated refactoring, or middleware replatforming. This post highlights short-term migration options, their key technical differences, as well as their differentiated benefits.

The New York Times had a critical business workload running on a mainframe as the core IT system supporting the daily Home Delivery Platform of its newspaper. They collaborated with APN Partner Modern Systems to successfully transform their legacy COBOL-based application into a modern Java-based application, which today runs on AWS. This post describes the project, including the automated refactoring process and AWS architecture, as well as key lessons learned, business outcomes, and future technology plans.

Customers that still have business-critical data locked in mainframes want to exploit this data with AWS agile services. Fortunately, Treehouse Software’s tcVISION replicates data in real-time and bi-directionally between mainframes and AWS to allow for these new use cases. Learn about the solution, customer use cases, and explore a practical example of how to replicate data in real-time from DB2 z/OS to Amazon Aurora.

Take a look at the most popular APN Blog posts in 2018. Our goal with this blog is to share timely and relevant news, technical solutions, Partner success stories, and more from Amazon Web Services and the APN specifically. For AWS customers, you can trust that APN Partners are focused on your success, helping you take full advantage of the business benefits AWS has to offer. With their deep expertise, APN Partners are uniquely positioned to help your company at any stage of your Cloud Adoption Journey.

Ippon Technologies has successfully re-written a large mainframe third-party software package to Java Angular Spring Boot microservices. The package supported 130 TPS and 1,800 MIPS, catered to over 5,000 users, and housed more than 5 TB of business-critical data. Ippon helped the customer define the approach and architecture, and then developed the microservices along with the CI/CD pipeline on AWS. Learn about the project’s technical aspects, methodologies, and lessons learned.

A multi-company team led by ARRAY delivered for the U.S. Air Force a successful modernization of a COBOL-based system running on aged mainframes to a Java-based system running on x86 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). AWS provides the system’s capabilities for reliability, scalability, and this post describes the objectives, approach, solution, lessons, and customer benefits realized from this experience.

The Modernization Platform-as-a-Service (ModPaaS) from APN Partner Modern Systems allows customers to collaborate in a highly-customizable manner. ModPaaS is available on AWS Marketplace and gives you access to Modern Systems-developed modernization solutions “as a service” on AWS. It can be used in a self-service manner, with assistance from Modern Systems’ modernization specialists, or in a fully-managed approach similar to traditional project engagements.

Mainframe monoliths have grown over the years with overwhelming complexity. They often mix different languages and data stores with various interfaces, evolving coding standards, online and batch, and millions of lines of code. With AWS, customers use microservices for agility, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go cloud technology. In this post, we explore AWS Blu Age solutions to peel off AWS microservices from a mainframe monolith, and how to solve data challenges associated with such a migration.

There is no one-size-fits-all for mainframe modernization to AWS. Depending on the business and IT strategy, customers select the most suitable pattern for them. If the mainframe is large enough to process multiple workloads, the characteristics can favor different patterns. Fortunately, based on our experience from successful customer modernization projects to AWS, we have identified patterns, lessons learned, and best practices that facilitate new mainframe-to-AWS initiatives.

Heirloom automatically refactors mainframe applications’ code, data, job control definitions, user interfaces, and security rules to a cloud-native platform on AWS. Using an industry-standard TPC-C benchmark, we demonstrated the elasticity of Heirloom on AWS, delivering 1,018 transactions per second—equivalent to the processing capacity of a large mainframe. Heirloom Computing is an APN Standard Technology Partner.