Reducing Risk in Mainframe Migration

Many organizations are excited by the opportunity mainframe modernization and migration offers, but express concerns with comments like:

• “Those who have successful migration stories have systems or organizations that are not like our systems or organization”
• “My mainframe is simply too big to move everything off”
• “Moving everything is going to take too long – I need to show results in much shorter timeframes”
• “I’m not sure we have the skills to operate in the target environment”
• “Nothing can match the mainframe for reliability”
• “Can I rely on Windows as an enterprise platform?”
• “I want to try a small amount before we decide to do more but we don’t really have any discrete applications that would be a good test”

If this sounds like you, the good news is that we have solutions that can help you overcome these concerns and achieve the benefits you deserve.

The Solution -- Selective Application Migration

Using NeoData zLink, in conjunction with NeoKicks and other products in the Neo solution set, applications can be migrated to .NET without having to bring all the data files they require with them.

NeoData zLink enables complete flexibility to select the application that makes the most sense to migrate so you don’t need to find that special application, or set of applications, that share no data with others.

The selective application migration approach is illustrated in the figure below.

Figure 1 Selective migration using NeoData zLink

With this selective approach you are able to choose the applications you want to migrate in manageable chunks – meaning as much as you like to get results quickly, determine feasibility, and start seeing returns on your investment. Short-term returns can be measured by freeing up mainframe MIPS for use by other applications, or avoiding mainframe upgrades because your growing workload is no longer maxing-out the mainframe. Manageable should also mean that you aren’t moving so much that you feel you are totally committed to the new platform – you might even leave yourself with the option to back out if you really aren’t happy with the results.

See the NeoData zLink product page for more details on this particular part of the Neo solution set or watch the webcast Eradicating the “All-or-Nothing” Approach to Mainframe Migration to Reduce Risk and Speed Results for a more detailed presentation on the need for and advantages of our selective application migration approach.