Our Automated Archiving solution allows you retain your legacy source code and data in an easily accessible repository when migrating away from the mainframe as part of an ERP implementation or re-engineering effort. This solution also includes tools to efficiently navigate, document, trace, and isolute rules in the archived source code and data.
CHALLENGES
Modern ERP solutions often take the place of home-grown, mainframe-based applications in today's enterprises. Unfortunately, there are often business-critical components of these legacy systems that are incompatible with the ERP solution being implemented.
In many industries, regulatory compliance standards require historical data retention. This can be challenging if that data resides on a mainframe that is being retired or decommissioned.
Companies who must retain legacy data for regulatory purposes, or business-critical functionality outside of a replacement ERP system often choose to keep expensive mainframes that could otherwise be decommissioned.
OUR SOLUTION
Our Automated Archiving solution allows you to retain and access archived data and application source code by migrating these assets to repositories on modern, distributed systems. This removes the crippling cost of retaining the original mainframe infrastructure.
Automated Data Migration
Companies harness the power of modern ERP systems to replicate some, or all of the functionality of the legacy applications they are replacing. Implementing these complex ERP systems is a monumental task that requires hard work and out-of-the-box thinking to achieve success. And, when the dust settles, there can be components of the old system that don't fit into the new ERP, but need to be retained.
Most compliance standards that govern data retention insist that data remains in place and accessible for up to a decade or more. As a result, many companies opt to retain pieces of legacy systems to run alongside a new ERP deployment to meet those retention requirements. Unfortunately, this strategy is expensive. To make matters more complicated, it's expensive to make the archived data accessible by way of the new ERP system too.
We can archive non-relational databases such as IDMS, IMS-DB, Adabas, and VSAM by converting them into relational equivalents. Then, we refactor the applications (typically online applications), complete with screens, to a modern language like Java or C#, and present them in a web browser. Here you can use them to access the data the same way you did before, but without the legacy infrastructure or licensing costs.
Flat files, GDGs, and sequential files
Our solution can migrate flat, sequential, and GDG files into Windows or a Cloud environment, and use our eavFileConverter software to convert the EBCIDIC to ASCII automatically, on demand. It then presents the files as they’re intended to be presented without the legacy infrastructure that’s normally required to open them.
Legacy source code archival
In some situations, companies are rewriting monolithic mainframe applications into Cloud-optimized microservices. The process of doing this is an arduous one, and developers often need to refer to the original source code and business logic to properly outfit the new architecture.
Our solution can collect source code in languages such as COBOL, Natural, or PL/I off of the mainframe, and inject it into eav, our research, documentation, and rules isolation repository software. Eav can reside in your data center or in the Cloud, where it can be used to access and traverse the code as-is for a re-engineering project, removing the need to retain the legacy infrastructure in place during the process.
“We were looking to accomplish two things with the pilot. The first was to prove the solution would work on GE hardware under our roof. The second was to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to our users that their UI wasn’t going to change.”
Marc Rubel, Executive Director of Application Development
GE Capital
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by Tim Jones, Managing Director - Application Modernization
Over 35 years of COBOL and mainframe modernization experience
Read our application modernization blogs