Our Natural Rehosting solution combines the industry’s best software platform with proven application consolidation and data migration services. This ensures your entire mainframe estate is deployed to the target environment in the languages and database models you need.
CHALLENGES
Mainframes cost as much as 4,500 percent more to operate than equivalent Cloud counterparts. This figure is compounded by a scarcity of development resources and rising licensing and maintenance fees for ancillary mainframe utilities, applications, and databases.
Legacy databases are difficult to integrate with systems on modern platforms. This is because of inherent inextensibility, incompatibility, and rigidity of the underlying hardware and software powering these legacy systems.
Companies are rapidly moving to DevOps and the Cloud while consolidating their technology stacks to maximize IT performance. Unfortunately, the inflexibility of mainframes has become a growing hindrance to modern, continuously evolving, agile business.
OUR SOLUTION
You can retain your Natural code as-is while taking advantage of the cost savings and infinite elasticity of the Cloud by rehosting your legacy estate with Advanced.
Rehosting, sometimes referred to as replatforming, is ideal for companies whose applications are still meeting their business needs, and who therefore wish to retain their Natural development skills while moving away from non-relational databases and expensive mainframe infrastructure. With rehosting, Natural is migrated onto modern, distributed platforms, either on-premises or in the Cloud, without change. Underlying legacy databases are migrated to relational models, configured to seamlessly interact with your applications via the rehosting platform.
Our Natural Rehosting solution leverages our robust Application Transparency Platform (ATP) rehosting software. ATP is a Natural rehosting and Adabas migration solution that provides an end-to-end strategic pathway for lower licensing costs, higher productivity, and full preservation of legacy assets and business rules. Organizations looking to move away from Natural can use ATP to automatically convert syntax to COBOL, Java, or C# on demand. As an alternative to the re-engineering and conversion solutions available for Natural and Adabas, ATP dramatically reduces the timeframe for the replacement cycle and accelerates your return on investment.
ATP enables automated Adabas migration into the relational database of your choice, processing Natural applications using ATP Language (ATPL). ATP powers Natural rehosting seamlessly from the mainframe environment to a more economical and more robust ATP environment, thus reducing maintenance / licensing fees and mainframe workload. Since ATP interprets and executes each Natural command, the Natural applications can execute against the new relational database without changes to the Natural syntax.
Our eavJES batch execution suite, an ancillary toolset within the ATP rehosting environment, provides a job execution system for organizations who want to preserve their JCL and PROCS, and continue to maintain them even when they move off the mainframe.
In addition, ATP includes a full-featured UI-based development platform that includes Natural code analysis, flow diagramming, impact analysis, pattern matching, version comparison, and interactive debugging. The existing Natural development team can continue to develop and maintain applications as they always have with the support of modern development tools.
Retaining Natural syntax may be the final modernization goal for some organizations. For others, it might be a step in a phased approach to move away from procedural code and pre-relational databases altogether. ATP is designed to support customers regardless of how far down the modernization path their migration effort takes them. For migrations away from Natural, ATP supports automated refactoring to C#, Java, or COBOL through a simple right-click, SaveAs function. This is an industry first, bringing automated refactoring to the end user. Using this feature, it is possible to maintain the Natural, but choose to have the actual syntax converted to C#, Java, or COBOL at the time the syntax is saved by the developer. Once saved, the newly converted code is functionally equivalent to the legacy Natural syntax. This feature enables the best of both worlds; re-use of developers’ existing skill sets in Natural and their extensive knowledge of the applications, while deploying as C#, Java, or COBOL.
OUR PROCESS
We begin every modernization initiative with a discovery, free of charge. Our modernization experts work with you to understand and document your business and technical goals and objectives. Together, we gather information about your mainframe estate. Everything from infrastructure to language and database types and quantities are accounted for. The discovery concludes with a workshop where we recommend optimal modernization approaches based on information gathered, as well as rough order of magnitude (ROM) pricing, and estimated project durations and resource requirements.
The assess and design phase is performed using our automated tools to fully catalog and develop a complete understanding of the application, infrastructure, and operational components of a mainframe environment. It exposes mainframe artifacts that organizations did not know they had, relationships they did not realize existed, and assets that are no longer in use. Assess and design activities provide stakeholders with valuable insight to inform application modernization decisions such as disposition strategies and target environment architectures. It also mitigates cost and risk by highlighting potential challenges and how to overcome them. At the conclusion of the assess and design phase, all in-scope artifacts are accounted for, a detailed project plan is established, and the transformation process begins.
The transform phase includes the bulk of the application consolidation activities, the database and data modernization, and build-out of the target operating environment. During transform, the rehosting software is deployed and we perform any necessary refactoring in pre-defined work packets. We also perform functional tests and deliver the work packets into the DevOps pipeline. While customer teams build, test, and deploy these work packets in the target environment, we refactor the next work packet, iterating until the entire mainframe estate has been transformed.
The test and deploy phase begins with the receipt of work packets through the DevOps toolchain as they are delivered from iterative refactoring activities in the transform phase. If issues arise, the work packet is passed back to us where we review the code, adjust our tooling, reprocess the work packet, and send it back into the DevOps pipeline to resume testing and deployment. This process repeats until the entire refactored estate has been deployed.
Prior to go-live, we refresh the target environment by transforming a final snapshot of the mainframe environment to account for changes that have taken place throughout modernization project as part of normal business operations. Fortunately, since all adjustments and optimizations have been made to the automated refactoring tools and not the refactored code, this final refresh can be delivered into production over a weekend, eliminating code freezes.
We work closely with you and your team to ensure a smooth transition into production. Part of this transition includes the cooperative construction and testing of a go-live production cutover plan to reduce the potential risks associated with application deployments. We also provide on-demand assistance during the warranty period following production deployment, as well as appropriate rehosting platform support, and post-transformation support of the modernized applications.
“With Advanced, we were able to achieve our project goals within the timeline and budget specified at the outset of the project. The migrated applications acted exactly as expected, enabling us to integrate with internal and external systems as needed, with a level of performance we required. Plus, the modernized STARS can now deliver data in ways that will provide new value to customers countrywide.”
Li Phing,
Singapore Land Authority
We were able to rehost the Natural/Adabas-based visitor tracking system at the Savannah River Site to a modern Windows environment.
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by Tim Jones, Managing Director - Application Modernization
Over 35 years of Natural and mainframe modernization experience
Read our application modernization blogs