Migrating and/or decommissioning Mainframe Application.

[Anuj Dhawan]

Hi,

I had been involved in couple of projects where in we supposed to do such migration or decommission the entire application, though, I was mostly involved as Application Developer.

The one thing which I get interested in to is - in case, you migrate to another platform, how do one decide on the MSU of the machine to be replaced with. For the existing Mainframe System there should be a(n) MSU already available (yes/no?) - if NO - then what are the practical ways someone has used personally or known. Once the MSU is known of existing machine, what's next - in terms of throughput of the next machine...

Hopefully, I put forward the question well enough to get started with some answers, at least...

[Robert Sample]

In theory, the MSU of the mainframe platform should drive the determination of the replacement platform. In my experience, however, the replacement platform is usually determined by the application (often the vendor) and if the initial platform does not have enough horsepower additional servers / disk drives will be thrown at the application until response times are deemed adequate (or the company stops putting money into the application). After all, servers are "cheap" -- especially compared to the big chunk of money that is paid for mainframe hardware / software / maintenance.