HP pushes mainframe alternatives

IBM is the sole mainframe vendor still in the market

HP said it is seeing growing demand for its mainframe alternative programme, which offers customers a way to reduce operating costs for their big iron, right through to providing a complete migration path onto more modern and open platforms for organisations seeking to leave behind their legacy systems.

The Mainframe Alternative Programme (MFA), which has been operating for several years, has already assisted hundreds of customers worldwide to migrate off the mainframe, and is now one of HP's fastest growing programmes in the EMEA region, according to the firm, with close to 60 contracts signed in the last financial year.

Among the reasons for this is the recession, which has forced many companies to re-assess their IT spending, but also the fact that key staff needed to maintain many legacy systems are now retiring.

"It wasn't seen as a problem to keep the mainframe going before the recession, but when the credit crisis kicked in, many mainframe contracts started to become an unacceptable cost," said Herman Eggink, HP's MFA sales manager for EMEA.

However, this is in contrast with findings from services firm BMC, which published a report last year claiming that mainframe customers are happy with these systems, and were largely seeking ways to hold down costs and modernise their applications.

IDC analyst Chris Ingle said many organisations used the issues around the Y2K modernisation at the end of the last millennium to get off the mainframe, and many others have been considering it since, but the sheer cost of any migration project is likely to be a factor.

"And you have to take risk into account," he added, pointing out that in many cases, mainframes are running applications that drive the day-to-day business operations of the company.

But some customers in talks with HP have also woken up to the fact that as many as half of their specialist mainframe technicians are due to retire within the next three to five years, Eggink said, and so addressing the issue has suddenly moved up their agenda.

Ingle agreed, saying that "skills are definitely a problem. IBM has been investing in university places to get new people with mainframe skills, but there are still going to be few of them. Of course, IBM would claim that you don't need as many as you do to manage Windows."

Another major factor is that IBM has effectively become the sole vendor left in the mainframe ecosystem, and this lack of competition is driving up costs to the point where many customers have had enough, according to HP.

"In our re-hosting projects to date, we haven’t seen less than a 50 per cent reduction in total cost of ownership, and people just find it hard to believe this when we tell them," Eggink said.

With potential savings such as this, it is easy to see why organisations might show an interest, but moving away from a mainframe system that a customer might have been operating for decades is a daunting prospect.

In fact, many mainframe workloads can be migrated successfully to open systems, according to HP, but this depends on the throughput of the existing system and the applications running. Open systems refers to servers based on architectures such as Itanium 2 or x86, running Windows, Linux, or Unix.

"Up to a couple of thousand MIPS, Windows is a viable alternative, and even at 14,000 MIPS, we can be more cost-effective than IBM," Eggink said.

In most cases, successfully transferring the applications and data from the mainframe will be the difficult part of the project.

"The main problem is getting code from the customer. We rely on the customer to have at least some expertise in their own existing environment, but this isn't always the case," explained Eggink.

Mainframe migrations are so specialised that just about every customer's situation is unique, according to HP.

For this reason, HP said it has set up an MFA centre of excellence for the EMEA region, consisting of an experienced centralised team of specialists that handles applications and data migration, while local HP teams in each territory deal with the infrastructure.

In most cases, re-hosting is the best solution for customers, according to Tracey Swales, MFA services director for EMEA.

"In terms of actual applications, Cobol or whatever, we can take it as-is onto open systems," she said.

This is a "very low risk" approach for customers, who can then start to modernise and customise their migrated applications, she claimed.

However, Ingle warned that organisations should expect such projects to take at least six months and sometimes longer than two years to come to fruition.

"I don’t think anyone would claim it is going to be easy," he said.

One customer that HP is currently working with still has its mainframe, but wants to reduce operating costs. According to HP, the solution was to migrate the organisation's chief z/OS applications to Linux running on eight HP ProLiant 500 series servers, with a residual 250 MIPS workload remaining on the mainframe, which HP has also taken over the management of via an outsourcing contract.

The precise stack a customer ends up with will depend on the core applications they rely on. For batch processing functions, HP always uses its own solution stack, Swales said, which means customers have no need to buy new licences.

For online transaction processing, such as replacing Customer Information Control System (CICS), third-party tools such as Clerity UniKix will be brought in if the customer is moving to a Unix stack, or Alchemy NeoKicks if a customer is migrating to a Microsoft-based infrastructure.

Until last year, customers mostly preferred Unix, according to Swales, but HP has begun to see a change in this situation.

"Microsoft tools have become more enterprise-ready, and we're starting to see customers asking for a migration to Windows. They may have lots of Microsoft experience [in their IT department] and so it makes sense to offload to Microsoft," she said.

However, Swales stressed that it is important to do a full risk assessment before proceeding with any mainframe re-hosting project, and said that HP's MFA Core Services will carry out the initial feasibility studies for a fixed price.

"We haven't yet seen any case where it wasn't feasible to re-host, but it might be possible that with really old code, the customer may not own that code, " she said.