Case Study
Industry
Energy Product
OpenFrameTibero
Challenges
- Mainframe was an annual expense that increased each year
- Spent several years rearchitecting legacy systems but still had some mission critical applications running on IBM z/OS
- 15.7 million lines of code, 172 MIPS
Results
- Mainframe was shut down completely without affecting business or operations
- The high-performance associated with the mainframe was unchanged
- Annual run costs decreased by 70%
- Greater reliability – normalized delivery into a core competency
- Faster processing times and a smaller application footprint
Company Overview
Entergy Corporation (NYSE: ETR) is an integrated energy company engaged in electric power production, transmission and retail distribution operations. Entergy delivers electricity to 3 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy owns and operates one of the cleanest large-scale U.S. power generating fleets with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, including 7,000 megawatts of nuclear power.
Headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana, Entergy has annual revenues of $10 billion and more than 13,000 employees.
Entergy consistently strives to create sustainable value for its customers, employees, communities and owners. That concentrated focus drives the way it thinks as an organization. It enables Entergy to effectively navigate through numerous transitions, both revolutionary and evolutionary, and still deliver on its commitments to its stakeholders.
The challenge
The mainframe system that enabled some of Entergy’s most critical operations was implemented in 1981. The company had been rearchitecting its legacy systems but still had some mission critical applications running on IBM z/OS. The cost to support the systems increased each year.
These issues needed to be addressed; it was not possible to maintain the status quo any longer. Moving some applications over and a few other options, such as rewriting, were also on the table. However, these were too big of an undertaking with no guarantee of success. As a result, the company realized all mainframe programs, databases, storage, scheduling, and interfaces would have to be ported onto new virtual servers in its virtual environment. Migrating the mainframe was the most viable option.
The solution
TmaxSoft delivered a proof of concept (POC) that showed that programs could be moved without change and that they would perform the same as they had on the mainframe. Entergy saw that the lift from the old platform to a new platform would have huge benefits and enable the company to successfully shut down the mainframe.
Entergy selected TmaxSoft to migrate its mission critical applications to the OpenFrame platform and migrate its data to the Tibero RDBMS, both running on Linux. TmaxSoft assisted with application migration, which included recompilation of the application programs on Linux and building both a production and a test environment. The file system (PS, GDG, VSAM) was migrated and ADF COBOL was rewritten to Java. TmaxSoft also provided OpenFrame and Tibero services, mentoring and training for developers and administrators, and product installation and configuration. Entergy’s team took decades of programming and made it all work on a Linux platform.
After the migration, the company reported that processing time was the same and, in some instances, faster than on a mainframe. Significant decrease in annual run costs of over 70%, and the application footprint decreased significantly as well. The new modernized solution supports growth and innovation, enabling the energy company to better serve its customers.