Blog
by Surender Kumar
How OpenFrame helped an insurance company modernize its mainframe
A nationally known insurance company burdened with an out-of-date, expensive and inflexible legacy IBM mainframe was looking to make its infrastructure more available, scalable, resilient and performance-centric. They identified migrating their workload to Microsoft Azure as the best approach but needed to determine the fastest, most affordable and least risky migration method.
After considering numerous options, they settled on TmaxSoft OpenFrame as their preferred mainframe re-platforming approach and the best way to kickstart their modernization journey.
OpenFrame benefits include:
- Fast deployments, often as fast as six months and seldom longer than 12 months
- Supports COBOL, Assembler, PL/I, Easytrieve and more legacy technologies
- Reduces annual run costs
- Horizontal and vertical scalability
- No change to the end-user experience or application business logic
- Supports both containers and virtualized environments
Re-platforming
Re-platforming is the process of producing an exact copy of an application, workload, and all associated data and moving it from one environment to another. This rehosting process ensures all the functionality of the mainframe is kept complete, with the same user experience, but instead of it being housed in a costly, inflexible on-premises mainframe, it has moved to the public or private cloud.
Migrating workloads to the cloud is complicated because there are many elements to consider, among them servers, storage, networking, monitoring, identity and access management, subscription and tenant creation. Security and compliance requirements are also critical, as are system backups and disaster recovery options. While not every component needs to be 100% operational at the beginning, a plan needs to take into account every aspect, including how and when each component will be plugged in.
TmaxSoft OpenFrame is a rehosting solution that makes it easy to shift existing mainframe applications to Microsoft Azure using a no-code approach. Since the code doesn’t change, neither does the user experience, and no data is lost. TmaxSoft quickly migrates an existing application and is particularly compatible with Microsoft Azure and its landing zone architecture.
Azure Landing Zones
An Azure landing zone is an environment created to ensure all your applications are migrated, modernized and innovated safely and at scale. In other words, it’s the platform that establishes the foundation needed to host your workloads in Azure.
TmaxSoft worked with Azure to put together an OpenFrame on Azure landing zone accelerator based on their extensive experience and the methodologies within the Cloud Adoption Framework. The fully automated Azure Resource Manager template builds out the full architecture of management groups and subscriptions, along with core Azure and OpenFrame services. As the migration of the legacy mainframe workloads is mapped out, this landing zone accelerator helps to build foundational services to host workloads in Azure. This also helps to automate the future infrastructure build-out of recommended foundational services to support a continuous modernization journey to the cloud.
Migration, Simplified
Building the IT infrastructure for mainframe systems, ensuring it is highly scalable, available and resilient, and installing and configuring a vast array of software products is a lengthy, complex and costly process. This impacts time to market and business continuity and creates a bottleneck to business innovation. OpenFrame on Azure solves the mainframe migration problem, lowering operational costs, adding new agility, scalability and resiliency and opening the door for future modernization. By incorporating a landing zone accelerator, the proper infrastructure can also be implemented quickly and is easier to manage and operate.
By leveraging OpenFrame on Azure landing zone accelerator, the insurance company started on the right path to mainframe modernization and now has a foundational framework that lowers costs and improves functionality and infrastructure efficiency.
OpenFrame can do the same for you. Learn more by reading the article Migrate IBM mainframe applications to Azure with TmaxSoft OpenFrame.
For more information about the benefits of migration, watch our webinar “Mastering Mainframe Migration: A Case Study with Microsoft Azure.” During the webinar, you’ll learn:
- Why OpenFrame can deliver both improved performance and cost efficiencies
- What applications are better suited to an OpenFrame environment
- How mainframe migration doesn’t have to disrupt operations