6 July 2007

Co-op Financial Services, the US's largest credit union–owned electronic funds transfer network and processor, was spending US$2.3 million per year to keep its shared branching transaction processing system on its existing mainframe. One of the key applications on the mainframe was the transaction processing system that each day enabled hundreds of thousands of members from hundreds of participating credit unions to visit a shared branch supported by the company and to deposit or withdraw funds or do other transactions. The system handled more than one million transactions each month.

When the Shared Branching operation merged with Co-op Financial Services in 2002, the parent company began to move applications off the mainframe to outsourcers to achieve cost-efficiencies. By 2005, the transaction processing system was the last application on the mainframe, consuming just two per cent of its capacity. But it was unique; more than mission-critical, it was the heart of the Shared Branching operation. Keeping it operating with mainframe-level reliability was essential.

The mainframe lease cost Co-op Financial US$104,000 per month, with another US$30,000 per month in contracted maintenance, and high costs weren't the only problem. Mainframe knowledgeable Cobol programmers are not easy to find. The mainframe's days seemed numbered. The likely candidate for a new platform was the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system. The company already ran the Windows operating system and so had the in-house expertise. But its Windows environment was largely limited to supporting e-mail and file-and-print services. "We had never run a transaction-processing system—let alone a heavy, mission-critical transaction-processing system—on Windows," says Beckman. "We were mainframe guys. We were concerned about the reliability."

To address those concerns, as well as to help manage the broader challenges of the migration, Co-op Financial turned to The Progeni Corporation, an IT solutions provider and member of the Mainframe Migration Alliance, based in Duluth, Georgia.

One of the first questions to be addressed in the migration process was whether to port the existing Cobol code to Windows Server 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework—in a process popularly called "lift and shift"—or to rewrite the code for the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is an integral Windows component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.

"We chose to port our existing code for two reasons," explains Beckman. "First, we knew the business logic worked. There wasn't a problem with our application, just with what it was costing us on the mainframe. Second, we didn't have the time to rewrite the code. Given our very aggressive schedule, anything we could do to limit the variables, the better."

Progeni handled the process of migrating the Cobol application code and the database. It converted and recompiled the application source code to Micro Focus Net Express. The company's Enterprise MCS product provided transaction control functionality for the flow of messages between the presentation layer and application programs. Its Data Migrator Toolkit used Co-op Financial's original platform database design to generate equivalent relational schema for the new database, which runs on the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database software. The migration was completed in four months and went live in December 2005.

By migrating from the mainframe to the Windows Server environment, Co-op Financial has saved virtually all of its mainframe expense while getting mainframe-level reliability.

The Windows-based solution costs a paltry US$18,500, including US$10,000 for two server computers, US$8,000 for software licensing, and US$500 for contracted maintenance.

The staff of nine programmers and administrators was reduced to three, with the maintenance chores for the solution being assumed by existing Windows support staff."We thought that migrating from the mainframe to Windows would be a no-brainer from a financial standpoint and it was," says Beckman. "Compared to the multimillion-dollar cost of the mainframe, the cost of running the solution on Windows is virtually zero. Our return on investment is through the roof.

"We get extremely good reliability from Windows. We reboot the server maybe once every few months and, when we do, the process is far faster and less painful than it would be on the mainframe. Windows delivers at least as much uptime as we saw on the mainframe. The reliability is so good, we don't bother to measure it. If this solution weren't delivering as required, we'd hear about it right away."

As business has increased, the transaction rate has increased from 1 million per month on the mainframe in December 2005 to 1.45 million per month a year later.

"Windows gives us more processing capability than we need for what we thought was a very transaction-heavy application," says Beckman. "We don't have to think about scaling out any time soon but, when we do, we know we can do so cost-effectively by adding a computer – that's flexibility we didn't have with the mainframe."

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