Chicago, IL – October 18, 2010 – Clerity, a full-service provider of mainframe migration, modernization, and optimization solutions, has completed a mainframe migration for Deutsche Rentenversicherung (DRV), the organization that administers the pensions of 57 million citizens in Germany. Four DRV divisions have moved their key pension management application from IBM® z/OS® to Clerity's UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software running on Linux on IBM® System z® partitions. This move has helped the DRV divisions surpass a 350 million euro cost-cutting mandate from the German Parliament and put in place a consolidated, flexible platform for future IT initiatives.
"We had a limited time frame to complete our migration project and our core mainframe application was quite complex," explained Falk-Oliver Bischoff, head of IT at DRV Baden-Württemberg. "Clerity's UniKix technology and professional services team enabled us to safely rehost our workload onto a more cost-effective mainframe Linux partition and protect our legacy investments in order to meet federal goals."
Following a complete analysis of options, DRV Baden-Württemberg (BW), DRV Hessen, DRV Saarland, and DRV Knappschaft Bahn See (KBS), chose to rehost their central pension management application to Clerity's UniKix software. This allowed significant cost savings by reducing expenses for hardware and annual software licensing fees.
Approximately 3.5 million lines of code and 2,500 IBM® CICS® and COBOL programs, serving up to 5,000 simultaneous users, were moved during this project. Since the pension application maintains life-long data for all workers in its system, the detailed calculations it performs had to be ported onto the UniKix software and Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) partitions. Two IBM® System z10™ Enterprise Class machines, each running six IFLs, were deployed to support the intensive application.
"It was very important that we delivered a solution that did not sacrifice quality or performance," noted Hartmut Hackert, head of IT, DRV KBS. "UniKix software made it possible for us to take full advantage of the mainframe Linux environment while meeting all of our operational and cost reduction goals."
Both IT leaders noted that Clerity was the only vendor who proved they could deliver the robust technology and migration support services required for their complex implementation. They named UniKix software as a primary reason that they were able to meet their cost reduction objectives, especially without retraining end-users or disrupting operations.
The mainframe rehosting project has also helped the DRV divisions better position themselves to implement future service oriented architecture (SOA) plans and be in line with a national trend to move to open source technologies. The DRV intends to use this new, agile platform to continue consolidation and cost-reduction efforts.
Click here to download a detailed IBM Systems Magazine feature story on the DRV's mainframe rehosting project.
