Jason's Blog on Oracle Modernization Solutions

Hey Folks.
Sweden was great, btw. Customer turn out was excellent and the speakers were good. (yeah, I know, I was one of them...i meant the other guys)

So, now that Charles and Thomas have announced the Middleware story with BEA, this would be a great time to talk a bit about Oracle's Modernization offering with Tuxedo. Around here, we like to call it Re-host++. I'll post next on what I mean by that, and how we get there.
With Tux, we can look at Rehosting CICS/IMS Coobl and even manage the glut of C/C++ code out there. With clustering, failover and queing technologies, it is also and excellent solution for Batch rehosting.

Here is a link to the Tux Rehosting Page.

Tomorrow, i'll post some thoughts on why Re-hosting Batch on Tux is a good idea.
Next we'll talk about what Re-host++ is, and how we leverage a key partner, Metaware to do this.

Tuxedo for batch

We know that Tuxedo gives Oracle a great advantage for rehosting IMS and CICS COBOL from the Mainframe on to Open Systems. With TUX we can now provide Mainframe Quality of Service on the entire stack for CICS and IMS. So that means, our customers can gain a lot of savings from high cost hardware and OS from Z/OS by running on Linux (Even z/linux too) while opening up more standards...etc. All the good stuff we talk about.

What if you want to rehost batch programs? Is Tux good for that too? You may think the main advantage of using Tux for rehosting is that it provides the ability to do transaction processing and two phased commits, but for batch you can just use a standard COBOL compiler for linux or windows (Like MF/Accu..Fujitsu...etc)

Well, you miss out on some key RAS featuers. Let's look a bit closer.

What makes up Mainframe Batch? Let's look at this for a second. Batch on the mainframe usually looks like --> Z/OS + JES + LPRS +JCL + COBOL

Now, if you rehost batch with Micofocus Cobol only you get --> Distrubted OS (good) + JCL + COBOL

Tux looks like --> Distrubuted OS (Still good) + Tuxedo (Z/OS Like features...LPRS, JES Like runtime) + COBOL + JCL

Tuxedo provides also provides:
Connection Pooling
Clustering
Failover
Scalability
So, ask yourself, would you run a production batch system off the mainframe without these features? It's great to rehost and save money, but you CAN'T sacrifice RAS.

So here are some great reason for Batch with Tuxedo:

:: RAS (reliability, availability, scalability) built in
:: Sizable number of implementations
:: Over 2,000 implementations
:: Provides a ‘Java like’ container for COBOL applications
:: Supports C/C++ so languages like PL/1 and Assembler can be migrated to C/C++ instead of COBOL
:: SOA enabled out of the box
:: Can use any Job Scheduler you want including the free Oracle Scheduler solution

I wanted to take the opportunity during the run up to Open World to get some of the Modernization Sessions out there on the blog.

We are seeing quite a lot of rehosting activity in the world today and I think this is going to be a great session. Personally, much of my time spent in Latin America has been around rehosting projects.

Here is the blurb from the site. Mark Rakhmilevich is the Tux Product Manager for the rehosting side and will be giving this session.

Date Tuesday, October 13
Time 13:00-14:00
Venue Marriott Salon 7
This presentation explores the key success factors learned from many mainframe modernization projects. It presents proven transformation architecture for rehosting mainframe applications and data, describes Oracle solutions for proven mainframe cost reductions, explores SOA integration options and considerations when SOA-enabling rehosted applications, and explains project methodology commonly used for risk mitigation in these projects. Come learn how customers generate substantial cost savings to re-balance IT budget towards innovation and new development, while leveraging invalueable business logic and data in mainframe application assets.