One of the perennial questions asked about financial services is when they will migrate off their big, heavy COBOL spaghetti systems onto newer packages. Very soon, these conversations peter out as it soon becomes clear banks just can’t afford to do that: the often used analogy is that so core are they to everyday processing that it would be like doing a simultaneous heart and lung transplant, taking off mainframe systems like that.
That reliance on existing investment was brought home to us once again discussing a new database utility brought out this week by supplier BMC. The software is designed to help the very heaviest end of the IMS Big Iron dbms market, the so-called IBM FastPath market. This is really only the territory inhabited by very big banks and credit card firms, who need to manipulate very big (Terabytes) datasets; thus of the top 50 biggest IMS users only 27 are also FastPath customers.
The problem is that they have struggled to work with any application off those big datasets as they are so constructed (remember, IMS is non-relational) that they have to be accessed sequentially – which can take a bit of time. Like six to ten hours worth of time – which is pretty much a disaster if you are a truly global 24×7 operation, patently.
A big bank needs its database to remain online during the majority of the restructuring of an application process, increasing application availability and minimising the risk of financial losses associated with outages. This is particularly useful for financial institutions and other organisations that process thousands of transactions per second and cannot afford to have lengthy outages. Well, none would be better, of course.
The BMC fix (Fast Path Online Restructure/EP) cleverly avoids the need for stopping the main engines of the bank for hours at a time by creating a mirror of the database so that administrators can make edits and changes without taking it offline and when work is finished merges the datasets again, reducing downtime from several hours to a couple of minutes.
"This is really the only way a bank can really start being continuously available, application wise," the firm’s Bill Miller, senior vice president and president of Mainframe Service Management, told CBR this week. As he puts it, availability correlates directly to superior service delivery and increased business revenue for the kind of FastPath customers he’s talking about.
The system was actually made available in March but is only now being rolled out to the stalwarts of the IMS world – it being worthwhile remembering that IMS is no less than 41 years old and still a core weapon in many IT shops’ armouries.
System z mainframe users may not be about to chuck out all those older systems – as they just can’t (and why should they?). But at least with this bit of innovation, they can keep their systems as spruced up as they need to be without inconveniencing us – the demanding online global, 365 world we have come to expect, but which is proving to be putting quite a strain on even the biggest IT users, it seems.
