KMD’s Simple Migration From an HP Cluster to an IBM Mainframe

by Joe Clabby

June 11, 2009

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has dead-ended several of its server architectures over the past five years, including the HP 3000 and HP 9000 architectures, as well as its AlphaServers. HP customers with these systems, and those that require more capacity, have only a few options. They can either buy used HP servers (Dec. 31, 2008 was the last day you could order a new HP 9000 from HP) or migrate to another systems architecture.

KMD, Denmark’s largest locally owned IT service provider, was facing these choices; it chose to migrate a homegrown application, called Perspektiv, from an HP 9000 cluster to an onsite IBM mainframe.

Background Information

KMD has close to 3,000 employees and annual revenues of approximately DKK 3 billion (about $570 million or €402 million). KMD operates seven distinct data centers, with approximately 3,000 Windows servers and 250 UNIX/Linux servers. KMD also runs two IBM System z mainframes that process 270 million CICS transactions per month and handle batch jobs. The company’s primary charter is to provide IT and consultancy services (hosted services) to public and private markets.

As a hosted service provider, KMD runs IT services on back-end servers for its clients. But KMD is also an Application Service Provider (ASP) and an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), and markets its own payroll and human resources application suite (Perspektiv) to government organizations and small, medium, and large enterprises. KMD also sells its Perspektiv independently, so some of its customers host Perspektiv on their own equipment.

From the outset, Perspektiv was designed to run on HP’s UNIX operating environment, HP-UX. It was initially deployed on an HP 9000 server, but this environment ultimately grew to four HP 9000s in a clustered environment.

HP announced it was planning to discontinue its HP 9000 a few years ago. It wasn’t long after this announcement that KMD determined it would need more capacity on its HP 9000 server cluster if it was going to continue to meet demand for its Perspektiv program.

KMD had four technology options to address its need for more computing capacity:

• Upgrade to an HP Itanium-based Integrity server (because HP has ended development and manufacture of its HP 9000 servers, leaving KMD with no future upgrade path)
• Move to a competing UNIX server environment
• Move to Linux on distributed x86 servers or blades (an option KMD didn’t see as viable)
• Get creative and find a way to exploit existing computing capacity elsewhere in its information systems environment.

KMD chose to get creative.

Migrating From HP to an IBM Mainframe

KMD migrated its Perspektiv payroll/human resource applications environment from the HP-UX operating environment to Linux partitions running on an IBM mainframe. By doing so, KMD greatly increased its application processing capacity and demonstrated significant cost-ofacquisition savings over a five-year period.




More info about the author:

Joe Clabby (no biography detail available)