Accelerating Mainframe Offload to MongoDB with TCS MasterCraft™

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading multinational information technology services and consulting company, leverages its IP-based solutions to accelerate and optimize service delivery. TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus uses intelligent automation to modernize and migrate enterprise-level mainframe applications to new, leading-edge architectures and databases like MongoDB. In this blog, we’ll review the reasons why organizations choose to modernize and how TCS has made the process easy and relatively risk-free.

Background

Legacy Modernization

Legacy modernization is a strategic initiative that enables you to refresh your existing database and applications portfolio by applying the latest innovations in development methodologies, architectural patterns, and technologies.

• At the current churn rate, about half of today’s S&P 500 firms will be replaced over the next 10 years
• $100T of economic value is ready to be unlocked over the next decade via digital transformation

Source

Legacy System Challenges

Legacy technology platforms of the past, particularly monolithic mainframe systems, have always been challenged by the pace of disruptive digitalization. Neither the storage nor the accessibility of these rigid systems is agile enough to meet the increasing demands of volume, speed, and data diversity generated by modern digital applications. The result is noise between the legacy system of record and digital systems of engagement.

This noise puts companies at a competitive disadvantage. It often manifests as a gap between customer service and user experience, impeding the delivery of new features and offerings and constraining the business from responding nimbly to changing trends.

Operational costs of mainframe and other legacy systems have also skyrocketed. With each million instructions per second (MIPS) costing up to $4,000 per year, these older systems can create the equivalent of nearly 40% of an organization’s IT budget in technical debt, significantly increasing the overall annual run cost. And as qualified staff age and retire over the years, it’s becoming harder to find and hire people with the required mainframe skills.

To manage MIPS consumption, a large number of our customers are offloading commonly accessed mainframe data to an independent operational data layer (ODL), to which queries are redirected from consuming applications.

IT experts understand both the risk and the critical need to explore modernization options like encapsulation, rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, re-architecting, or rebuilding to replace these legacy systems. The key considerations when choosing an approach are familiar: risk of business disruption, cost, timelines, productivity, and the availability of the necessary skills.

MongoDB + TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus = Transformation Catalyst

To stay competitive, businesses need their engineering and IT teams to do these three things, among others:

• Build innovative digital apps fast
• Use data as a competitive moat to protect and grow their business
• Lower cost and risk while improving customer experience

Some customers use a “lift and shift” approach to move workloads off the mainframe to cloud for immediate savings, but that process can’t unlock the value that comes with microservice architectures and document databases. Others gain that value by re-architecting and rewriting their applications, but this approach can be time consuming, expensive, and risky. More and more, customers are using a tools-driven refactoring approach to intelligently automate code conversion.

What TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus Brings to the Table

TCS MasterCraft™TransformPlus automates the migration of legacy applications and databases to modern architectures like MongoDB. It extracts business logics from decades-old legacy mainframe systems as a convertible, NoSQL document data model for deployment. This makes extraction faster, easier, and more economical, and reduces the risk that comes with rewriting legacy applications.

With more than 25 years of experience, TCS’s track record includes:

• 60+ modernization projects successfully delivered
• 500M+ lines of COBOL code analyzed
• 25M+ lines of COBOL code converted to Java
• 50M+ new lines of Java code auto-generated

What MongoDB Brings to the Table

MongoDB’s document data model platform can help make development cycles up to 5 times faster. Businesses can drive innovation faster, cut costs by 70% or more, and reduce their risk at the same time.

As a developer, MongoDB gives you:

• The best way to work with data
• The ability to put data where you need it
• The freedom to run anywhere

Why is TCS collaborating with MongoDB for Mainframe Offload?

Cost. Redirecting queries away from the mainframe to the ODL significantly reduces costs. Even cutting just 20%-30% in MIPS consumption can save millions of dollars in mainframe operating costs.

Agility. As an ODL built on a modern data platform, MongoDB helps developers build new apps and digital experiences 3—5 times faster than is possible on a mainframe.

User Experience. MongoDB meets demands for exploding data volumes and user populations by scaling out on commodity hardware, with self-healing replicas that maintain 24x7 service.

More details can be found here.

How TCS MasterCraftTM Accelerates Mainframe Offload to MongoDB

Data Migration

• Configures target document schema to corresponding relational schema
• Automatically transforms relational data from mainframe sources to MongoDB documents
• Loads data to MongoDB Atlas with the latest connector support

Application Migration

• Facilitates a cognitive code analysis-based application knowledge repository
• Ensures complete, comprehensive application knowledge extraction
• Automates conversion of application logic from COBOL to Java, with data access layer accessing data from MongoDB
• Splits monolithic code into multiple microservices
• Automates migration of mainframe screens to AngularJS-based UI