The Sun Professional ServicesSM program completed the migration in just 68 days for Transamerica Life Canada from a mainframe to the Sun FireTM 6800 server using the Sun mainframe rehosting solutions. The migration is expected to save Transamerica Life Canada more than 50 percent per year in mainframe system operations expenses and produce a return on investment within six months. In addition, the applications formerly running on the mainframe are performing 25 percent better on the Sun server.

Industry research firm IDC followed Transamerica's migration closely from the planning stages through product implementation and testing and is publishing three white papers detailing the progress.

"When Transamerica Life Canada acquired NN Life Insurance in December 2000, a mainframe, outsourced through a U.S.-based service provider, was introduced into our IT environment; it was clear from the outset that this solution was not cost effective," said Naj Hirani, CIO for Transamerica Life Canada. "An in-depth evaluation of our options, which consisted of either bringing the mainframe in-house or migrating our applications to the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE), revealed that working with Sun would allow us to realize significant savings, while improving our application performance. The results of the project to date have proven beyond any doubt that we made the right decision."

Through the SunTM ONE Mainframe Transaction Processing (MTP) and the SunTM ONE Mainframe Batch Manager (MBM) software, Sun's mainframe rehosting solutions help enable customers to run existing mainframe CICS, COBOL and batch applications, commonly found in commercial banking and insurance, manufacturing, retail and government, virtually unmodified but in a contemporary computing environment.

The Sun FireTM servers and Sun EnterpriseTM servers, combined with Sun's mainframe rehosting software and Sun Professional Services' mainframe rehosting specialists allow customers to maintain the skill sets of their IT staff and save considerable time and expense, while providing them with a strong alternative to their legacy mainframe infrastructures.

"We were impressed with Sun's ability to keep the project on schedule and were struck by how few problems were encountered during the course of a migration of this size," said Vernon Turner, group vice president, global enterprise server solutions for IDC. "When you consider the myriad issues involved with maintaining a mainframe in today's data centers -- from expenses in staffing and software licenses to the limited support for business critical applications -- it's clear that Sun's rehosting products and the expertise of Sun staff are critical to IT managers who want to keep pace in a modern, networked data center environment."

For details of the Sun and Transamerica Life Canada migration project, please see the IDC white papers located at:

http://www.sun.com/datacenter/mainframe [...read more...]

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