by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development for Treehouse Software
Many medium to large size companies are still investing in new mainframe systems, because they have been relying on them for decades to handle mission critical data transaction processing. For these companies, their mainframes are deeply entrenched, and have been rock-solid reliable over the years, allowing many users and applications to simultaneously access the same data without interfering with each other. Mainframes also perform large-scale and extremely fast transaction processing (thousands of transactions per second). Chances are, most transactions for which you use your debit or credit cards have a mainframe processing the data in the background.
There have been countless predictions of the demise of the mainframe over the years, but they have been proven wrong every time, and there’s no sign of extinction any time soon. Mainframes remain a vital part of IT infrastructures used by companies spanning a variety of industries around the world, including banking, insurance, healthcare, government, aviation, and retail.
Today, most companies that have their enterprise data stored on a mainframe system are discovering the advantages of newer cloud and open systems databases and services, including instantaneous global database deployments (e.g., Amazon Aurora), economics to scale, high availability, elasticity, security, testing at scale, disaster recovery, etc. Consequently, these companies are looking for an automated solution that allows real-time data replication between the two environments, and many are turning to Treehouse Software.
Customer Scenario: A Look at a Large Airline’s Mainframe Data Replication Project
Treehouse Software has a major airline customer that is a long-time user of Software AG’s Adabas database on their mainframe system. Their desire was to move their data to more modern applications off of the mainframe. However, their mainframe contains vital airline maintenance and parts data that must always be highly available, so rather than performing a complete migration from the mainframe, the customer decided to utilize a data warehouse with a requirement of real-time data replication. This allows the mainframe legacy teams to maintain existing applications, while the modernization team develops applications on the newly created RDBMS. All teams determined that tcVISION real-time mainframe data replication was the perfect fit for meeting their goals.
How tcVISION Addressed the Customer Needs...
The high-level environment for the airline customer using tcVISION for data replication looks like this…
- Adabas: Mainframe data source containing business critical information replicated to the RDBMS.
- Oracle: Open Platform RDBMS chosen by customer as replication target for both data warehouse and modernization project. The tcVISION Manager also uses Oracle as a repository for the metadata (field mappings).
- tcVISION Manager: Software component deployed on both source and target systems. It is responsible for provisioning resources for:
- Processing scripts
- Metadata import
- Scheduling
- tcSCRIPT: Software component deployed on both source and target systems. It works in conjunction with the tcVISION Manager to:
- Perform initial load of Adabas into Oracle
- Ongoing near realtime CDC (Change Data Capture) and replication from Adabas to Oracle
- tcSCRIPT processes data from:
- Direct from the DBMS (initial load) or from DBMS extracts
- Adabas Protection log (PLOG)
- tcVISION Control Board: Software component deployed on a Windows machine which provides graphical user interface for a single point of control to administer the tcVISION environment:
- Metadata import, creates metadata rules governing relationship between mainframe and open platform data structures
- Replication rule maintenance
- DDL creation
- Creation of ETL and replication processes
- Start, stop, and schedule replication processes
Customer’s Technical Requirement for tcVISION
The airline requires that the replication solution must support online and batch Adabas transactions and provide data replication between Adabas and Oracle. Additionally, their large databases contain millions of rows (e.g., > 50 million) that must be supported, as well as support for database change audit requirements (datetime and type of operation), transaction management, and notification of exception events.
There must also be support for configuration management between development, QA, and production.
Finally, the solution must address hardware and software failures on the mainframe, Linux, and database nodes.
Customer Outcomes
All requirements were met by tcVISION, which led to a successful project implementation. Here is a look at the customer outcomes and benefits:
| Business Outcome | Customer Benefit |
| Data warehouse is always in sync with Adabas using tcVISION data replication | Improved timeliness and reliability of reporting data |
| Reduced usage of mainframe MIPS | Reduced cost |
| All data required for modernization project was successfully replicated to target environment | Increased business efficiently and agility |
Many more mainframe data migration and replication customer case studies can be read on the Treehouse Software Website.
Contact Treehouse Software for a Demo Today…
No matter where you want your mainframe data to go – the cloud, open systems, or any LUW target – tcVISION from Treehouse Software is your answer.
Just fill out the Treehouse Software Product Demonstration Request Form and a Treehouse representative will contact you to set up a time for your online tcVISION demonstration.
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