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Db2 for z/OS Tool Replacement for International Airline

Background

As part of a group-wide cost management and rationalisation effort, a major international airline decided to migrate its mainframe workloads from their aging on-premise System Z servers to IBM’s zCloud1 environment. This move included the airline’s Db2-based, business-critical financial and operational IT systems.

The zCloud strategy promised significant flexibility and cost effectiveness benefits for the airline, but also came with a major technical challenge: the airline’s on-premise Db2 environment was supported by a number of tools and utilities supplied by BMC Software, which could not be licenced within the new zCloud environment. It was therefore necessary to replace all Db2 BMC products with their IBM/Rocket equivalents prior to the move to zCloud.

IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) were appointed to manage the zCloud migration project, and engaged their business partner Triton Consulting to undertake all aspects of the Db2 product conversion.

 

Work Undertaken

Triton took responsibility for all aspects of the technical work surrounding the tool replacement, including:

  • Initial discovery of the client’s technical environment and creation of a detailed technical design for the replacement work.
  • Technical project management, coordination and management reporting
  • Installation of IBM/Rocket tooling in client’s on-premise environment, including the Db2 utilities suite, IBM Tivoli Omegamon XE for Db2 PE, IBM Db2 Administration Tool, IBM Db2 Object Comparison Tool, IBM Tools Customizer for z/OS, IBM Db2 Sort for z/OS and IBM High Performance Unload for Db2
  • Conversion and functional testing of approximately 500 production Db2 housekeeping jobs, from BMC Db2 utilities to IBM equivalents. This made use of Triton’s automated conversion routines to dramatically reduce the time, effort and cost associated with the conversion.
  • Conversion of approximately 300 BMC Change Manager migration profiles, to provide equivalent functionality within IBM Admin/Object Compare tool. Again, proprietary automation was used to allow the conversion to be done quickly and accurately.
  • Migration of the client’s Db2 performance database from BMC Mainview to IBM Omegamon, together with conversion of bespoke Db2 performance reporting programs to work against the new database,
  • Technical education for airline technical staff to allow them to understand and use the new IBM tooling.

 

Summary and Outcomes

The conversion project had to overcome some significant technical hurdles, including a lack of recent preventative maintenance on the client’s Db2 systems, technical incompatibilities between the BMC and IBM products and meeting demanding performance requirements for some key application housekeeping jobs despite the fact that the airline was using an old version of Db2 for z/OS .

All of these challenges were successfully addressed, and the client was able to decommission the BMC products in time to support the wider zCloud migration project timescales.

1 The zCloud offering is formally known as “IBM Managed Extended Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for IBM Z”

 

Triton Consulting Case Study Db2 z/OS Tool Replacement

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