At Sabre, Walker plans to continue to migrate off the mainframe, which he says is simply too expensive.

In-place upgrade

Bob DiAngelo, vice president and CIO at MIB Group Inc., is already facing that challenge. His company relies on an I/O-intensive application used to detect insurance fraud for more than 500 insurers in North America. DiAngelo says it was impossible to hire anyone to support MIB Group's IBM mainframe applications, originally written in 1969 in assembler with a back-end VSAM data-base. So a few years ago, he received approval to re-engineer the system. The IT team is developing the new system in Java based on a three-tiered architecture using WebSphere MQSeries and DB2. But the new system, now halfway complete, doesn't run on Unix or Windows hardware. It, along with the systems still in production and the development and quality assurance testing environments, all run within a single logical partition on a 210 MIPS uniprocessor IBM zSeries 880 with a z/OS Application Assist Processor (zAAP) that handles the Java workload.

The new Java code runs on a zAAP. Keeping the applications off the mainframe processor keeps CPU-based licensing for third-party applications from rising while boosting the total system capacity to 366 MIPS. But DiAngelo doesn't have a lot of third-party software to worry about. He says declining mainframe operating costs have allowed the company to grow from an 80 MIPS system to the 210 MIPS box plus the zAAP processor while total costs remained "relatively stable."