IP Australia sticks with big iron

15.09.2006
Two years after announcing it will migrate off the mainframe in favor of mid-range Unix systems, national patent and trademark administrator IP Australia will now keep its big iron for at least another five years.

IP Australia had planned to move off the mainframe by June next year as it was only using 30 MIPS and could not justify the perceived transaction cost, according to CIO Paul Ayers.

Ayers said IP Australia has invested a lot into its mid-range environment with the promise of reduced complexity and TCO, but when it was implemented there were "maturity issues" and the TCO ended up being higher than anticipated.

"As it stands at the moment, our mainframe is more cost-effective than the mid-range environment, but I think it's only a matter of time before our mid-range will have a lower TCO," Ayers said. "Our processes have been around in the mainframe for many years and are not as mature in mid-range."

IP Australia's mid-range infrastructure consists mainly of Sun Solaris machines running J2EE-based applications and the business case for re-writing the remaining mainframe based applications from Adabas Natural on an IBM zSeries wasn't there.

"The trouble with Java is there are 10 ways to do anything which increases the maintenance overhead and the complexity of the environment is a magnitude more than the mainframe," Ayers said.