Lozen™ offers several connectors to enable mainframe data access to a broad range of applications with high performance and data integrity.
In this blog, we highlight Lozen’s Rocket® Enterprise Server (formerly a Micro Focus® product) Connector and how it provides a path for customers to recompile a mainframe COBOL or Java code application to run in the Rocket® Enterprise Server (formerly a Micro Focus® product) environment on Linux or a Windows public or private cloud environment, without requiring any data access changes — offering cost savings, expedited migrations, and more efficient operations.
In the use case below, you will see how this customer saves over $2.2M per year with Lozen:
- $2.2M in annual savings through IBM Z and ISV hardware and software costs
- Plus another $1-3M in cost avoidance of change data capture (CDC) software and other legacy license fees
Use Case Overview
Summary: The customer migrates legacy COBOL-based business functions and batch applications to a public/private cloud. These migrated applications leverage VSAM data sets, which are shared by the remaining mainframe applications and several important distributed applications.
Lozen Implementation: Lozen enables ongoing real-time, read-write access to the shared VSAM data file, while enabling the bundle of COBOL and batch applications to be migrated to the cloud environments — without any changes to the data access semantics of the application, as if they are still native mainframe applications.
Savings: Based on the 93% efficiency of Lozen running on a zIIP (z Integrated Information Processor) plus removing 23% of the general processing workload by migrating this bundle of applications to the cloud, the customer would realize a net savings of $2.22M per year. The hard, measurable savings in this instance are attributable to the reduced workload and capacity through a reduction to the annual MSU hour consumption under IBM’s Tailored Fit license charge model.
Use Case Details
The customer in this use case has legacy COBOL-based business functions that leverage VSAM inventory data. The customer wishes to move several of these functions and applications to a distributed COBOL on Linux public cloud environment.
This application is the third largest in the customer’s mainframe environment and consumes 23% of the mainframe processing capacity. The customer is on IBM’s Tailored Fit pricing and has an aggregate 13.2M MSU hours per year, at a rate of $1.02 per MSU hours with incremental MSU hours of $0.47 each.
Business has been good, and the customer’s overall business and mainframe consumption is growing year-over-year for the last three years at a compounding 14%.
In the migrated application (following recompile and now running on the Rocket® Enterprise Server (formerly a Micro Focus® product)), the VSAM inventory data is accessed by key in the same fashion it did prior to migration. With the implementation of Lozen, the customer avoids any data changes or data replatforming, while allowing the remaining mainframe applications that need to reference this data to remain intact.
With Lozen running on their zIIP engine, the data access from the migrated application will be 93% more efficient from the general processing legacy consumption — saving the customer 21.4% of the annual MSU hours (23% of general processing capacity x 93% Lozen zIIP efficiency).
In the Tailored Fit pricing model, any MSU hours under the annual cap may be rolled over for a future year consumption. Therefore, the customer would realize a total IBM software costs savings of $1.86M per year:
7.4% savings of annual cap x 13.2M MSU Hrs x $1.02 per MSU Hr
+
14% savings of cap overage x 13.2M MSU Hrs x $0.47 per MSU Hr
Given that hardware, IBM one-time charge software, and ISV software expenses are usually equal to IBM Z software charges, there would be an additional savings of approximately $1.86M per year, for a total gross savings of $3.72M per year.
The costs of the new migrated environment are approximately $500,000 for the Linux Cloud, $500,000 for the distributed Cobol platform, and $100,000 for Lozen, for a recurring net savings of $2.22M per year.
But in actuality, the savings are even greater:
- The customer was able to recompile the code, implement Lozen, and complete testing in under a month, avoiding all the additional project time, cost, and complexity associated with legacy data access approaches.
- This customer completely avoided any complex change data capture software and support, additional data transformation tools, and increased network resources.
This is such an important analysis for customers to conduct using their chosen methodology, as we often see legacy data access approaches completely consuming the savings from application compute migrations or even increasing the mainframe capacity needs.
Learn More
To learn more about our pricing and licensing approach and how to unlock the power of real-time, read-write data access with Lozen:
- Read about our approach to Lozen pricing and licensing.
- See how you can save money with Lozen.
- Watch demos and webinars.
- Try Lozen for free.
- Still have questions? Contact us.
