Many vendors are now offering “cloud computing” services that allow a company to purchase machine cycles and storage on demand. One of the most prominent of these offerings is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) (http://aws.amazon.com). One of the Amazon offerings, S3, allows storing data in a secure and replicated way.
A growing number of software companies are offering their applications as pre-configured virtual images for running in the Amazon cloud. Micro Focus offers a cloud solution for Mainframe Migration. In addition to the software platform, Micro Focus offers runtime monitoring as it is found in an IBM data center.
Data Strategies has created a cloud solution for archiving legacy tape data. This consists of a special file handler which translates Cobol file operations into Web service requests to the cloud and software component running on an instance of the Micro Focus Enterprise Server in the cloud which processes those requests against archive data stored in S3 on the cloud.
The legacy data is migrated originally to the cloud via the Data Strategies’ Data Migration Service for Mainframe Modernization (DMSMM). In particular this service provides for:
Analysis of customer’s environment. This task is aimed at quantifying the amount of mainframe tape data to be ‘conserved’, qualifying the data on the base of type, source, retention and security requirements, and identifying the associated control metadata.
Transfer of Control Metadata. This task consolidates and ‘moves’ TMS, System Catalog, and application specific metadata from the mainframe to Tape Archive Migration Database, (TAMD)
Optional Datasets Migration. This task uses the information in the TAMD to extract all datasets from the mainframe tapes and store them on the Cloud Tape Data Archive, (CTDA). A migrated dataset Catalog is built as part of the process and added to the CTDA database.
Optional Deep Archival of Legacy Tapes. This task creates virtual tapes from the physical legacy tapes and stores them on the Cloud Data Archive, (CDA). A consolidated version of the TAMD (Dataset and Volume Tables) is built as part of the process and added to the CTDA database.
A cloud specific extension to the standard service is the ability to load the migrated data onto bulk devices such as disk or tape for use in the Amazon Import/Export service. This allows data to be sent to Amazon data centers on specified devices for bulk loading directly on their network thereby avoiding the cost of loading over the wire.
