What if a school system expels its mainframe?

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By Ellen Fanning

PALM DESERT, California (IDG) -- When San Diego City Schools, California's second-largest school district, decided it needed to modernize its applications and bring new functionality to end users, it did its homework and took a hard look at its mainframe environment.

The school system considered three options: either ditch the costly mainframe entirely, reduce dependence on it by moving some applications, or leave things as they were. Although he had to miss the party at which the school systems' programmers ceremoniously wheeled out the 3090-class mainframe, Howard Hinman, president of Hinman Consulting Corp., was a key player in the yearlong migration project.

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Hinman talked about the project Tuesday at Computerworld's Premier 100 conference here.

In early 1999, Hinman was called in as a consultant for Fujitsu Software Co. to help the 175,000-student school system unplug its mainframe and move its applications to a client/server environment. There was a lot of ground to cover: In addition to untangling the school's Y2K remediation, which had hit an earlier snag, the project involved migrating 500 online applications, 1,500 batch applications and 10,000 mainframe data files. The mainframe had supported everything from student attendance records to payroll for the school systems' 25,000 employees to a finance system for accounts payable and receivable that supported 1,000 end users.

"This was not a small task," said Hinman. "The biggest challenge was to understand what needed to be changed. And you can't find that out without getting into the code."

To start, mainframe EBCDIC data and logic was converted to native PC ASCII, and several key VSAM files were migrated to SQL Server. The team also installed a custom emulator that runs locally on client PCs with shared data off the network.

On the hardware side, the mainframe was replaced by four quad Xeon servers with 1GB each of RAM that support batch, Web and SQL requirements. Now there are about 200 application servers, one at each school, that support 3,000 client machines. An RS/6000 server processes large-scale printing requests.

"Once you get away from that mainframe, the hardware costs go way down," said Hinman. "For the school system, it was a dual opportunity -- get rid of the mainframe and its costs and utilize the functionality of PC software for end users."

There was also an unexpected benefit, Hinman said: Many applications are now running up to 30 percent faster in the PC environment.