For many years now, decades even, we have been told on a regular basis that the end of the mainframe is near. But, what we can see in various publication and customer contexts is that, not only will the mainframe survive, but it will evolve and embrace new technologies.
In the field of Output Management for which, since its creation, RSD has been a pioneer, two examples, among others, illustrate the confidence of our banking customers in these scalable, reliable, effective and efficient technologies.
The main and obvious motivation of a consolidation project is to reduce the IT budget, despite high migration costs.
The mainframe consolidation could be viewed in two ways using two RSD customers examples:
First, a historical customer, who first signed with RSD in the early 80s and has a rich history of mergers and acquisitions, who are now faced to multiple solutions in the same domain requiring a lot of skills and competencies that could be reassigned to other solutions for an efficient IT department.
Second, a customer with a long-term relationship with RSD, with an organization split across many regions. For IT administration and IT modernization purposes, the IT department decided to create one single centralized team and servers, in one location.
“Harmonization” consolidation: From multiple solutions into one!
An initial feasibility analysis had been conducted in 2011 but was stopped for priorities and availability reasons. It restarted in 2014, and resulted in the development of a Proof of Concept.
First objective: Validate the consolidation project feasibility! Consolidating several solutions in one requires validation of the migration efforts (costs and man-days charge), the final benefits in terms of administration tasks reductions, whilst also preventing any data loss.
Of course key challenges had to be overcome, such as tight deadlines, outdated information and geographically remote technical units but, the results were in line with expectations, with the same level of functionalities.
“Modernization” consolidation: From several servers to one!
In this case, the challenge is not a migration, but a real consolidation of several existing RSD EOS environments into one, but the consolidation of 6 servers into one can give some legitimate concerns to the client. However, after scalability and performance analysis with the new single server, RSD was able to reassure the customer with additional testimonials from other customers with similar loads and volumes of data.
The new RSD EOS features are in line with customer expectations on performance and high volumes support, especially in terms of archiving.
With a ROI that is easy to calculate and demonstrate, high rated customer satisfaction and regular technical updates, RSD EOS remains the leading Output Management solution, as proven by the successful outcome of these projects.