Mainframe Migration Saves Dollars and Lives

A reliable and effective emergency response system is anecessity for any city, no matter its size, location or crime rate. For a citysuch as Inglewood, Calif., which receives more than 250 emergency calls forservice every day, anything but the fastest, most dependable emergency responsesystem was out of the question.

Inglewood was faced with a daunting challenge. An agingmainframe posed a huge risk to mission-critical emergency response functions,and the city needed a cost-effective solution?and fast. In addition, theplatform required nearly $120,000 a year in maintenance costs.

The city was under pressure to upgrade its hardware andoperating system, and we quickly recognized that it made the most financialsense to reduce reliance on the mainframe. This put in motion a series ofprojects that began moving current applications onto other platforms.

For many of our software applications, the easiest optionwas to purchase commercial off-the-shelf packages. While some requiredlengthier solutions than this, over the course of a four-year program, we wereable to successfully move all but one of our existing applications off themainframe.

The final remaining application, however, was the mostmission-critical, as it provided support for the city?s 911 emergency dispatchcall center.

With Inglewood receiving more 911 service calls than all ofits neighbors combined, a smoothly operating computer-aided dispatch (CAD)system was of the utmost importance for the safety of the community and itscitizenry. When a 911 call is received at one of Inglewood?s eight emergency controlcenter desks, its details are transmitted instantly to mobile data computers(MDCs) in the 40 police vehicles that patrol the city?s streets.

Our CAD system must run 24/7, and data has to be transmittedas soon as the emergency call is taken for immediate service dispatch. Withlives depending on the availability of critical information, downtime isunacceptable.

Although the city?s mainframe was reliable and accurate, itsage was making it increasingly difficult to obtain replacement parts when componentsfailed, meaning that the CAD system faced the potential risk of catastrophicfailure should any component break down. Inglewood couldn?t justify upgradingthe entire mainframe to address the need of just one application, but acceptingthat the dispatch system could flatline was simply not an option.

We investigated a range of possibilities to overcome thischallenge. Buying a commercially packaged solution was a $2 million investmentthat meant compromising on functionality. Plus, it virtually guaranteed theloss of many years of intelligence that had been built into the customizedmainframe-based CAD system.

As an alternative, we attempted a more cost-effectiveproject to convert the 500,000+ lines of COBOL code to Windows, but thiscreated problems. After a year-and-a-half of development, implementing a simpleoperating system software update caused the code on the server to fail,resulting in an emergency fix that took almost eight hours to complete. Thisoption posed far too great a risk, and we were forced to abandon this approach.

At that point, we decided to migrate the application in itsentirety to the Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition on Windows Server. Thissolution ensured that the CAD system was running on a completely modernized platformthat didn?t introduce failure or downtime risks.

Our 150 mips mainframe application now runs on two Windowsservers, one for production and one for development. Ongoing development isminimal and is done directly against the development Windows server runningMicro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition via remote desktop.

The production environment for the application is a WindowsServer running Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition. Approximately 50terminals connect to the production server, along with in-car console displaysand emergency control center desks.

Inglewood now benefits from a robust and resilient CADsystem that runs on a far more cost-effective platform and continues to deliverthe functionality that is so important to the city?s emergency responseservices. As a result of moving off a costly and dated mainframe, the city isnow saving more than $120,000 each year in maintenance and support fees, whilepreserving our CAD system?s 99.99 percent fault resilience.

Protecting the safety of our residents is the most criticalaspect of my job. The city?s efforts to protect its population with the mostadvanced CAD technology available has delivered meaningful and measurableresults that benefit the citizens of Inglewood on a daily basis.

 

Michael D. Falkow, PMP, is assistant city manager/CIO anddeputy director of emergency services for Inglewood, Calif.