A Migration Case Study

This page gives an example of a data migration project

eMag Solutions, together with Bull Information Systems, have been assisting the government of Namibia with a very important departmental data migration project.

A payroll system, developed using COBOL on an ICL 1900 (VME) mainframe way back in 1968, required to be transferred to a new AIX client-server network. To facilitate this migration, a method had to be found of reading the unique 6-bit ICL data tapes and restoring the files into a suitable environment for further processing. Operating under Windows NT, MMPC was chosen as the most cost-effective and reliable way of restoring these rather old, but important 0.5" 9-track magnetic tapes. Connected to a suitable SCSI-based tape deck, MMPC successfully restored each tape in turn, making the records contained within each file available to the department's programming team.

Subsequent data processing by the resident IT staff finally enabled the converted records to be imported into the new payroll database. Alternatively, MMPC's optional Record Reformatter program could have been used to process the source files and prepare a new set of payroll records, i.e. expand packed numeric fields, remove any extraneous fields, convert fixed- to variable-length, etc. However, in this simple example, the requirement was to use MMPC as a media interchange tool, leaving any further complex data manipulation to the department's technical staff and the Unix software they were more familiar with.

For more information on systems migrations and how InterMedia can help you email us.

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