IBM mainframes have been a fixture of Fortune 1000 companies for decades.   When these companies deployed their mission critical applications on the mainframe, they really were the best approach to get the scale and reliability they required.   Technology has progressed significantly since those early days and today, with Windows Azure, companies can now achieve high-availability through a scale-out architecture. This enables such companies to scale far beyond the capabilities of the largest mainframes while paying only for actual consumption. 

It’s great that Windows Azure can scale far beyond multi-million dollar mainframes but how can a mainframe organization take advantage of Windows Azure while preserving the applications they have developed and deployed on the mainframe over many years?   Alchemy Solutions, has just announced a new version of their NeoKicks® product that tackles this mainframe application migration challenge.   NeoKicks takes mainframe CICS/COBOL/DB2/VSAM-based applications and migrates those workloads to Windows Azure with minimal changes to the application code and data.   This can help those organizations that wish to break free of the high cost of mainframes while getting virtually unlimited scale and improved price/performance over their prior environment.   You can read more about this offering on Alchemy’s site, as well as sign-up for a free evaluation version.

If you’ll be at Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Florida this week, stop by the Alchemy booth (Booth 628) to see examples of migrated mainframe applications running on Windows Azure and learn what is possible once the migration is complete.   In their demo scenario at the booth, Alchemy is also showing a Windows 8 Metro application running on a slate device going against the previously migrated mainframe application now running on Windows Azure. 

Before: Video Rental application running on mainframe

After: Metro Application running against IBM mainframe application migrated to Windows Azure