Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Financial Services Firm Opts for Microsoft Windows over UNIX for Mainframe Migration
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Financial Services
Customer Profile
Based in Madison, Wisconsin, CUNA Mutual Group, with 6,000 employees worldwide, is the leading provider of financial services to credit unions and their members.
Business Situation
CUNA Mutual was running out of capacity on its mainframe-based financials system. A migration to UNIX would be costly and would not meet a corporate directive for Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 software.
Solution
CUNA Mutual migrated PeopleSoft financials and Financial Data Warehouse to Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 and SQL Server 2000.
Benefits
Saves 38 percent in upfront hardware and software costs compared to UNIX
Lowers ongoing support
Beats POC benchmark by 47 percent
Moves six hours of processing off a 425-MIPS mainframe
Provides greater flexibility compared to mainframe / “Moving PeopleSoft to Windows Server System instead of UNIX cut our costs while exceeding our benchmarks…. We’ll consider alternative applications before we move off SQL Server.”
Dan Lawton, Assistant Vice President, IT Finance, CUNA Mutual
CUNA Mutual Group, the leading provider of financial services for credit unions and their members worldwide, ran its PeopleSoft, Walker, and related financial applications on a mainframe. Utilization was approaching 100 percent, giving CUNA Mutual little room to grow. During a financial system overhaul, the company was prepared to migrate to UNIX. But a mid-project proofofconcept (POC) on Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 changed the company’s plan. CUNA Mutual saved 38 percent in upfront hardware and software costs and substantially lowered ongoing operational costs. Additionally, PeopleSoft running on Microsoft Windows Server System™software exceeded a key CUNA Mutual POC benchmark by 47 percent, while providing greater flexibility compared to the mainframe, and aligned the financial systems with the strategic direction of using SQL Server.
Situation
CUNA Mutual Group, the leading provider of financial services to credit unions and their members worldwide, offers customers more than 300 insurance, investment, lending, and technology solutions.
CUNA Mutual ran its financials on the IBM OS390 mainframe platform, with accounts payable and purchasing supported by PeopleSoft version 7.0 software and a Walker general ledger, with the underlying financial database running on DB2. Both the PeopleSoft and Walker systems were legacy decisions made in the early 1990s. More than a decade later, it was time to review and determine the appropriate platform to align with the future needs of CUNA Mutual’s business.
As CUNA Mutual’s business volumes grew, so did its demands on the mainframe. The system was running at up to 95 percent of processor capacity at peak times—primarily at the monthly and annual closings—which left scant capacity for the company’s increasing needs for development and testing.
“We were rapidly reaching the point with the mainframe where we were going to have to do our development and testing at night,” says Tom Junk, IT Integration Manager. “We needed an alternative.”
In 2003, Junk and his colleagues also were anticipating the renewal of CUNA Mutual’s mainframe leases, which would otherwise expire over the following two years. The company’s platform choice was crucial. The team wanted a platform for their PeopleSoft financials that would reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and take advantage of support resources on a single platform—without sacrificing performance.
CUNA Mutual had some applications already running on UNIX. UNIX offered some cost efficiencies compared to the mainframe and would enable CUNA Mutual to further take advantage of its UNIX support team. Initially, the company decided to consolidate its general ledger on PeopleSoft and move all of its PeopleSoft financials—accounts payable, purchasing, and general ledger—to the UNIX platform.
As CUNA Mutual began to plan for its implementation of PeopleSoft, the scope of the project expanded. The company wanted to add a reporting solution—PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) with a financial data warehouse. That put renewed focus on the database, which would best be run on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 relational database software in order to align with the enterprise data warehouse direction.
Junk and his colleagues faced the prospect of supporting three platforms: the mainframe (which received inputs from 45 other systems), UNIX for PeopleSoft financials, and now Windows® and SQL Server for the warehouse solution. This conflicted with the goal of consolidating platforms.
“We realized we’d be supporting similar yet different processes on different platforms with the same team,” says Junk. “We’d lose the benefits of economies of scale. We’d be maintaining three platforms. We would have to deal with issues of data integration among three platforms.”
Although CUNA Mutual had already begun planning for the UNIX solution, it realized that the expanded project scope required it to reconsider its choice. The company asked Microsoft for assistance in considering a migration of PeopleSoft financials to Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, including the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and SQL Server 2000.
Solution
In July 2004, Microsoft worked with CUNA Mutual’s existing solution provider, Accenture, to develop a proof of concept (POC) to test the performance of PeopleSoft 8.8 modules for purchasing, accounts payable, general ledger, and EPM financial warehouse on Windows Server System. The POC was conducted against existing internal benchmarks for processing of accounts payable and general ledger transactions on the mainframe.
While the POC was under way, CUNA Mutual researched the choice of Windows Server System versus UNIX in detail, soliciting opinions from its own project team, from the CUNA Mutual infrastructure team, and from experts at Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft. CUNA Mutual solicited these opinions in several carefully defined areas: viability, TCO, and impact to the project.
On the issue of TCO, CUNA Mutual research determined that Windows Server System, compared to UNIX, would offer lower initial costs, easier management of environments, and savings for ongoing application support. In addition, the team envisioned industry trends that continued to favor lower-cost platforms such as Windows Server System, and that made database administration and support simpler and enabled greater developer productivity.
The project team concluded that CUNA Mutual could choose Windows Server System for the move to a new platform without affecting the project schedule—if the decision was made promptly. Accenture recommended SQL Server, and Microsoft and PeopleSoft confirmed the viability of the solution. But the project team needed the results of its POC to be certain of the solution’s viability. In October, CUNA Mutual concluded the pilot and received its answer: Windows Server System beat the benchmarks for PeopleSoft financials on the mainframe. CUNA Mutual made the decision to migrate off the mainframe and move to a platform based on Windows Server System.
The production environment consists of five IBM 365 computer servers. One four-way server runs the financial applications, and another runs the EPM data warehouse; a third four-way server manages batch processing for both of those servers and provides failover support. A pair of two-way servers functions as load-balanced Web front ends. Testing and development is maintained in a separate environment that mirrors the production environment, except that all the hardware consists of dual-processor computers.
Benefits
Thanks to the migration of PeopleSoft financials and Financial Data Warehouse to Microsoft Windows Server System, CUNA Mutual sees consistent performance and initial costs cut by 38 percent over the UNIX alternative. In addition, the company gains flexibility to adapt its infrastructure quickly to meet new needs.
Performance on Key Benchmark Up 47 Percent
By adopting the Microsoft Windows Server System for its PeopleSoft financials and Financial Data Warehouse, CUNA Mutual was able to move six hours of processing time per day off a 425 millions-of-instructions-per-second (MIPS) mainframe.
In the POC, the combination of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 beat the mainframe benchmark on the two key metrics tested by CUNA Mutual. On accounts payable vouchers, the Microsoft software processed 17,544 vouchers in 54 minutes, or 324 vouchers per minute, 47 percent faster than the mainframe benchmark of 12,000 vouchers in 70 minutes, or 171 vouchers per minute.
On the general ledger benchmark, the Windows Server System–based solution processed 250,000 journal lines in 16 minutes, or 15,625 lines per minute, 37 percent ahead of the mainframe benchmark of 250,000 journal lines in 22 minutes.
“We were looking to migrate off the mainframe without losing performance,” says Junk. “But by moving to Windows Server System, we were able to beat the mainframe benchmark performance. With the Microsoft solution, we have more of an industrial-strength, enterprise-level solution than we had before.”
Costs Cut by 38 Percent
The Windows Server System–based solution isn’t just faster than the mainframe platform; it’s also more cost effective than the UNIX solution that CUNA Mutual had considered. Putting its financials on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 saved CUNA Mutual 38 percent, hundreds of thousands of dollars, compared to the cost of the UNIX solution.
Beyond the immediate hardware and software savings, CUNA Mutual estimates another nearly 20 percent savings per year in reduced costs for ongoing support.
“Moving PeopleSoft to Windows Server System instead of UNIX cut our costs while exceeding our benchmarks,” says Dan Lawton, Assistant Vice President, IT Finance. “We’re on the lowest-priced platform. We’ll consider alternative applications before we move off SQL Server.”
Flexibility Increased
On its former, mainframe solution, CUNA Mutual was running at up to 95 percent CPU utilization. On the Windows Server System–based solution, CUNA Mutual gains a highly flexible solution that it says can scale quickly and easily meet growing needs.
“By moving off the mainframe and onto Windows Server System, we gain the freedom to adapt or expand the platform as needed to support our growth,” says Lawton. “With SQL Server, we can roll out a new environment in a matter of hours, not days. That’s tremendously liberating.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
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