Breakthrough the Mainframe IMS Barrier and Migrate to Microsoft Azure with Raincode

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Raincode and Microsoft are pleased to announce IMS to Azure, a new and exclusive offering to migrate IBM IMS mainframe workloads running IMS/DB and IMS/TM to Microsoft Azure. This innovative new solution enables customers to accelerate the migration of existing IMS-based applications and databases with minimal disruption.

IMS to Azure presents IBM IMS mainframe customers with a unique approach to reduce the dependency on the mainframe and supports an incremental modernization journey. IMS to Azure enables endless transformational possibilities including application architecture, cloud-native deployments, and data sharing across organizations.

IMS to Azure is based on Raincode IMSql and is complemented by the entire Raincode product suite, including compilers for COBOL, PL/I and ASM 370, as well as JCL and CICS emulators. Together with the world-class capabilities from Microsoft Cloud, these products enable customers to migrate from siloed and expensive mainframes to a lower cost, reliable and scalable cloud platform, as part of an incremental modernization approach.


IBM IMS

IBM’s Information Management System (IMS) was introduced in the mid-sixties and includes both a hierarchical database engine (IMS/DB) and a transaction processing environment (IMS/TM formerly IMS/DC). It remains widely used across most industries, including banking, finance, government, healthcare, and others.

IMS can be used as a homogeneous platform, coupling IMS/DB and IMS/TM; or in a mixed environment: IMS/DB with CICS as the transaction processing environment, or IMS/TM together with Db2 as the database.


Raincode IMSql Technology Summary

Raincode IMSql is a high-performance emulation solution aimed at running mainframe IMS applications on Azure while preserving the existing business logic unchanged. It was developed from the ground up specifically for the IMS market for optimal flexibility and scalability, rather than as a mere variation on an existing product. IMSql relies extensively on SQL Server (Azure SQL or Azure MI) for storage, queuing, horizontal scaling, and transactional integrity.

IMSql is intrinsically low risk.

Existing mainframe applications, smartly grouped to reduce and minimize latency concerns, can be compiled unmodified on the target platform and can interact with IMSql in the same manner as they interacted with IMS on the mainframe, using calls to CBLTDLI, PLITDLI as well as EXEC DLI statements.

Similarly, IMS/DB data is imported as is, in bulk, with no change whatsoever, including no cleansing or normalization, to ensure a deterministic and risk-free migration process. Migrated data, now accessible in Azure, is exposed to the external world by means of comprehensive relational views, usable both in read and write mode. This solution makes for the best of both worlds: a non-transformational migration process to reduce risk and increase project velocity while seamlessly making the data available in cloud hosted relational entities for new applications and ad hoc reporting.

IMSql supports homogeneous environments, where IMS/DB and IMS/TM are tightly coupled, as well as heterogeneous situations where another database or transaction processing environment is used.

If you’d like to learn more about IMS to Azure, please contact us at: mainframetransformed@microsoft.com

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IMS, CICS and Db2 are Registered Trade marks of International Business Machines.