South Dakota migrates off mainframe; chaos ensues
South Dakota’s two largest counties had hours-long lines at their administration buildings this week due to glitches in a new statewide computer system after migrating off the mainframe.
A story in the South Dakota Argus Leader detailed how people waited in lines for hours yesterday waiting to renew their license plates. According to the story, the system changed from a “mainframe system to a Web-based system.” It’s not clear what the “Web-based system” is, but it’s likely to be an x86 infrastructure.
“When a transaction is done on the computer, the computer boots them out, or the system doesn’t do it the way it is supposed to,” Minnehaha County Treasurer Pam Nelson said, according to the Argus Leader. “It doesn’t calculate fees accurately, and they are having to do them manually.”
Oops.
The director of the state’s division of motor vehicles defended the change, saying the first day wasn’t “as bad as (she) thought it could have been,” although Nelson said the new computer system is slower. One last quote:
Over the weekend, the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles changed its old system to the new South Dakota Customized Automated Registration System.
If you didn’t catch it, the new system, Customized Automated Registration System, can be abbreviated as CARS. Well hey, the new computer system might not work, but at least they were able to implement that cute little acronym…
(Photo above courtesy of the Argus Leader.)
Posted in Mainframe servers, Mainframe migration decisions | 10 Comments »
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