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.)

Whenever the California state Legislature needed more money in its coffers, the DMV would pay for it in maintenance costs on its mainframe.

Why? With many applications built on COBOL, changes to the system could lead to time and money spent on altering those legacy applications. One of those changes which came about regularly was whenever the state would hike licensing fees.

But as James Taylor writes, companies can learn to make meals from their mainframe leftovers. What in the world does that mean? It means identifying which parts of your mainframe architecture are static and don’t require a lot of changes — and which do.

In the case of the California DMV, licensing changes were frequent. Other processes, such as the application managing vehicle information, didn’t change much.

And so mainframe migration doesn’t have to mean moving every process off big iron because a few are changing all the time and causing maintenance costs to increase. It means migrating only those oft-changing processes to a distributed platform, where changes might be easier, even if it’s only because of who the company has working for them and what skills they possess. As Taylor puts it:

However, more careful analysis can lead to an interesting insight - much of a typical mainframe system is static, works fine and needs no maintenance. Often only a small portion of the system is responsible for much of the maintenance work.

The University of Manitoba recently held a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its mainframe, whose nickname was Betelgeuse. The event included a pinata seen here that employees had some fun bashing.

Though the story, reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s radio division, doesn’t mention what it’s doing with the mainframe and what will be replacing it (the university’s site only says something about “25 servers”), the funeral itself is pretty hilarious. Here’s a quote from the “eulogist” in the story:

For 47 years, you served us well,
You cast us in your green-screen spell,
You processed transactions without complaint,
We’ve asked the Pope to make you a saint.

The university had been running a mainframe since 1960, when it bought an IBM 650. It then cycled through about 10 different machines, finishing up with an Amdahl Millennium 1015.

The full mainframe timeline, eulogy and funeral procession route are also on the university’s Web site.

The U.S. Government Printing Office is replacing some mainframe-based back-office software with two Oracle E-Business Suite applications running on a different platform.

The GPO, which prints federal government documents for public consumption, already has Oracle applications running but it’s unclear on what platform. This press release from Guident Technologies, which is doing the outsourced work for the GPO for almost $1.6 million, doesn’t say.

The GPO will be replacing the mainframe software with Oracle Project Costing and Project Billing, two components of its E-Business Suite. The E-Business Suite runs on Unix, x86 Linux and Windows platforms. From a short story in Washington Technology:

The goal is to modernize and streamline the office’s two main business processes – Commercial Printing and Plant Printing. The implementation will enable the GPO to process orders from fulfillment through billing. It will also improve the agency’s ability to track costs and revenue. The new system is designed to improve cash management, control inventory flows and increase procurement efficiencies.

I’m really curious to see what platform the GPO is running its E-Business applications on. If it’s Linux, this could become another Oracle certification issue. According to Oracle’s certification matrix, E-Business applications are supported on x86 Linux but not zLinux. Why?

The IT Toolbox has a cool mainframe migration blog from Jim Wilson, aka “BlueKnight,” talking about his county government’s move away from Big Iron. It’s apparent that it’s been an ongoing process, as the county first moved its welfare system off the mainframe a few years ago and is now doing the same with the justice system.

Part of that move also includes moving off an old CA Datacom database that the justice system is running and converting to Oracle. Jim does a really nice job of laying out the problem and reasons for migration in the first post — “Mainframe elimination - Finally, some real progress” — and going into all of the many migration options and vendors out there in the second post, “Heading down the path.” It’s still early in the process, so this blog will be a good one to keep an eye on as the migration moves forward.

If you’re so inclined, you can also check out SearchDataCenter.com’s mainframe migration stories and tips, including stories from the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the New York Stock Exchange on their mainframe migrations.

You’ve often heard vendors talk about their BRIC strategy, which refers to their investment in the fastly developing nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Now comes a report out of IDC saying that 65 percent of Brazilian companies plan to undertake some kind of mainframe migration in the next two years.

Although a few companies are consolidating all of their applications within the mainframes, the majority are looking to remove non-mission critical applications out of the mainframe into cheaper platforms, IDC senior analyst Reinaldo Roveri told BNamericas.

Brazil’s strong economy and currency is giving companies the confidence to rethink their IT architecture, the analyst said. The high costs of maintaining mainframes and competitiveness are also driving the migration, he added.

So where are they going? Most often to Unix, according to IDC, followed by x86 Windows and Linux. Roveri was far from flat-out dismissing the mainframe in Brazil, however. He said that in the government, finance and utilities sectors — where mainframes are most common — many IT directors will find it too risky to migrate.

That is true, but there are certainly examples from the financial sector, at least in the United States; for example, the New York Stock Exchange is migrating from the mainframe to Unix and Linux. You don’t get much bigger than that.