Aussie Retailer Sticking with Mainframe Approach to Data
March 12, 2013
One Tasmanian organization refuses to buy into to the cloud-migration trend. TechEye informs us that retail outfit Coogans is saying, in effect, “Forget the Cloud, Get a Mainframe.” The company is forging ahead with plans to upgrade its old standby, the Unisys mainframe. The article tells us:
“To understand how unusual this is, you have to realise that Australia never really had the mainframe bug and there are only about six organisations in Australia to use Unisys’ mainframe systems. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Coogans has been a loyal client of the Unisys and its predecessor, Burroughs, since before 1965, and this new fangled cloud tech just does not cut the mustard.
“It just took a weekend for Coogans to set up one mainframe, the latest Unisys Libra 460s, at each of its Hobart and Moonah locations in Tasmania and migrate its real-time custom production application, called Coogans Online Stock, Financial And Rental System, which was written in 1992 and is the centrepiece of the retailer’s IT architecture.”
It seems like a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But won’t they regret eschewing the advantage of cloudy redundancy? Nope. The company maintains a separate disaster-recovery environment at a nearby building, complete with VPN–ensured redundancy.
Okay, so they’re covered there. Still, why resist what many consider an inevitable shift? IT manager Peter Jandera is simply uncomfortable with not knowing exactly where his company’s data is going, and with knowing that “all it would take is a person with a space to cut through a cable and the company is stuffed.” He emphasized that Coogans cannot afford to lose even a minute from their working day; he is simply unwilling to trust another organization with that responsibility. I can’t say I blame him.
If more organizations were to buck the cloud trend, would it mean new hope for systems like BRS Search and IBM’s STAIRS?
Cynthia Murrell, March 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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