DWP Wraps Up Mammoth Mainframe Migration of Job Seeker’s Allowance Payment System
The Division for Do the job and Pensions (DWP) has efficiently shifted its Work Seeker’s Allowance Payment Technique (JSAPS) from its mainframe to an X86 architecture operating on Pink Hat Company Linux — a mammoth job involving reams of legacy code, some of which was composed in the nineteen sixties.
The re-platforming concluded with the ultimate migration of 54 databases containing 6.3 billion information from the unique databases/s to a “leading modern-day relational databases administration system” in less than 24 hrs
JSAPS (introduced in the late 1990s) was centered on an IT code established that had been intended in the nineteen sixties, with code additional in excess of the yrs as new specialized and policy needs changed. It has in excess of 50,000 close customers. The alternative system involves 7.two million strains of code, and 29,592 batch processes.
That’s in accordance to IT business Advanced, which supported the DWP with the go. The change has halved how long it normally takes to approach purposes, Advanced reported: the first full functioning working day of functions on the new system was finished in two hrs and eleven minutes as opposed to a preceding five hrs, making it possible for the DWP to concern two hundred,000 specific payments worth in excess of £53 million.
Mark Bell, VME-R Deputy Director at the Division for Do the job and Pensions reported: “This has been widely recognised as just one of the finest specialized achievements shipped by DWP Electronic for many yrs and as floor-breaking versus wider marketplace standards. It also permits us to make additional electronic enhancements to advantage hundreds of thousands of United kingdom citizens.”
Tim Jones, MD of Software Modernisation, at Advanced told Pc Business enterprise Overview: “The programme to go DWP’s purposes to a new system is component of a major modernisation initiative to safeguard and make improvements to the systems liable for a £170 billion of welfare payments for each annum.
“The scale, complexity and relevance of the job is perhaps the largest of its form to adopt an automated re-system solution.
To provide an plan of scope of the project…
- The Work Seekers Allowance application is the seventh DWP’s application to ‘go live’ as component of a a great deal larger programme of operate to decommission its mainframe which started off in earnest with Advanced in August 2017.
- Each and every system presents a mission significant assistance and as this kind of has national ‘critical asset’ status.
- C. 25+ Million Lines of Code converted using an automated solution
- All code efficiently translated to a modern-day code established and a modern-day built-in improvement natural environment (together with a major language translation for significant code)
- The migration of 9 billion facts rows all converted, loaded and verified
- Only three systems currently continue to be on the mainframe as the programme enters its ultimate stage.
He told us in an emailed respond to to several inquiries: “There have been specialized and delivery linked difficulties but these have been nicely managed and geared up for. The most important problem was to manage a huge-scale delivery with numerous ‘swim streams’. Some thing the office took on on their own and managed magnificently as component of constructing their have interior capacity.
Advanced’s Tim Jones additional: “Some specific specialized achievements that appear during the JSAPS job in specific include things like:
1) The sophisticated databases mapping and use of capabilities this kind of as partitioning and Index Arranged Tables which resulted in improved on the internet and batch efficiency than on the unique mainframe application. No variations had been required to the converted application code to meet up with efficiency targets.
two) Changing untyped facts with COBOL computational merchandise and EBCDIC people into equal ASCII facts.
3) Whole byte-by-byte reconciliation in between the unique databases and the go forward databases ensured any databases conversion issues had been resolved nicely just before cutover absolutely de-jeopardizing the implementation into reside.”
