Luxembourg private bank Société Générale Bank & Trust (SGBT), subsidiary of Société Générale Group, has completed the migration of its mission-critical banking systems to a cloud computing architecture. The migration took just over two years of preparation and testing, and required close collaboration between Anubex experts and system specialists from SGBT. The migrated systems went live in March 2013. Eric Mely, CTO at SGBT, comments: ‘The migration of our mainframe system gave us the opportunity to move these mission-critical applications to the bank’s private cloud. Our private cloud has facilitated the delivery of different environments, and was able to allocate resources to virtual machines where needed, thanks to its flexibility.” Modernization The applications were good for 10 million lines of code in total, spread over 17000 programs and 6000 screens developed in Natural 4GL. These applications used a significant amount of data that was managed on the mainframe in ADABAS databases and ISAM indexed files. The programs made extensive use of the transaction processing and batch environments of the mainframe with 12000 jobs and many proprietary utilities. The tools provided by Anubex offered an automation rate of 99.99% for the migration phase. According to Luc Dosquet, Deputy CIO at SGBT, who initiated and managed the project, ‘The mainframe applications fully addressed the needs of business for many years. The migration let us preserve the investment in the existing system, while adding value by moving it to a scalable, open environment.” The target system runs on a modern environment with Oracle RAC as database, and COBOL application servers on a fully virtualized Linux platform provided by VCE. Globally, the new infrastructure is based on 6 virtual machines for the application part, and 4 virtual machines for the Oracle RAC database. The developers are now using ‘drag and drop” gestures to maintain the migrated code in a standard Eclipse IDE which the bank also hosts on a virtual desktop infrastructure. Automated Testing With 10 million lines of code, the active management of testing was critical to keep the project on track. Business users were needed to ultimately accept the new systems. Guaranteeing functional validation of the programs prior to burdening the business with testing was an important prerequisite for the resource planning of the bank. To address this issue, Société Générale deployed the Automated Testing Framework (ATF), an Anubex product for automating testing. ATF automated the capture of test scenarios from production traces and the real-time multi-channel replay and compare of the original and replayed streams. Louis Heymans, CEO of Anubex comments: ‘ATF offers automated recording and replay of complete scenarios or individual sessions and it can be used for both functional testing and stress testing. The product goes as far as providing detailed analysis of response times and throughput, and also contains helpful utilities to detect performance problems. It produces test scenario coverage statistics and the pass rate of replayed scenarios.” Luc Dosquet, adds: ‘We used ATF heavily to automatically compare the functioning and performance of the converted applications with our previous systems. Practicing this way, we not only saved several hundred man-days in testing but we also improved the quality of the test himself.”
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