Microsoft Makes Push for COBOL Migration

geoff313 writes: "It would appear that Microsoft is making a real push for the migration of existing COBOL applications to Windows and their .Net platform. Micro Focus, a company who makes COBOL migration products and last year became a member of Microsoft's Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program, announced their Net Express with .Net product, a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003. It allows for COBOL code to be integrated and manged with other code in Visual Studio. In an interview with eWeek he declares that 'Micro Focus and Microsoft are bringing the mainframe to Windows and .Net'. This makes me wonder, are there any Open Source projects working to provide for this eventual migration? Gartner estimates that over 75% of business data is processed by an approximately 200 billions lines of COBOL, so this seems like a huge potential market to lose to Microsoft."

Comments

Re:Bah humbug...

[karit]

You are missing his point. He is refering the internal workings not redunacy. The mainframes will double check their working so if errors in the datapath (ie in processor) are picked up and corrected. 80x86 (AFAIK) does not have this kind of checking built into the chip.

Re:Bah humbug...

[larien]

*sigh* Clusters come nowhere near the level of fault tolerance you get in big iron. In a real fault-tolerant system, there are multiple paths for all transactions; in essence, you're running the same code on two (or more) CPUs. If one fails, you have zero downtime, other than a quick reroute in hardware to compensate (you probably wouldn't even notice it). To the best of my knowledge, there is no clustering solution which comes close to this, whether based on linux, Unix or Windows.

Yes, clusters can do a job which is "good enough" to replace expensive mainframes, but there are some cases where they aren't good enough, especially banking where you have to be 100% confident that every transaction is logged correctly.