Cleaning out clutter: Nassau County tosses Wang for Unisys, saves millions

At Nassau County Health & Human Services, IT was becoming a tangled mess. At the same time, elected officials had promised improved services to the county’s residents without promising any increase in IT budget to help streamline efficiencies.

Donald Rodgers, HHS systems manager for IT at the county on Long Island in New York, knew he had a big challenge on his hands. For one thing, the county was currently running on multiple platforms, anchored by a Wang environment that supported custom-built COBOL applications.

“We were running an antiquated environment that we had been looking at overhauling since Y2K,” Rodgers says. “Because we were running so many systems on different platforms, maintaining the environment had become next to impossible.”

Rodgers was looking for an industry standard platform that would support a move to .Net-based Web services, which would create better continuity and efficiency among the eight departments that HHS encompassed. But he didn’t want to be tied to a scale-out architecture in which industry standard servers are added as needs demand.

“We wanted to avoid creating a server farm. We’re a fairly small shop from a support standpoint so I didn’t want to get involved in an environment that we had to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade and also maintain ongoing. It just wasn’t going to be possible, we weren’t going to be able to do it,” he says.

At a Microsoft conference in 2005, Rodgers found what he was looking for: the Intel-based ES7000 from Unisys. The Xeon-based system that can scale to as many as 32 processors provided a flexible platform that would enable Nassau County to scale up as needed, all within a single box to manage, Rodgers says.

“When I saw the ES7000, I said, ‘This is the machine we need,’” he says. “It represented the best of both worlds: It was a mainframe that was going to run Windows.”

Moving to the ES7000 wasn’t going to be simple, however. The eight departments within HHS each were running isolated applications, most written in COBOL for the Wang VS8460. But other platforms, such as a mainframe, had to be accessed, as well, leading to a multitude of desktop devices that had to be managed in order to give HHS staff access to the applications they needed.

The idea behind the overhaul was not just to move off the old Wang to a more up-to-date, flexible platform, but also to create an IT foundation that would integrate data from all eight departments within HHS, letting staff not only access data from a single device, but also access relevant data from other departments, Rodgers says.

The first step toward reaching that goal was to begin migrating some 2 million lines of COBOL code off the Wang and onto the new ES7000, a process that began about 18 months ago. Rodgers and his team worked with Unicon Conversion Technologies to convert the COBOL code to AccuCOBOL, a version of COBOL that is supported by Windows.

The county spent about $1.2 million to re-engineer the legacy applications, but it saved about $5 million by going that route rather than rewriting them for the new platform, Rodgers says. Today, all of the HHS applications run on a 16-processor ES7000 that also supports the county’s SQL database. A second 16-processor ES7000 runs the database for the county’s digital images, a county-mandated move that has enabled HHS to significantly reduce space demands.