Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), U.S. Department of Defense

Story Details

The global Department of Defense (DoD) community relies on the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and its health information management system for enrollment information, eligibility and benefits coverage verification, immunization records, referral authorizations, and reports to primary care managers. After years of adding new information requirements, tasks, capabilities, and CPU cycles, the mainframe system’s operating costs had grown to more than $15 million per year. Government officials felt the system was too costly; their goal was to reduce the cost of the outsourced IT function and more easily implement new features and capabilities, so that as IT needs grew and changed, the expense would not be prohibitive.

DMDC selected the Sun Enterprise 10000, a high-end server with the most mainframe-equivalent technology, but without the unnecessary complexity. The challenge was to run legacy applications on the new server—including an artificial intelligence engine that had been integrated with the mainframe CICS transaction processing system. DMDC used Sun MTP software to migrate the existing legacy application without change to the Sun server. "Rewriting the application would have been too costly, take too long, and presented a huge risk of failure," explains Bill Boggess, Chief of the Access and Authentication Program at DMDC. "We decided to reuse the existing mainframe CICS framework and rehost the application to the Sun system. This approach reduced costs significantly and resulted in better performance. Sun's technology allowed us to move a majority of our legacy applications seamlessly to the new platform."

EDS, which operates the IT system for DMDC, provided detailed knowledge of the applications and the large relational database while Sun provided expertise on migrating mainframe applications. Compared to the mainframe, the Sun environment and Sun MTP software has enabled DMDC to reduce the cost of ownership by nearly 75%, saving taxpayers $10 million each year. In addition, DMDC achieved a rapid return on investment, and the ease of the migration insured that no users felt any disruption in service. The system now runs two million transactions per day, serving more than 25,000 active users and providing important information to ensure that 2.4 million U.S. military personnel and their families receive health care services when and where they are needed.