Dual-OS server saves maintenance costs for Columbus

Dual-OS server saves maintenance costs for Columbus

• By Trudy Walsh
• Aug 22, 2003

The city of Columbus, Ohio, is saving about $80,000 a month on maintenance now that it has replaced its legacy mainframe with a Unisys ClearPath Plus CS7101 server.

City officials chose the year-old server, which runs dual operating systems'both Unisys' MCP and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server'because it could handle existing payroll programs and police records as well as Windows applications. It could also Web-host many of their legacy applications, said Jesse R. Jones, director of Columbus' Technology Department.

The payroll department can batch-process checks 25 percent faster on the ClearPath mainframe, he said.

The former Unisys V530 mainframe had to produce $1.2 million worth of payroll checks for 8,000 employees every other week. It accessed the city's Oracle databases thousands of times daily, and the maintenance costs were just too high, Jones said.

Officials of the Ohio capital considered replacing the mainframe with a Unix server from Hewlett-Packard Co., but its proprietary middleware didn't work with the Oracle databases, Jones said.