Farewell Mainframe, the City Council's first data processor

After more than fifty years in operation, the City Council is now retiring its first data processor, the Mainframe, which until 2012 supported corporate applications such as the municipal register of residents, the electoral roll, tax collection, rates and the land registry. The data extraction and preservation process began in 2019 and has made it possible to finally take the processor out of service, resulting in a saving of almost a million euros in licences and maintenance.

29/12/2022 13:18 h

Ajuntament de Barcelona

The first Mainframe model, the IBM 360-40 with 64 KB of memory, was purchased in 1967 to be integrated into the Municipal Computer Centre, the forerunner of the Municipal Institute of Information Technology. It has primarily been used for processing large amounts of data and for storage.

Since the acquisition of that first unit, the City Council has regularly upgraded the platform, doing so for the last time in 2012 with the zSeries BC12. Existing applications were gradually transformed into new environments from 2005 onwards, mainly SAP and Java, but the historical data they held were still needed.

In 2019, when transactions were no longer taking place on the Mainframe, a project was launched to preserve and consult unalterable data using a secure, scalable and flexible platform for the management and archiving of all types of information over long periods of time.

The project was implemented in two stages: the first between 2019 and 2020, and the second between 2021 and 2022. Thirty applications have been decommissioned in all, their data preserved and the necessary queries created.

 

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