Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads is once again planning a path off its mainframe environment, this time hastened by the discontinuation of key IT support services.
The department is seeking to transfer hosting of its 30-year-old transport registration and integrated licensing system – TRAILS – from an IBM z16 mainframe managed by state-run IT provider CITEC, to the cloud.
TMR said it wants to “decouple its dependency” on CITEC due to the agency ceasing management of mainframe environments for Queensland government agencies.
The Queensland Department of Customer Services, Open Data and Small and Family Business (CDSB), which oversees CITEC, told iTnews the change was due to “limited partner demand for this technology, and future technology modernisation roadmaps”.
Meanwhile, a TMR spokesperson cited the “strategic changes in service delivery offerings by CITEC” as a factor in the department’s decision to canvas a move to cloud.
In addition, the spokesperson also referenced the “modernisation journey” of its “critical” Registration and Licensing Services (RnLS), the overarching system for managing vehicle and driver records in Queensland.
The department has long wanted to modernise TRAILS and move it away from its current mainframe environment.
“Highly complex” system
Described as a “highly complex legacy system”, TRAILS currently sits on an IBM mainframe, managed by CITEC and in data centres operated by Polaris and iSeek.
According to an expression of interest, TMR is now looking to migrate the workloads to cloud services hosted in either Sydney or Melbourne.
Alternatively, it is also content to keep the workloads in their current mainframe environment as long as a new provider oversees the infrastructure hosting the TRAILS system for a minimum of five years.
The aim is to buy TMR time to create a modernisation roadmap for both TRAILS and the RnLS ecosystem, both of which have “evolved [to be] difficult to modify and expensive to maintain”, according to an expression of interest (EOI) document.
The RnLS is a mainly an on-premises mainframe-hosted system using “hand-crafted” Java, COBOL and Java Gen that was last refreshed in April 2023.
According to the EOI, TMR intends to avoid another on-premises hardware refresh by migrating to a cloud service provider before the next scheduled hardware refresh in 2028.
“Should TMR progress with mainframe cloud services, it would be to ensure continuity of services under a sustainable delivery model while modernisation progresses over the next several years,” a department spokesperson said.
“Exploring cloud options also aligns with both the TMR and Queensland government cloud-first strategies.”
TMR said it has already “successfully migrated numerous on-premises systems to cloud” with presence in AWS, Azure and Oracle.