Migrating CNAF France’s family benefits agency
French social service agency turns to Bull to migrate from a proprietary relational database to PostgreSQL
Customer: Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF)
CNAF is France’s family benefits agency, which administers an annual budget of over 70 billion Euros for 30 million people. It has 11 million active files.
CNAF’s Goal
CNAF has mainframe systems from two vendors – Bull and IBM – and each system has a proprietary database (RFM, DB2). But CNAF decided to open their Bull infrastructure using Open software and Open databases, and to consolidate all of their distributed Bull Data Centers into one unique Data Center. Their goal was to open their mainframes without making changes to their core business logic.
CNAF and Bull Worked Together
2006: CNAF and Bull began working together on prototyping, using a PostgreSQL database to validate functionality, resiliency and performance. This collaboration resulted in performance improvements to both PostgreSQL and CNAF applications, and being able to utilize the functionality of PostgreSQL more efficiently.
2009: CNAF migrated to Open Source, including OpenOffice, Nagios, OCS (System Management Software) and PostgreSQL. In parallel with this migration, CNAF also launched the consolidation of all of their GCOS systems into one location.
2010: CNAF completed its migration to PostgreSQL.
The benefits included:
French social service agency turns to Bull to migrate from a proprietary relational database to PostgreSQL
Customer: Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF)
CNAF is France’s family benefits agency, which administers an annual budget of over 70 billion Euros for 30 million people. It has 11 million active files.
CNAF’s Goal
CNAF has mainframe systems from two vendors – Bull and IBM – and each system has a proprietary database (RFM, DB2). But CNAF decided to open their Bull infrastructure using Open software and Open databases, and to consolidate all of their distributed Bull Data Centers into one unique Data Center. Their goal was to open their mainframes without making changes to their core business logic.
CNAF and Bull Worked Together
2006: CNAF and Bull began working together on prototyping, using a PostgreSQL database to validate functionality, resiliency and performance. This collaboration resulted in performance improvements to both PostgreSQL and CNAF applications, and being able to utilize the functionality of PostgreSQL more efficiently.
2009: CNAF migrated to Open Source, including OpenOffice, Nagios, OCS (System Management Software) and PostgreSQL. In parallel with this migration, CNAF also launched the consolidation of all of their GCOS systems into one location.
2010: CNAF completed its migration to PostgreSQL.
The benefits included:
- Millions of Euros were saved on support costs.
- PostgreSQL was more performant than the previous databases.
- Impacts to customer applications were minimal.
- Existing data storage systems, database saves and DR logistics were still usable.
- New parallel operations within PostgreSQL allowed a 50% savings in the Batch processing.
- Transaction Processing was 30% faster.
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