State Workforce Development Agency

This midwestern state usually processes around 3,000 unemployment claims a week. In the first week after expanding benefits, the state received around 41,000 claims—a more than 11-fold increase over their typical load. Many states’ mission-critical systems were hobbled by similar rates of increase at around the same time. But because this state’s unemployment applications are processed using an IBM zSystems mainframe, IT was able to instantly scale up its total capacity on demand by nearly two-thirds without purchasing any new hardware or software.

Results

IBM reports that a single z15® mainframe is capable of processing 2.5 billion transactions in a single day — the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays. “When it comes to raw power, nothing else even comes close,” says the unemployment agency’s head of IT. “So when we need it, the scalability is there.”

Moreover, while the state purchased its first mainframe many decades ago, it has continued to invest in the platform, including upgrading both the mainframe platform to the latest generation of equipment and modernizing the underlying applications running on it. The head of IT attributes the state’s ability to efficiently process unemployment claims to these decisions, even through an unprecedented public health crisis. A Rocket Software customer since 2012, the agency currently uses Rocket Mainstar Catalog RecoveryPlus to ensure uninterrupted access to critical operational data, as well as Rocket VSAM Quick Index to maximize its systems’ data availability without adding resources.