Legacy System Virtualization
Legacy systems (for example, Digital Alpha and VAX, SUN Sparc, HP3000) are still running business or mission-critical applications. Companies are under increasing pressure to migrate as maintenance costs increase and system reliability declines, but how can virtualization work for them? These systems hinder companies’ disaster recovery planning because their data isn’t as well protected for system security or business continuity. The cost of space, power and cooling for the IT data centre becomes a key agenda item. Migration is expensive and risky for legacy applications.
Cross-platform virtualization addresses each of these concerns with viable alternatives. Stromasys has the ability to serve its clients globally with the products, services and support that make virtualization not only easy and low-cost, but the smartest way forward.
CHARON Products
Our CHARON family of virtualization products forms the ideal solution to preserve your existing software applications without worrying about your obsolete equipment. Using modern virtualization technology, the CHARON solutions provide a high performance replica of your legacy VAX or Alpha hardware system on modern desktop or server systems.
The major benefit of the CHARON solutions is that you need have no concern over the reliability of aging hardware systems, or with the increasing maintenance costs which come with this older equipment. Your software applications will work as before, or even faster. There is no expensive migration process, no software re-engineering or conversion, no training for system managers or users required, and no painful conversion of normal business practices. Software development tools won't change either. The only visible change is the immediate replacement of the older hardware by modern equipment, and a steep reduction in floor space, energy consumption and maintenance costs.
Virtualization technology improves efficiency and reduces costs in data processing. But the CHARON cross-platform virtualization technology takes a big leap beyond that: CHARON virtual systems can exactly replicate any computer hardware model, independent of the actual hardware systems they run on! Designed for commercial use, CHARON virtual systems are the 'too good to be true' instant solutions for aging hardware and spiraling maintenance costs.
The demand to replace older hardware is rising, and we are working on many virtual replacement systems. Our first two product families, with 3000+ licenses sold to-date, are the Digital Equipment Corporation's (now H.P.) legendary VAX and Alpha systems.
Our CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP products immortalize the OpenVMS and TRU64 operating systems, and the layered products and all your applications running on them. Even software warranty is of no concern: H.P. provides transfer licenses and will continue software maintenance on our products. For details, see our CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP family pages.
SYBIL and ZELUS
On June 23rd, 2010, Stromasys announced an expantion of it's virtualization offer with two new product families: “SYBIL”, a SPARC virtualization for Windows/Solaris; and “ZELUS”, an HP 3000 with MPE/iX virualization for Windows. For details please refer to SYBIL and ZELUS family pages.
“While still a niche market, the use of processor emulation (cross-platform virtualisation) is gradually accelerating with an increase in maturity, support and acceptance,” confirmed Andrew Butler, Vice President, Gartner Research. “With net performance after overhead for processor emulation still meeting the desired performance level, while benefitting from the cost economics of x86 technology, the capability is an opportunity for older architectures and instruction sets to be deployed on newer platforms.”