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 execute the unmodified OpenVMS and TRU64 operating systems, and "immortalize" all your applications running on them. Even software warranty is of no concern: H.P. provides transfer licenses and will continue OpenVMS / Tru64 maintenance on our products. For details, see our CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP family pages.
The CHARON-HPA/3000 is aimed at satisfying the needs of the MPE/iX customer base for continuity after the phase-out program of the HP3000 hardware, as the interdependence between business processes and MPE/iX applications will remain for current MPE/iX users. The CHARON-HPA/3000 product works in a very similar way to the current Virtual VAX and Alpha products and do not require modification of the MPE/iX operating system, database or application.
The CHARON-SPK/SS20 provides a SPARC’s hardware abstraction layer on an industry standard x 86 computer systems. The hardware abstraction layer appears to any software running on it as SPARC’s hardware. This virtual hardware executes any binary software that the original hardware would execute, including self-modifying code, kernel code and drivers. No code conversion or source code is needed.
“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.”
