Case Study

With Charon-VAX, Trend Windows saves millions and increases capacity by 30%

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• With Charon-VAX, Trend Windows saves millions and increases capacity by 30%

The Challenge

All of Trend Windows & Doors’ critical operating systems, including product design, manufacturing, and sales, relied on an aging VAX 7840 VMS server released in the mid-1970s. It had reached capacity, and since the cost of rewriting all the company’s operational systems would have run into millions of dollars, Trend was considering the purchase of a second, aging VAX system in order to increase capacity. While this would have been a less costly solution, and would have allowed them to retain their software applications, they were worried that the second system might experience teething problems or fail to deliver the desired improvement in processing capacity. This could potentially impact the company’s manufacturing operations and sales. There was also concern about the extra space that an additional VAX system would take up at Trend’s headquarters in Sydney, and the associated costs. Trend also needed to invest in a more modern storage solution, which would not have been compatible with the old VAX system.

Trend’s IT supplier, Oriel Technologies, approached UBS to evaluate Charon-VAX as a virtual environment that would allow all current applications to run unchanged on a modern server, increase processing speeds, and provide capacity for future expansion. The challenge was to move Trend’s applications to another platform without changing the underlying code, user interface, access to Rdb on Windows, and a number of LAT-connected devices used within the manufacturing process. Charon is the only virtualization solution that exactly replicates the existing VAX rather than imitate it on a different platform.