Four increasing costs of keeping your aging hardware

Things are running smoothly so far…the operating systems and applications, in which you’ve invested thousands of man hours and millions of dollars are still reliable and critical to your company’s operations.

BUT the decades-old legacy hardware these valuable applications rest on is starting to cause you headaches. Your legacy system is reaching end-of-life status and you find yourself in an organization that continues to put off upgrading or replacing these systems.

While it’s tempting to push your hardware to its limits, you’re incurring significant costs. In fact, continuing to use aging legacy hardware can turn out more expensive than investing in our virtualization solutions. Below, we’ve outlined the primary hidden costs of keeping classic hardware:

Hidden Cost #1: Downtime

It’s the most dreaded scenario for any organization. The financial losses that often accompany downtime come in the forms of lost production time, quantities, sales revenue, overtime costs, and IT recovery costs. Gartner put the hourly cost of downtime for computer network at $42,000. In addition to these measurable costs, there are the less measurable ones: damage to employee morale, disruption of ongoing developments, and irreversible damage to the company’s reputation for not delivering on customer products and services. With hardware emulation, eliminate unplanned hardware downtime by running your mission-critical applications on industry standard servers or in the cloud.

Hidden Cost #2: Maintenance

Companies spend large parts of their budgets on maintenance, and it’s a no-brainer than the maintenance for aging hardware systems consumes a large portion of that budget. Mark Gillespie, Data Center Operations Manager at Workflowone stated, “We went from paying over $100,000 in maintenance fees per year to paying just $10,000 per year” after using our emulation solution, Charon.  In addition to eliminating these steep maintenance costs, hardware virtualization also allows companies to save money by extending the life cycle of critical applications. With modern infrastructure and no retraining or recertification required, companies find themselves with budget freed up to invest in other initiatives.

Hidden Cost #3: Decreased Performance

Has your system slowed down over the years? This is a common phenomenon as hardware ages. This not only impacts the machine’s output but also how effectively employees can use their time. Employees working with an aging system may lose a significant number of work hours as they wait for systems to load—resulting in lost productivity. Oliver Sauter, IT Manager at Kraus & Naimer said, “Our employees were enthusiastic about jobs that used to run eight hours now being done in ten minutes.”

Another customer initially mistook a massive performance improvement for a malfunction when a report that took 30-45 minutes to generate on the original hardware was ready instantaneously after the hardware was emulated. Hardware emulation enables the software to work harder and faster, boosting system performance reliably and consistently.

Hidden Cost #4: Energy Consumption

With increasing pressures on organizations to reduce their energy consumption and “go green,” this can be a challenge for companies with aging hardware that requires more power and cooling. Reduce your organization’s environmental footprint by opting for a Charon hardware emulation solution in place of the original legacy hardware. Running in the cloud or on industry standard servers, Charon makes it easier for companies to reduce power usage and overall environmental impact—not to mention the utility bill. “Space is a big commodity. Using the Stromasys solution, we went from refrigerator-sized VAX hardware that also required a refrigerator-sized array to a modern, rackable HP DL 2U server,” said Steve Olson, VMS systems manager at Fidelity National Financial, “And you can just imagine the savings from lower energy consumption and cooling costs.”

Aging hardware is accompanied by a number of hidden costs, and it only makes sense to consider hardware emulation as a cost-effective option that helps companies protect their software investments. Support your classic software stack with a virtualized hardware solution to improve performance, increase reliability, save money, reduce the data center footprint and embrace today’s data center transformation strategies—all in a single move. Contact us to learn how.

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