How Can Emulation and Virtualization Drive Business Continuity and Sustainability Efforts?

Articles

Technology is evolving at a faster pace, making it crucial to maintain critical applications stable and resilient. Several businesses are now facing challenges with their aging legacy hardware, which not only requires high maintenance costs but also poses risks to business continuity. Technologies like emulation and virtualization solutions have emerged as crucial instruments for ensuring business continuity and enhancing sustainability.

These technologies promote resource efficiency by lowering the overall environmental impact of business operations and providing robust disaster recovery solutions. According to a survey report in 2023, 66% of businesses have reported an increase in agility after integrating virtualization.

Understanding the Legacy Applications and Their Challenges

Before we learn more about the transformative impact of virtualization and emulation, let’s first understand legacy applications. A legacy application is a solution built on outdated technology. These applications have a critical role in business operations, but their reliance on aging hardware and software often poses substantial risks.

For instance, many industries still rely on integral applications that run on legacy hardware like Alpha, VAX, SPARC systems, and HP3000. As these systems age with time, their maintenance costs escalate, and reliability decreases, which poses considerable risks to business continuity. Furthermore, these legacy systems need to be better equipped regarding recovery standards, making them vulnerable to data loss and continuous downtime during an outage event. According to a Forbes report, manufacturing companies face a staggering loss of up to $50 billion annually.

What is Hardware Emulation?

Hardware emulation is a procedure to imitate hardware components’ behavior. Typically, these systems under design use another specialized emulation system based on hardware description language compiled into a format that the emulation system will utilize. One simple example is an IT admin using hardware emulation to run an unsupported OS (operating system) on a VM (Virtual Machine). In this situation, the virtual machine may not have direct access to the server hardware. So, an emulation layer directs traffic between the virtual and physical hardware.

Benefits of Hardware Emulation

Here are some benefits of the hardware emulation system listed below:

Verification and Debudding

Emulators permit the designers to quickly identify and resolve issues in the system before physical chips are developed. They are extremely valuable for ensuring system correctness as they enable the real-time testing of live data.

Business Continuity

Emulation solutions ensure business continuity during any interruptions. With options like virtual systems, employees can now work from anywhere, minimizing the requirement of physical space and commute-related emissions.

E-Waste Reduction

Emulation extends the life span of end-users legacy hardware, reducing e-waste. Businesses can upgrade server infrastructure instead of replacing the entire system while maintaining existing endpoints.

Understanding What is Virtualization

The process of creating servers, devices, networks, and servers virtually is known as Virtualization. A single physical server can easily host several virtual machines, each designed to operate independently. Surveys have reported that after implementing virtualization, businesses have shown a 50% improvement in their operation efficiency.

Benefits of Virtualization

Here are some highlighted points on how virtualization contributes towards sustainability:

Efficiency in Energy

• Consolidation of Servers: Minimizing the number of servers and running multiple virtual machines on a single server reduces energy consumption.
• Dynamic Resource Allocation: Depending on user demands, VMs allocate resources that scale down during inactivity, thus saving energy. For a sustainable future, VMware has started the VMware Zero Carbon Committed Program along with more than 50 partners, including AWS, Oracle, Google, IBM, and more.
• Thin Clients: Using a low-power thin client to access virtual machines minimizes energy usage as compared to the old traditional systems.

Emissions Reduction

• Cloud-Based Solution: Cloud platforms offer customized private clouds that integrate well with virtual systems and have robust security. These clouds minimize IT footprints and ensure data protection.
• Operational Resilience: Virtual systems enable a work-from-anywhere option that reduces emissions caused by commuting.

Migration Strategies

• Legacy System Migration: Businesses should now assess the cost of maintaining their legacy systems. Legacy application migration helps them seamlessly work with the latest technology without disrupting the workflow and at minimal expense. Businesses like Stromasys offer Charon solutions that enable organizations to transition from their aging legacy systems to modern solutions seamlessly.
• Stromasys leverages cross-platform server virtualization to emulate legacy systems, allowing organizations to manage their existing solution configurations unaltered while enjoying the benefits of the modern virtualized architecture.

Driving Efficiency and Continuity with Stromasys

In an era where every business is working towards sustainability and continuity, Stromasys stands out as the world’s leading provider of aging legacy applications by offering practical solutions. It ensures the business maintains critical applications, minimizing costs, mitigating security risks, and enhancing performance with its VAX, Alpha, and SPARC emulation solutions. Whether cloud-based virtualization or hardware emulation, businesses will enjoy a seamless migration process while maintaining time-testing applications. Stromasys has the ability to serve its clients globally with its products, services, and support, which makes virtualization not only easy and low-cost but also the most innovative way forward.

Always remember that technological evolution is inexorable, and our choices shape the future. So, it’s best to choose wisely and build a resilient and sustainable digital environment.

For more information on transforming your legacy application with Stromasys, Talk to Our Expert, as Modern Problems Need State-of-the-Art Solutions!

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Key Takeaway

Emulation and virtualization offer a new way to manage the lifecycle of digital assets by allowing businesses to prolong their longevity. It enables the organization to stay ahead of the rapidly changing technologies while empowering sustainable practices. This approach requires a wide range of strategic actions.

Firstly, there needs to be a consensus on standard peripherals and emulator functionalities to facilitate seamless transitions from physical to emulated hardware.

Also, businesses need to carefully choose from emulators for the development and adoption of new environments and should ideally opt for open source to promote accessibility and collaboration.