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The city of Hammond’s legacy AlphaServer was easily replenished with the help of Charon-AXP, thanks to Stromasys.
The AlphaServer 2100 used by the city of Hammond was aging, and finding parts for it was extremely difficult due to time, cost, and complexity. However, the system was hard to replace.
Hammond, represented by Sammy Richmond, their systems and networking manager, moved their OpenVMS to a server with Charon-AXP, discarding the AlphaServer with Stromasys’ help.
The City of Hammond relied on an AlphaServer 2100 to issue business licenses and property taxes, but the age and reliability of the hardware was becoming a serious concern. After running smoothly for years, the Alpha was starting to deteriorate rapidly: back-ups had to be performed manually, complicating system administration, and hardware failure seemed imminent. When one of the drives failed, with no replacement parts to be found, it became clear that the system would need to be changed urgently.
One option was to migrate the system to a new platform; however, the fact that some of the source code for the custom-written COBOL application was unavailable complicated matters. This solution would also require significant time and money, both of which were in short supply. The department therefore contacted the VAX administrator for the Information Services Department at Southeastern Louisiana University for advice. He recommended that they investigate the virtualization solution provided by Stromasys.
After researching Stromasys’s CHARON-AXP software, Sammy Richmond, Hammond’s systems and networking manager, thought that it sounded like the perfect solution. CHARON-AXP would allow Hammond to continue running their custom-built application, which had been expensive to develop and fit their needs perfectly, without modification on industry-standard hardware. They could simply transfer their OpenVMS operating system and applications to a new server running Charon cross-platform virtualization software and dispose of the aging Alpha. Richmond contacted Stromasys to find out how to implement the Charon solution, and they referred him to their network of partners. Richmond chose to work with HP. The HP sales and project team helped the city purchase the Charon software, choose replacement hardware, and plan the implementation. To replace their legacy hardware, the city selected a HP ML150 G6 server. A Stromasys systems engineer came to assist the project team with the implementation, which went very smoothly.
The CHARON-AXP implementation was completely successful, and the City of Hammond was very pleased with the results. In addition to solving their hardware problem, they gained a significant increase in performance and freed up space in their data room by replacing the old server, which was about the size of a filing cabinet, with a new, more compact one. In other words, Charon allowed them to achieve their goal—and more—for thousands of dollars less than what a traditional migration would have cost.