Legacy systems (for example, DEC PDP11, Alpha, VAX, SUN SPARC, the HP3000) are still running mission-critical applications. Companies are under increasing pressure to replace legacy systems as maintenance costs increase and system reliability declines.

Many companies face a dilemma: Legacy systems carry a high cost in terms of space, power and cooling, hardware maintenance and investments for disaster planning. On the other hand, migration by rewriting software is very expensive, lengthy and risky for legacy applications.

This is where Stromasys' virtualization technology for legacy system architectures will help. Datacenter virtualization products like VMware or OracleVM are designed to run applications on virtual Industry standard (I86) systems. However, these virtual clients only run applications that are made for the I86 architecture.

Stromasys has taken virtulization technology a step further by developing virtual clients that directly execute unmodified software made for legacy systems. These clients run directly on standard Windows or Linux servers, VMware or OracleVM, but retain the original operating system and applications, as the diagram below shows:

CHARON™ Products

Stromasys 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.

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.

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.

SYBIL and ZELUS

On June 23rd, 2010, Stromasys announced the development of two new product families: "SYBIL", a SPARC virtualization for Windows/Solaris; and "ZELUS", an HP 3000 with MPE/iX virualization for Windows. These projects have now moved into product development, and will be available as CHARON-SPK (Sybil) and CHARON-HPA (Zelus). For product status, see their product pages.

"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."