This blog is co-written with Sandra Levitt, Senior Sales Engineer – Global Alliances at Stromasys

Why are Legacy SPARC systems a concern?

Companies often continue to run legacy Oracle applications for their businesses because they are stable, work perfectly fine, and perform exactly what the business needs.  These mission-critical applications, associated databases, and operating systems have been running for years on aging “legacy hardware” in the face of a looming, ever-growing risk of hardware failure.   Unit managers or IT administrators usually convey their fear of this risk by “not touching what is not broken.”  How can one reduce hardware failure risk without making application changes from the operating system level and up?  The easiest solution can be hardware emulation from Stromasys.  This approach allows migration to OCI, thus reducing the risk of hardware failure, while at the same time allowing the legacy operating system, databases, and applications (for example EBS) to continue to run as they always have. 

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Charon Virtual SPARC

Using the picture above, let’s say on the left you have an old Sunfire system running Solaris 8 with an old database such as 9i and a custom application.    Furthermore, the source code to this custom application is missing, or the 3rd party company is no longer in business or supports this application.  Yet this application runs payroll, or some other mission-critical function within your company.   You plan on upgrading the application, but this is a long and expensive task and has been put off for years.  Also, no reliable spare parts are readily available to keep this system going. Using the Charon solution from Stromasys, you can replace the aging hardware on an OCI Instance running Linux.  From the operating system layer and up, you can then lift-and-shift via ufsdump (for example) all your filesystems, and in less than a week, your application will continue to run as it previously did, but now in Oracle Cloud. 

By moving to OCI you no longer must worry about hardware failure or data center issues.  Additionally, you can purchase Charon either directly from Stromasys or in supported countries through the marketplace using your existing Oracle Universal Credits!

For further information, this previously recorded webinar is available on Oracle Connect:

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Here are a few links to get you started exploring the Stromasys and Oracle partnership activities further:

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Stromasys is a pioneer in enterprise-class cross-platform legacy server emulation solutions, providing modern infrastructure for legacy applications. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland with sales, engineering, and research and development offices worldwide, Stromasys has cross-platform virtualization implementations in over 70 countries to help organizations lower costs, protect their investments, improve performance, reduce risk, and provide easier maintenance.

Our virtualized environments include:

  • Charon PDP- Virtualization/ Emulation of PDP-11 systems.
  • Charon VAX- Virtualization/ Emulation of VAX/ OpenVMS configurations.
  • Charon AXP- Virtualization/Emulation of Alpha/ OpenVMS/ Tru64 solutions.
  • Charon PAR- Virtualization/ Emulation of HP 3000/ MPE PA-RISC technologies.
  • Charon SSP- Virtualization/ Emulation of SPARC/ SunOS/ Solaris infrastructure.
  • Charon on the Cloud- Virtualization/ Emulation of SPARC, Alpha, VAX, and PA-RISC environments in the cloud.

For more information on Stromasys, call 919-239-8450, or visit https://www.stromasys.com