Classic AlphaServers and VAXen may be, due to their original nature, systems with a fairly large footprint, energy consumption and high cost of ownership. CHARON helps the user to reduce the operational costs of maintaining the Alpha-based applications. By moving the classic applications to a CHARON based solution one can gain on many levels:
Footprint reduction: Scaling (down) legacy VAX and Alpha hardware to Charon technology offers many advantages among which include lower cost of service-maintenance, operation, facility, power and with most often faster performance and scaleability.
High Performance: For most configurations, performance improves when implementing (VAX/Alpha) OpenVMS, (Alpha) Tru64/WinNT applications on modern server hardware - especially when implemented in SAN/iSCSI environments.
Hardware Tolerance: File systems configured on classic hardware as "just a bunch of disks" (JBOD) can execute fault tolerant on current generation RAID devices without changes to the legacy's converted file system.
Leverage: Charon uses modern processors, memory, low-cost IO bus configuration options and storage technologies. Charon takes full advantage of current day hardware technology resulting in very high efficiency when running legacy applications. Performance yieds are often factored many times greater to classic hardware.
Add additional JBOD devices cleanly and easily. Add tape drives (physical) and virtual...
For example, using the Blade server concept, many host computers can be fitted into one rackmount computer creating a pool of host systems that can deliver over a hundred CPU's. With appropriate planning and configuration, a large AlphaServer installed base will fit into one Blade Server rack.
The combination of the Blade, CHARON and SAN technologies offers an effective, compact, f
ast and low cost solution for any VAX/Alpha legacy hardware replacement. Read more about this concept in the CHARON user documentation or contact eNVy Systems, Inc. for more information.
Another example, a client replaced a VAX 4000 /512MB with a comparable Charon system configured over an HP/iSCSI SAN. Database backup (IO intensive) jobs which took 4 hours to complete now complete in 8 minutes.
Leverage the tools and capabilities when combining performance enhancing software/drivers, e.g. disk volume cache, non-volitile RAM disks. Charon technology provides miriad possiblities to scale down cost yet achive massive performance compared to other comparable platforms.
Please see the description (PDF) for more technical details about AlphaServer consolidation with CHARON-AXP, please register your interest at eNVy Systems, Inc.