Migrating your VAX or Alpha system to a virtualised solution typically costs 30% - 50% less than your current annual support contract. Once migrated, your old VAX support contract can be replaced with an inexpensive PC server contract. It may even be covered by your existing PC support contract.
Other cost benefits are achieved through reduced power consumption and air conditioning requirements.
With virtualisation, the reliability of your VAX applications no longer depends on old VAX hardware. You can take full advantage of the redundancy and fault-tolerance features available within modern PC server architecture, building up the reliability as needed.
Features such as HSC clusters can be replaced by two striped RAID 5 sets (RAID 50). These include 2 hot-standby drives and can withstand up to 4 faulty disks without failing. In the event of a faulty drive, the unit automatically rebuilds the RAID set on the fly and informs you by email. The arrays also implement automatic load balancing and are expanded up to 128Tb without incurring any downtime. With current networking speeds, individual disks or clusters can be located anywhere on the network, taking advantage of your existing network architecture.
Migrating your VAX system results in performance benefits to both your applications and your staff. Operations such as backing up or rebooting can now happen in a fraction of the time and your staff spend less time sourcing replacements for old, problematic hardware.
The superior performance of current PC server hardware means that even with the virtualisation overhead, your new VAX system can run between five and ten times faster than the original VAX. These systems are reliably supporting organisations with over 800 concurrent users without any negative impact on performance.
Traditional VAX hardware is bulky, noisy and power-hungry. By comparison, a virtualised VAX solution can easily fit into your existing server room or rack with less demands on power, air conditioning or ear drums! As to what you do with the reclaimed floor space, well, that’s up to you.
£10 million and 4 years: that was the minimum estimated cost to replace one company's Vax systems. Swiftbase completed the task in a matter of months and saved the company over £9.5 Million.
Since the release of the Alpha migration tools last year we are now ramping up to do the same for Alpha users as we have for VAX users.
We have already an installed base of 60 Alpha systems - not bad in just 8 months. But this is just the start. Apart from the cost savings as with the VAX you are released from proprietary hardware once and for all time.
Swiftbase has now 500+ installed systems without a single migration failure. With locations ranging from China to South America and organisations as diverse as supermarkets to Nimrod defence systems, this sets it up as the most successful global cross-industry migrator of VAX and Alpha systems to PC.