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December 07, 2012

Attempt at migration preceded emulation

At the newest HPA/3000 Charon emulation site, IT manager Warren Dawson said the decision to keep MPE/iX running was not the first choice for his company in Australia.  Migration was a prospective strategy at the organization, but it didn’t pan out for the application. 

“We were rewriting our software in a VB and .NET version, but in the end it turned out to be taking too long and being too costly,” Dawson said. “ In the meantime we’d tied down the migration of the databases into SQL databases, so that was already running smoothly.  Now they use those databases for other applications.  We’ve done that migration, but our main system is still the TurboIMAGE/SQL system."  A nightly extract through Minisoft's ODBC drivers creates a mirrored version of the database in SQL Server. 

Even while the company has eliminated the risk of hardware failures, the challenge of finding replacements for its 3000-savvy talents remains the same. “ COBOL programmers here are few and far between,” Dawson said. “ In terms of my own job security, it’s cemented that somewhat — great for me, but from the company’s point of view it’s an issue.  It will be an issue to get someone to replace the skills in COBOL, because that’s what we mainly use." 

The parent company of Dawson’s firm has been talking about an adoption of the corporate system, “but that’s at least five years away.  So even with a 947 with failing hardware, it was still well worth going with the emulator.” 

By making the HPA/3000 solution a keystone in the company, Dawson feels like he’s retained the best part of the 3000 computing experience. “ I’ve found that it’s not the hardware that I liked, it’s the operating system.” 

Crucial to the process was the support from the creators of the Charon HPA/3000. “ I’ve been very pleased with Stromasys themselves, because any issue I raised, they fixed it as fast as they could,” he said. “ I was unaware that any of my issues had already been raised, because the way they treated me was that anything I said was important to them, even if they’d heard it before.  Not saying they’d already heard it, but saying, 'Tell me about this, and let’s go through it.' ” 

"The biggest issue I had which I was asking them about was the security key that’s got to be connected into the host PC.  We were planning disaster recovery, but we didn’t have a key to replace that one.  They said they’d give us a temporary key we could use for a number of hours.  So they’d already addressed that possibility." 

Support issues with timezone differences haven’t presented a problem.  One key Stromasys engineer bridges the gap between Australia’s workday and the one in the US headquaters, Dawson said.  The Stromasys labs include operations in Moscow as well as North Carolina. 

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Attempt at migration preceded emulation

At the newest HPA/3000 Charon emulation site, IT manager Warren Dawson said the decision to keep MPE/iX running was not the first choice for his company in Australia.  Migration was a prospective strategy at the organization, but it didn’t pan out for the application. 

“We were rewriting our software in a VB and .NET version, but in the end it turned out to be taking too long and being too costly,” Dawson said. “ In the meantime we’d tied down the migration of the databases into SQL databases, so that was already running smoothly.  Now they use those databases for other applications.  We’ve done that migration, but our main system is still the TurboIMAGE/SQL system."  A nightly extract through Minisoft's ODBC drivers creates a mirrored version of the database in SQL Server. 

Even while the company has eliminated the risk of hardware failures, the challenge of finding replacements for its 3000-savvy talents remains the same. “ COBOL programmers here are few and far between,” Dawson said. “ In terms of my own job security, it’s cemented that somewhat — great for me, but from the company’s point of view it’s an issue.  It will be an issue to get someone to replace the skills in COBOL, because that’s what we mainly use."