Going Green with CHARON-VAX

WorkflowOne Saves Both Energy and Money

The Problem

WorkflowOne in Dayton, Ohio needed to add more servers to their data center. But their data center UPS was at 95% of capacity.

The Old Hardware

After research, they discovered that their old VAX systems were drawing most of the power. They had a 3-CPU VAX 7630 and a 5-CPU VAX 7850 in a clustered configuration. And about 800 GB of data, in ancient disk drives.

The Solution

Via email and phone, Quayle Consulting supported Mark Gillespie and John Moore of WorkflowOne during a proof-of-concept that showed that CHARON-VAX could replace their entire VAX cluster.

CHARON-VAX is a VAX emulator that runs on a Windows system. The operating system (VMS), application and data were moved to the emulated system. Since the system emulates a VAX completely, right down to the hardware, no changes were required to the application or data. The part that took longest was copying the data itself.

Stanley Quayle of Quayle Consulting then came on-site to support the production cutover to the CHARON-VAX system. A few minor issues were encountered and overcome. The emulated VAX was on-line!

The New Hardware

WorkflowOne selected a HP Proliant server and external disk array, pictured here. The server is running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003.

The Result

Some numbers captured by the client:

Metric	Old VAXes	CHARON-VAX
Annual Maintenance costs	$110,000+	$12,000
Power consumption	9,360 watts	600 watts
Heat dissipation	31,937 BTU/h	2,038 BTU/h
Footprint	48 square feet	4 rack units (9 inches)

The performance of the CHARON-VAX system was also faster:

Metric	Old VAXes	CHARON-VAX
Full backup time	12 hours 33 minutes	1 hour 41 minutes
End of month sales processing	8 hours 33 minutes	1 hour 8 minutes

Mark Gillespie's email to senior management says it all:

Here’s some good news about the VAX migration. We figured our annual savings on the maintenance contract alone would be in the 100K range. This does not include the savings from electrical power or lower A/C use.

I just redid the contract with Hewlett Packard, keeping the two remaining systems for Development and OMNI, as well as the Right to Use license for the new emulated VAX.

Annual cost before taking out migrated VAX equipment: $120,178.34
Annual cost with the equipment we have now: $14,787.84
Annual cost avoided: $105,380.50

This is about a 1-year payback after considering the CHARON-VAX licenses, new hardware, and installation services!

Epilogue

WorkflowOne has since purchased a second CHARON-VAX key. In the event of a disaster, they can recover almost anywhere, not just where a VAX might be available.

Download the "case study" based on this experience in PDF format.

For more information on CHARON-VAX and how it might work for you, contact Quayle Consulting. Note: We protect your privacy -- you will not be added to a mailing list. Check out our plain-language privacy policy.

Services

Quayle Consulting Inc. provides a complete menu of services, including:

VAX migration and replacement using virtualization technology
Alpha migration and replacement using virtualization technology
Software design, development and maintenance,including porting to Alpha and Itanium OpenVMS
PDP-11 migation and replacement using virtualization technology
System Administration for platforms including VMS and Linux
Data Conversion to open formats
Software Development
Network design and support

Other items of interest:

The company blog
Details on hooking up equipment, including MMJ connectors
Sales and technical support for the DOS Buttons product, which has flown on the Space Shuttle
News and whitepapers about Quayle Consulting and VMS

The Quayle Consulting Inc. website

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Trademarks

OpenVMS is a trademark of Hewlett-Packard.
CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP are trademarks of Stromasys. Quayle Consulting Inc. is an authorized reseller of CHARON products.
NuVAX is a trademark of The Logical Company.
Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation, USA.