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Situation 01 / 08 — Platform risk

Hardware end of life

The last spare came off a reseller site, or out of a machine that was already sitting idle.

A machine that has run without breaking down for twenty years is not a maintenance problem until the day it is. Salem is usually called when the spares inventory is down to its last unit, the original manufacturer no longer exists, and the application running on that hardware still controls production.

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Sound familiar

  • Replacement parts come from the secondary market or get pulled from idle equipment on site
  • A single hardware failure would stop shipping, production, or billing
  • The maintenance contract was dropped years ago, or the provider stopped renewing it
  • Nobody is willing to power the system down, because nobody is sure it comes back up

How Salem approaches it

01

Establish what the hardware is actually carrying

Before recommending anything, Salem engineers document the applications, interfaces, and batch processes running on the machine. In most cases the system does more than the current team believes it does, and that inventory determines which options are real.

02

Remove the immediate failure risk

Depending on what the assessment finds, that means emulation on modern x86 hardware, a refurbished platform as a bridge, or a direct migration. Salem has no product to defend, so the recommendation follows the assessment rather than the other way around.

03

Set the modernization path once production is safe

With the hardware risk contained, replacing or replatforming the application becomes a planned project with a budget cycle attached, not an emergency response to a failure.

Related services

Platform migration

Modern application support

Legacy hardware assessment

How long can the current hardware last?

Most companies underestimate this by about two years.

Send Salem the model, the workload, and what is left in the spares cabinet. You will get an honest answer about the runway, whether or not it leads to a project.
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Oracle Rdb on OpenVMS: Three Paths Forward

Join us on Wednesday, October 7, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM for a practical webinar exploring three paths forward for Oracle Rdb and OpenVMS environments.

Salem Automation, PARSEC Group, and CONNX will cover emulation, bridging Rdb data into modern business processes, and migrating the database and supporting functionality to a new platform.

Discover how to modernize while reducing migration risk and keeping critical legacy systems supported.

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