What is CHARON-AXP-PLUS?
The CHARON-AXP family of products from Stromasys, including CHARON-AXP-PLUS, is an emulation layer between the Intel platform and a customer’s legacy OS and applications. It runs OpenVMS and Tru64 operating systems, layered products, and applications in their original binary form.
As emulation presents significant overhead (sometimes hundreds of x86/x64 instructions to emulate a sequence of just a few Alpha CPU instructions), it was always a challenge to achieve the performance level of the fastest physical Alpha systems manufactured by DEC in the 2000s and to satisfy our most demanding customers. Now Stromasys is releasing CHARON-AXP-PLUS to address high-end Alpha system replacement.
Technically CHARON-AXP-PLUS is a significantly redesigned and improved CHARON solution, which is much closer to the hosting hardware. The bare metal approach is aiming to exceed a physical AlphaServer ES45 with 1 GHz AXP CPUs—and to address the high end of the DEC AlphaServer family.
CHARON-AXP-PLUS differs from the regular CHARON-AXP family in the way it manages the hosting hardware resources. By providing the Guest Operating Systems (OpenVMS and Tru64) with direct access to hosting hardware Memory Management, Network, Disk I/O, and Fiber Channel peripherals, CHARON-AXP-PLUS significantly boosts the performance for the most demanding end users.
At this time, host server requirements are strict. The host hardware minimums are Intel v3 or v4 CPUs (3Ghz or faster) with chipsets supporting VT-x and VT-d Intel virtualization technologies and legacy (BIOS) boot options: NVMe (M.2 or PCIe form factor) flash storage (Intel 750 series is recommended), Broadcom 57xx-family network adapters, LSI 92xx or Megaraid SATA/SAS storage controllers, and Emulex Fiber Channel controllers up to 8Gbps.
CHARON-AXP-PLUS must, at this time, be serviced directly by Stromasys or by selected Stromasys Certified Partners – bcconnect.