In the 1980s and 1990s, most organizations chose minicomputers like DEC VAX and Alpha to run their business applications on VMS and OpenVMS. Across the UK, many organizations still rely on these legacy IT systems.
Though it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep these systems running, replacement hardware and skilled OpenVMS personnel are becoming scarcer every day; these organisations still have common objectives from these legacy systems:
Increased stability
Increased scalability and performance
Reduced risk while reducing data centre space, power needs and costs.
Continued to develop the systems
Organisations are also looking at increased service levels, therefore OpenVMS Disaster Recovery and OpenVMS Business Continuity are becoming more important.
We have all heard the horror stories of simple mistakes that lead to costly business disasters. It seems like every day on the news we hear about the next recall or outage that leads to the need for public relations to clean up the mess. More often than not, the damage is too great to overcome and the company that suffered the IT disaster can’t recover. Having an IT disaster recovery plan is a critical business need.
Planning for the unknown can be difficult, but having enough funds to implement an IT disaster recovery plan can seem close to impossible. But how unlikely is it that an IT disaster will happen to your company? With the combination of natural disasters, hardware failures and human error, the reality is that data loss is only a matter of when, not if.
According to a Small Business poll, man-made disasters affect 10 percent of all small businesses, and a staggering 30 percent have been impacted by natural disasters. A simple power outage could put your whole business at risk. In fact, research shows has shown that only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within two years.
Will your business survive?
Remember, you are only as strong as your weakest link.
Have you ever considered the cost of downtime on your legacy systems?
Lost production – cost per hour
Lost customers – value and trust
Loss of goodwill – repeated service loss
bcconnect has been integrating and modernising legacy OpenVMS systems for over 30 years and can help you reduce the costs and risks for your legacy systems.
Also, as part of these modernisations, bcconnect has been providing increased OpenVMS Disaster Recovery and OpenVMS Business Continuity.
During this period, bcconnect has been providing OpenVMS help and OpenVMS support, including help and assistance with OpenVMS core products, commonly designated as:
OpenVMS Cluster Software
Volume Shadowing for OpenVMS
RMS Journaling for OpenVMS
TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS, DECnet, DECnet-plus, DECnet phase IV, DECnet phase V
DECnet/OSI
DECram for OpenVMS
Layered Databases including Rdb
DIGITAL Command Language (DCL)
bcconnect support offerings vary from customer to customer due to the diverse nature of the legacy systems. A more specific example of this support follows which demonstrates the depth of our knowledge, follows:
Infrastructure Support
This includes 24×7 pro-active support, automated and online system checking/monitoring and day to day OpenVMS system management.
As well as remote management and automated monitoring, bcconnect will physically connect to each system on a daily basis (Monday to Friday excluding Bank Holidays) for the purposes of Device Error Analysis, System Uptime and Integrity Checks, Existence of System Specific Processes and Memory/Performance Management etc.
Our automated monitoring routines will collect system data and we will require sending this to our centralised servers at bcc for analysis. No specific customer data will be copied.
Application Support
This includes 24×7 pro-active support, automated and online system checking/monitoring and day to day application management.
We will create application specific monitoring routines which will be developed to maintain maximum uptime and reduced downtime by managing critical system processes and taking corrective action where possible.