How a Fan Can Become a Migration Tool
June 17, 2014
We heard this story today in your community, but we'll withhold the names to protect the innocent. A Series 948 server had a problem, one that was keeping it offline. It was a hardware problem, one on a server that was providing archival lookups. The MPE application had been migrated to a Windows app five years ago. But those archives, well, they often just seem to be easier to look up from the original 3000 system.
There might be some good reasons to keep an archival 3000 running. Regulatory issues come to mind first. Auditors might need original equipment paired with historic data. There could be budget issues, but we'll get to that in a moment.
The problem with that Series 948: it was overheating. And since it was a server of more than 17 years of service, repairing it required a hardware veteran. Plus parts. All of which is available, but "feet on the street" in the server's location, that can be a challenge. (At this point a handful of service providers are wondering where this prospective repair site might be. The enterprising ones will call.)
But remember this is an archival 3000. Budget, hah. This would be the time to find a fan to point at that overheating 17-year-old system. That could be the first step in a data migration, low-tech as it might seem.
Moving data off an archival server is one of the very last steps in decommissioning. If you've got a packaged application, there are experts in your app out there -- all the big ones, like Ecometry, MANMAN, Amisys -- that can help export that data for you. And you might get lucky and find that's a very modest budget item. You can also seek out data migration expertise, another good route.
But putting more money into a replacement Hewlett-Packard-branded 3000 this year might be a little too conservative. It depends on how old the 3000 system is, and what the hardware problem would be. If not a fan, then maybe a vacuum cleaner or shop vac could lower the temperature of the server, with a good clean-out. Funk inside the cabinet is common, we've seen.
Overheating old equipment could be a trigger to get the last set of archives into a SQL Server database, for example, one designated only for that. Heading to a more modern piece of hardware might have led you into another kind of migration, towards the emulator, sure. But if your mission-critical app is already migrated, the fan and SQL Server -- plus testing the migrated data, of course -- might be the gateway to an MPE-free operation, including your archives.