Powerhouse customer inquires on emulator
January 20, 2015
One mission for the Stromasys emulator for HP 3000s is carrying forward legacy applications and systems. In fact, that's the primary reason for making the investment into the Charon-HPA version of the software. Some other companies are using the product to keep an MPE/iX suite alive while they are migrating.
There must be HP 3000 sites that want to move Powerhouse from their HP-built servers to the more modern hardware that drives Charon. Some manufacturing sites would like to do this with as little fanfare as possible. Notice of changing host hardware is optional, for some managers. Nobody in the 3000 community, or in the offices of the new Powerhouse owners Unicom Systems, has checked in with a report of running Powerhouse on Charon.
There is a additional interest for this combination, however. It's on the Digital side of the Charon product lineup.
Steven Philbin at FM Global was inquiring about whether Powerhouse code is compiled or interpreted. In a message on the Powerhouse mailing list, Philbin reached out to find "anyone out there working on a Virtual Stromasys Charon/SMA solution on systems written in Powerhouse."
"We are using Oracle/RDB, VMS, and Powerhouse v7.10 running on an Alpha ES40. Contact points with other users would be really helpful."
MANMAN already has Digital Alpha users who employ the Charon product. Some of the most robust recommendations for the emulator have come out of the Digital community. A CAMUS user group conference call meeting in 2013 included reports from Tim Peer of Envy Systems about Digital MANMAN users running VMS on Charon. The customers were happy with performance and compatibility.
Permission and licensing from such big-scale software providers has been the wild card in the Charon story for MPE/iX. Stromasys has been selling its emulator, but reports of such products running on Charon have not emerged.
One year ago this month, Unicom Systems announced its acquisition of Powerhouse and related products from the Cognos-IBM stable. FM Global is an insurance and services provider, not a manufacturer. The last public event for Powerhouse hosted by Unicom was a re-launch of the Powerhouse user group, along with a customer advisory board meeting, in late June.