Over at Stromays, the creators of the only PA-RISC virtualizing software for MPE/iX machines don't call what they do emulation. It's referred to as conversion. Using Charon converts hardware requirements from HP's 10-year-old PA-RISC boxes. The needs for MPE/iX become powerful Intel servers.

It might seem simple to see that and figure it will cost less to maintain MPE applications using Charon. A new calculator on the Stromasys site makes those numbers add up.

Even a simple calculation that has you paying no more than $650 a year for support can be a candidate for significant savings. A four-processor N-4000 probably won't have support that costs that little. But even if it did, the calculator says that a 3000 owner can save more than $52,000 by getting away from that old hardware. 

We're looking closer into the methodology that drives the calculator. At the moment it seems that the more you pay for maintenance, the lower the savings will be, so we'd like to know more about that.

An N-Class server can be bought for far less than the $52,000. So a 3000 manager might be tempted to reach for replacement N-Class HP hardware instead of virtualization. That's a solution which will work exactly once, though. When that hot-swap replacement HP gear fails, you're back to square one. You won't save on power or footprint, either, in that swapped in HP gear scenario. And there's the matter of finding another N-Class box.