The parts of a legacy IT shop most likely to fail are the moving parts. Old servers usually run off old disk drives. Some of the drives in the HP and Digital legacy shops hail from the 1990s. It’s as if the trouble coming with the hardware is on the move, heading on a direct course to a loss of service.

Beechglen Development has a solution that steps between a legacy server and the applications’ need for data. The BGDSAN creates a storage area network’s individual drives using a network link to a customer’s on-premise legacy server.

Virtual arrays were state-of-the-art storage solutions 20 years ago. Plenty of these VA devices still serve legacy iron. Beechglen says its “managed Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) solution is typically comparable in cost to your existing hardware support contract.”

In one interesting wrinkle, Beechglen says it builds its BGDSAN units exclusively from HP hardware. Some of the customized configurations for this STaaS solution can include SSD units. Repairing VA arrays like the VA7410 requires parts that are not new or refurbished. “These are just used drives that have not failed yet,” the company says.

HP’s other array solution for HP 3000 and HP 9000 systems is the XP line. Both VA and XP arrays require costly hardware support compared to the BGDSAN.

Ready to restart

Then there is the ability to restart devices after a shutdown.

“Many disks will continue spinning forever – provided they never stop spinning,” Beechglen says. “Over the years we’ve seen countless disks powered down for planned maintenance that don’t spin back up. The bearings cool off and seize the motor. Or the bearings are warped from years of running hot resulting in disks that just cannot come back to operational speed after a complete stoppage.”

Remote computing is the default today for modern IT architecture. Azure Cloud services deliver virtualization servers. The scope of off-premise computing is virtually complete. If there is a spinning disk in a legacy IT shop, it’s as classic as a terminal attached via cables.

HP-labeled hardware is always going to have a terminus, because they’re not building 3000s anymore. The peripherals will see their finale, too. It could well turn out that the Charon emulation solution will be the only data route that runs into the end of the 2020s, and maybe beyond. They keep making faster Intel hardware.