Charon Vax
From TSSwiki
When many of us think about the our current Student Information System (SIS, also known as Legacy SIS), we think of an application that hasn't seen much change since it was installed in the mid-1980's. Year after year, this old workhorse of an application has allowed us to register hundreds of thousands of students.
With each passing year, the demands that have been placed on the VAX computer hardware that runs SIS has grown drastically. In an effort to keep up with these increasing demands, Information Technology Services has upgraded the VAX several times. But, despite our continued efforts, we were fighting a losing battle.
Several years ago, we upgraded the VAX to a used VAX 7000 manufactured in 1993. While we realized some performance improvements with that upgrade, the experience for the users of the system was getting progressively worse, especially during peak registration. Further, since there were no remaining new spare parts available from the factory, hardware failures were common and increasingly frequent. These hardware failures could cause anywhere from 45 minutes of downtime to nearly 12 hours in one case.
Hardware failures leading to downtime on any computer system is bad. But since the VAX is responsible for running our most critical institutional application, SIS, downtime meant that students couldn't register or pay for classes while we scrambled to repair the failed hardware.
The ITS Department realized that something needed to be done to prevent further failures.
We went looking for a solution that would allow us to increase the reliability of the VAX and allow us to provide the best possible performance to the SIS application. That's when we found the CHARON VAX emulator. This software application allows us to copy our VAX 7000 to a modern HP server running Windows Server 2003. The HP server hardware provides superior performance and reliability than any used VAX we could've purchased.
After a lengthy process of obtaining funding from District-wide bond monies, the new system was installed on Sunday, February 18 with less than 48 hours of SIS down time.
Since that day, ITS has seen performance improvements that are nothing short of remarkable. In fact, things are going so quickly, it has allowed us to keep the SIS application available for 20 additional hours per week. This means that students can continue to register on-line until midnight Monday - Friday, even when our campuses are closed.
