Sometimes it happens that an organization is stuck with old software running on the Tru64 operating system on Alpha hardware. Usually such an organization suffers from some of the following problems.
- The hardware is old, the ownership costs and failure risks are high.
- The old software cannot easily be modified and extended
- The programmers with the skills in Tru64 and the programming language are hard to find
- The software cannot easily be integrated into the modern settings or cannot interchange data with modern software peers.
- The software performance cannot be increased, because it is running on slow old hardware.
Our virtual AlphaServer product AlphaVM-Pro can help solving some of the problems. It helps to get rid of the old hardware. In many cases the resulting system is faster than the original one.
However, the emulation does not fix the old software limitations. We have skills for porting and rewriting Tru64 applications to run on Windows or Linux. Please note that for porting projects the original software source code is required. Tru64 is a UNIX, which makes porting to Linux easier.
Porting or rewriting projects can take relatively long time to complete. AlphaVM-Pro still can be used as a temporary solution to get rid of the old hardware before the new software can be introduced.
The porting project complexity and costs depend on the following factors:
- The size of the software (in software code lines)
- The original and the target programming language.
- The target OS (Windows or Linux)
- Binding to some OS specific libraries like GUI (X-Windows) etc.
- Using low level features of the OS.
- Using the machine codes directly (in the form of assembler written code or on-the-fly generated code).
- Using some hardware devices via low-level OS interfaces.
- Using custom device drivers.
- The quality of the software code from the software development point of view.
Please contact us, if you have questions about porting or rewriting the software.