In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, MAN Diesel used a small VAX cluster to support the information technology associated with engine design, maintenance, and record keeping. Properly maintained marine engines have a long life expectancy, often in excess of thirty years. One of many customers is the U.S. Navy. MAN Diesel periodically receives engines back from the Navy for repair and rebuild. The Navy contract requires that MAN Diesel maintain build and maintenance records for all engines purchased by the Navy while they remain in service. Over time, MAN Diesel has progressively updated its IT infrastructure. However, the VAX cluster, comprised of two VAX 4000’s and a VAX 3100 running OpenVMS 5.5-2, soldiered on. VAX hardware reliability and VMS O/S quality allowed the system to perform without requiring any special care.

The situation changed in early 2008 when the VAX disk drives started to fail. A wheel had finally squeaked, bringing the legacy system to the attention of IT management. While no longer critical, the applications on the VAX cluster were important and needed to be preserved. Since MAN Diesel no longer had VAX or VMS expertise on staff, an outside expert was sought.

After evaluating various possibilties Migration Specialties moved the VAX cluster to virtual VAXs on SIMH/Windows.

All of this was accomplished at a reasonable cost and in a short period of time. An essential legacy application and its associated data have been preserved and will continue to provide value to MAN Diesel for the foreseeable future.

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