CHARON-TB PDP Emulation on a Windows PC

CHARON-TB is designed to extend the life of PDP RSX applications by moving them to a new server style PC hardware platform without any conversion effort. Adoption of this strategy has many benefits:

  CHARON-11 PDP Emulation on a Windows PC
   
CHARON-TB Product Description:
   
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CHARON_Sales@SalemAutomation.com
   
  • Reduced Risk – HP is not renewing PDP support on some systems in some areas leaving the customer to fend for themselves for parts and maintenance services. By eliminating your ageing PDP hardware and replacing it with modern, readily available PC server style computer and CHARON-TB platform you eliminate the risk a PDP disk or tape will wear out bringing your system to a grinding halt with no spare to be found. Such a failure could be a career-ending or company-ending event.


  • Reduced Cost – A total turnkey CHARON-TB from Salem Automation including migration services, PC hardware, 3-year hardware maintenance contract, software licenses, software maintenance and onsite installation can normally be paid back in 6 to 18 months by eliminating the PDP maintenance contract.


  • Avoid Cost – Implementing a CHARON-TB emulator, you avoid having to evaluate a new software package, decide upon new software, purchase new software, customize it for your organization, retrain everyone, re-document everything, go through an unspecified amount of downtime and enjoy the risk that the new system may not work as good as the old, PDP system. With CHARON-TB emulation you issue a purchase order to Salem Automation and in as little as 3 weeks we arrive onsite with the new system. We move one cable over to the new system and test it for functionality. Your old system remains in place should you want to fall back to it. The users of the new CHARON-TB emulator system will only be aware the system seems to be running faster.


  • Speed Up Your System – The new computer system for CHARON-TB will have disks 5 to 20 times faster – meaning your data gets to your users that much faster. Boot times are a fraction of their earlier times. Compile times have gone down substantially. Some CHARON-TB licenses can be up to 20 times faster than your existing PDP system. This improved performance can allow you to add more users on the system without speed degradation. The CHARON-TB emulation is the fastest PDP computer ever made!


  • Store More Data – The CHARON-TB emulator allows you to increase your disk space on your PDP by a 10,000 fold using modern 15,000 RPM SCSI disks. Not only are these disks faster they can be setup in a RAID 5 redundant configuration, mirrored or shared between a backup system.


  • Standard Hardware & Software – The CHARON-TB emulator uses off-the-shelf standard PC hardware and Microsoft Windows Operating Systems. No proprietary hardware or software to maintain!


  • RAID Drives on a PDP?! – CHARON-TB emulation allows you to use PC computers with RAID 5 drive systems. This was not possible with even the last PDP systems manufactured. You can also use Windows disk Mirroring on your host system. If you are using shadowing in RSX on your existing PDP this will work on the new CHARON-TB emulator and you can even have each disk container file that is being shadowed located on a separate physical drives in your PC system.


  • Use Windows tools to Backup Your PDP – Because CHARON-TB uses disk container files, you can use Windows tools to backup the entire PDP disk as a single file. If shadowing is used, backups can be done online without interrupting the emulated PDP’s operations. As you can imagine this allows your backups to proceed very fast. You can also continue to do local tape backups under the CHARON-TB emulation by assigning your PC’s tape drive to the emulated PDP and use RSX commands to backup your disks. Obviously you can do a complete image backup of your system just as you would with any Windows system.


  • Ease RSX Operating System Upgrades – Once upgraded to the CHARON-TB emulator you can more easily upgrade your RSX operating system to a more current version. Once the CD on your PC system is assigned to the PDP emulation, you can then load the new operating system version. If there are any problems and you need to fall back, no problem, you made a backup of the container file before you got started! You merely move your backup to the appropriate directory and restart CHARON-TB, it will come up as before. At a later date you can re-try the update.


  • Make All Your Old Tape Backups Available Online – Once upgraded to CHARON-TB emulation, you can move all of your old tape backups over to container files on your system. This means you can finally throw out all of your old PDP tapes (or floppies or removable disk packs!). These container files can be configured to be available online or you can configure them into the system as needed.


  • CHARON-TB is Compatible with Old Versions of RSX – CHARON-TB has been tested with most PDP operating systems including RSX-11M+,RSX-11M, IAS, RT-11 and UNIX 7.


  • CHARON-TB Supports Old Q-BUS & UNI-BUS Peripherals – The CHARON-TB emulator supports old Q-BUS peripherals via an interconnect cable and PCI board to an old Q-BUS/UNI-BUS chassis. Alternatively, PCI boards are available that emulate many of the old Q-BUS / UNI-BUS cards to allow complete elimination of the old hardware.


  • Moving Serial Devices from PDP-11 to a PC – Existing serial ports on a PDP system can be mapped to a multi-port serial card on a PC under the CHARON-TB emulator to allow easy switchover to the new system without changing any of your RSX configurations.


  • Emulate PDP CPU – The CHARON-TB emulation product will emulate any of the 27 PDP CPUs produced.