Shipping Out A Legacy System

摘要

Virginia international Termi-nals Inc. knows that to stay competitive in shipping, change is as constant as the tides. That's why the marine-port and trucking-terminal operator has for the past year been preparing to move critical transaction-processing systems from a server platform on the verge of obsolescence to one better suited to manage the swelling tide of data flowing through the company daily. A year ago, Virginia International learned that Hewlett-Packard was preparing to close the book on its once-popular e3000 server line and was encouraging customers to migrate to HP 9000 servers running either HP-UX Unix or Linux. This was a daunting task for Virginia International, which has been running its mission-critical online transaction-processing system on e3000 servers for nearly two decades. HP's announcement that it will stop selling the e3000 in November and stop supporting the product after 2006 "sent a shock wave through our organization," Clark Farabaugh, Virginia International's assistant IT director, said a year ago when informed of the vendor's decision.