North Carolina’s Buncombe County IT Department Utilizing Emulation Software

During the Summer of 2008, Brian Dillingham, Buncombe County IT Director decided that an upgrade or replacement was needed for their current DEC AlphaServer 4100 5/533 (1 CPU) computer located in Asheville, NC. The County had used this machine for over 10 years, but now the concerns over increasing maintenance costs and decreasing parts availability required action. Brian started his investigation and came upon Salem Automation’s web site, http://www.winvms.com/.

His request for information was responded to by Chuck Graham, one of Salem’s principals and VP of Sales. Based upon their discussions, Brian agreed to fill out the Customer Information Form and to run the listed SHO commands that would provide information as to disk sizes, memory utilization, VMS version, etc. With Buncombe IT’s completed information, Salem Automation prepared a proposal and submitted it to Brian, who then submitted it to the County Commissioners. Based on the costs and minimal operational impact, a purchase order was issued, and the installation was scheduled for December 08, 2008, about 60 days from Brian’s initial discussions with Salem.

Greg Snider, Salem Automation’s Emulation Installation guru, arrived on site on December 8, 2008 and started the three-day installation/cutover process. There was one “wrinkle” to this installation. Emulation software is normally installed on HP workstation or servers. Buncombe County needed the installation to utilize their existing IBM (?) blade server configuration. “There were a couple of extra steps,” said Greg, “But the Emulation Software was successfully installed without major deviations from our regular setup.” The installation was completed December 10, 2008, within 48 hours of Greg arriving on site. The additional time was used to training IT personnel and to address specific questions related to Emulation.

“The Emulation System has performed beyond our expectations,” Brain recently reported. “Our system has not had a single minute of downtime since Greg left. We are very happy with Emulation and with Salem Automation!”

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