The Challenges of Running on Old Hardware

Running on old hardware is an immanent risk of keeping access to your application and data. Compare this to driving a 50-year-old car. Hard to get support or spare parts. Only willingness to spend a lot of money and time is the solution. Relevant for the car and the IT infrastructure, whereby later does not have to be 50 years old to cause those issues.

Real-Life Examples of Aging Systems

We have heard it so many times during the projects we worked on in the past:

1. “Please be careful during data export, if the system hangs, we do not know, if we can start it again”

2. “Please be careful, the backup system does not work anymore, and we do not find anyone to fix it”

3. “This is so old and fragile; we will have a party once it is gone, and we do not have to worry anymore”

4. “E-Bay is the best source for spare parts for this system”

Those and similar concerns were raised when we came in to archive the data from post-productive applications with the aim to enable the shutdown of those. While the approach to get rid of those applications (just keeping the data) was the first step, the risk of keeping old applications on old infrastructure (in most cases even older) is huge.

Same as software, IT infrastructure components must be maintained and updated over time as well. Another similarity is that hardware also becomes “out of maintenance”. This in combination that old software / applications only runs on certain (old) IT infrastructure causes a vicious cycle.

The huge risks, besides the know one´s like security issues, support and spare parts, derive from exactly the dependency of software and hardware. Once the point is reached that the application can not be moved to a modern infrastructure stack (due to compatibility starting on OS level) some kind of deadlock kicks in. At this point in time the only chance is to upgrade the application to run it on up to date IT infrastructure. In this instance, imagine upgrading a SAP 4.6 c system to an ECC 6.0 EHP or soon a S/4 Hana. A fairly high price to pay for a system that is not in operational use anymore and the only reason it is kept, is to have access to the data.

Of course another alternative is to freeze the system and move it into a VM. Is that the final answer though? Think about GDPR and potential request of data that needs to be deleted. More on this in another article.

Breaking the Software-Hardware Deadlock

Separating application and data is a solution that helps to avoid ending in this kind of deadlock. Using an archiving / historization (to differentiate form archiving of data from a productive system) solution that enables that, is the easiest, most secure and cheapest way out.