Case Study: ABB achieves extended life for power-plant control systems with Stromasys CHARON-VAX

ABB Minden counts on CHARON-VAX: Long Life for Power Plant Control Technology

ABB Minden, a division of ABB that designs and maintains control and communication systems for power plants, faced a major challenge: decades-old VAX-11/750 systems running OpenVMS hosted critical engineering and automation software that could not be outsourced, yet consumed excessive space, power and maintenance as the data center was restructured in 2007. With hardware failures increasing and no path to refresh the proprietary VAX hardware after vendor changes, the team needed a way to preserve their legacy applications and data on modern infrastructure.

ABB worked with Invenate to deploy Stromasys CHARON‑VAX virtualization, validating the migration in 2008–2009 and running production on x86 hardware. The virtualized environment runs the original applications unchanged with equal or better performance, allowing ABB to shut down the old VAX hardware, cut power and space requirements, and continue using their bespoke software and databases while simplifying future maintenance.

ABB

Horst Kruckemeier

System integration, IT Support, and Logistics, ABB AG-Division Energietechnik-Systeme