Stay organized with collectionsSave and categorize content based on your preferences.
UNITEC Modernizes SPARC servers by migrating Solaris apps to Charon-SSP on Google Cloud in 24 days
About Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC)
Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC), one of two private universities under Laureate International Universities, offers high school, bachelor, and postgraduate programs on 10 campuses in Mexico City and in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, and Querétaro, as well as online. With more than 90,000 students, it is the largest private university in the region.
UNITEC is poised to increase its application footprint on Google Cloud, while enhancing focus on overall business expansion, exceeding expectations, and meeting an aggressive timeline.
Google Cloud results
Infinite scalability on demand
Zero negative impact on end-user experience and application performance
24 days to migrate eight servers, 22 zones, 25 TB of data from SPARC servers to Google Cloud
Eight SPARC servers with 22 zones migrated in 24 days
Universidad Tecnológica de México(UNITEC) is one of the post-secondary education learning institutions under the Laureate Education, Inc., umbrella of Laureate International Universities. The CIO of UNITEC decided it was time to modernize the university's IT infrastructure and that the most efficient way to do this was to migrate all IT workloads toGoogle Cloud, thereby exiting their data center.
"Given the time-crunch situation we were in, the Stromasys and Google Cloud teams stepped up and migrated all the servers, applications, and data in the promised time. I couldn't have been more proud of the team."
—Ivan Alonso, CIO, IT Services, Laureate International Universities
The date was set, but one major obstacle to a complete data center exit needed solving. What about the mission-critical Solaris applications running on proprietary SPARC systems? No such hardware exists in any cloud. UNITEC had eight SPARC T5-2 server LDOMs with each hosting several Solaris zones running Solaris OS versions 8 through 11.
The Google team recommended Google Cloud Technology PartnerStromasysand its elegant solution, Charon-SSP (software that emulates legacy SPARC systems).
The customer took full advantage of Charon-SSP's SPARC system virtualization to move the legacy applications to Google Cloud, with no change to the applications or operating systems. The project was completed in twenty-four days. "Given the time-crunch situation we were in, Stromasys and the Google Cloud team stepped up and migrated all the servers, applications, and data in the promised time. I couldn't have been more proud of the team," said the CIO, IT Services at Laureate.
How the legacy systems were migrated to Google Cloud
Laureate was running a SPARC T5-2 server ( 512 RAM | 32 Cores) to host their application servers, whereas the database back end was in an on-premises VMware cluster. The SPARC system had eight LDOMs, each with around 3-10 zones running Solaris OS versions 8-11.
The databases running on their on-premises VMware clusters were easily migrated toGoogle Cloud VMware Engine, which is Google's fully managed VMware service. Then they were able to quickly spin up three custom VM instances running RHEL OS on Google Cloud with the specific number of RAM and CPU that was required. The Stromasys team then installed the Charon-SSP emulation on top of the RHEL VMs as hypervisors so that the LDOMs can be created and the data migrated over a low-latency dedicated interconnect connected from Laureate to Google data centers.
The benefits of running on Google Cloud
The legacy application now running on Google Cloud not only gets a new lease on life, but can now take advantage of options and new capabilities. The benefits of Charon cross-platform virtualization of legacy SPARC, DEC, and PA-RISC systems on Google Cloud:
Risks of a legacy workload failure are mitigated (legacy hardware is gone)
Costs are optimized with Google Cloud pay-as-you-go consumption model
Google Cloud CPU fast-clock speeds deliver enhanced performance for applications
Organizations can now include legacy systems in their Google Cloud mass migration plans
No application recertification and end-user retraining is required (it is the same application)
System capacity becomes flexible with possible adjustments in minutes
New Google Cloud high-availability schemes and disaster/recovery best practices become available
Charon on Google Cloud supported by technology partner Stromasys
Stromasys offers product support for Charon on Google Cloud during business hours or 24/7 for all emulators worldwide. Support typically applies to the Charon emulator software itself. Stromasys can also offer operating system support such as support for OpenVMS 7.3 and earlier.
Stromasys is a Google Technology Partner that addresses the data center modernization needs of customers by allowing the movement of legacy system applications and data to x86 infrastructure without changing any legacy code or data.
Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC), one of two private universities under Laureate International Universities, offers high school, bachelor, and postgraduate programs on 10 campuses in Mexico City and in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, and Querétaro, as well as online. With more than 90,000 students, it is the largest private university in the region.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["\u003cp\u003eUNITEC successfully migrated its mission-critical Solaris applications from SPARC servers to Google Cloud using Charon-SSP, a virtualization solution, in just 24 days.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eThe migration involved eight SPARC servers, 22 zones, and 25 TB of data, and it was done without any negative impact on the application performance or user experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eBy using the Stromasys Charon-SSP emulator, UNITEC could maintain its legacy applications without any changes to the existing code or data, and it also eliminated the risk of hardware failure.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eUNITEC was able to easily migrate their on-premise databases to Google Cloud VMware Engine, while also gaining advantages such as infinite scalability, and cost optimization from Google Cloud's pay-as-you-go model.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eStromasys, a Google Technology Partner, provided support for the Charon emulator and assisted in the migration process, enabling UNITEC to complete the project within the given time frame.\u003c/p\u003e\n"]]],[],null,["UNITEC Modernizes SPARC servers by migrating Solaris apps to Charon-SSP on Google Cloud in 24 days\n\nAbout Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC)\n\n\nUniversidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC), one of two private universities under Laureate International Universities, offers high school, bachelor, and postgraduate programs on 10 campuses in Mexico City and in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, and Querétaro, as well as online. With more than 90,000 students, it is the largest private university in the region. \nIndustries: Education \nLocation: Mexico \nProducts: [Google Cloud](https://cloud.google.com/), [Compute Engine](https://cloud.google.com/compute/), [Google Cloud VMware Engine](https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine) \n\nTell us your challenge. We're here to help.[Contact us](/contact)\n\nUNITEC is poised to increase its application footprint on Google Cloud, while enhancing focus on overall business expansion, exceeding expectations, and meeting an aggressive timeline. \n\nGoogle Cloud results\n\n- Infinite scalability on demand\n- Zero negative impact on end-user experience and application performance\n- 24 days to migrate eight servers, 22 zones, 25 TB of data from SPARC servers to Google Cloud \n\nEight SPARC servers with 22 zones migrated in 24 days \n\n[Universidad Tecnológica de México](https://www.unitec.mx/) (UNITEC) is one of the post-secondary education learning institutions under the Laureate Education, Inc., umbrella of Laureate International Universities. The CIO of UNITEC decided it was time to modernize the university's IT infrastructure and that the most efficient way to do this was to migrate all IT workloads to [Google Cloud](https://cloud.google.com/), thereby exiting their data center. \n\n\"Given the time-crunch situation we were in, the Stromasys and Google Cloud teams stepped up and migrated all the servers, applications, and data in the promised time. I couldn't have been more proud of the team.\"\n---*Ivan Alonso, CIO, IT Services, Laureate International Universities* \n\nThe date was set, but one major obstacle to a complete data center exit needed solving. What about the mission-critical Solaris applications running on proprietary SPARC systems? No such hardware exists in any cloud. UNITEC had eight SPARC T5-2 server LDOMs with each hosting several Solaris zones running Solaris OS versions 8 through 11.\n\n\nThe Google team recommended Google Cloud Technology Partner [Stromasys](https://www.stromasys.com/) and its elegant solution, Charon-SSP (software that emulates legacy SPARC systems).\n\n\nThe customer took full advantage of Charon-SSP's SPARC system virtualization to move the legacy applications to Google Cloud, with no change to the applications or operating systems. The project was completed in twenty-four days. \"Given the time-crunch situation we were in, Stromasys and the Google Cloud team stepped up and migrated all the servers, applications, and data in the promised time. I couldn't have been more proud of the team,\" said the CIO, IT Services at Laureate.\n\nHow the legacy systems were migrated to Google Cloud\n\n\nLaureate was running a SPARC T5-2 server ( 512 RAM \\| 32 Cores) to host their application servers, whereas the database back end was in an on-premises VMware cluster. The SPARC system had eight LDOMs, each with around 3-10 zones running Solaris OS versions 8-11. \n\nThe databases running on their on-premises VMware clusters were easily migrated to [Google Cloud VMware Engine](https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine), which is Google's fully managed VMware service. Then they were able to quickly spin up three custom VM instances running RHEL OS on Google Cloud with the specific number of RAM and CPU that was required. The Stromasys team then installed the Charon-SSP emulation on top of the RHEL VMs as hypervisors so that the LDOMs can be created and the data migrated over a low-latency dedicated interconnect connected from Laureate to Google data centers.\n\nThe benefits of running on Google Cloud\n\n\nThe legacy application now running on Google Cloud not only gets a new lease on life, but can now take advantage of options and new capabilities. The benefits of Charon cross-platform virtualization of legacy SPARC, DEC, and PA-RISC systems on Google Cloud: \n- Risks of a legacy workload failure are mitigated (legacy hardware is gone)\n- Costs are optimized with Google Cloud pay-as-you-go consumption model\n- Google Cloud CPU fast-clock speeds deliver enhanced performance for applications\n- Organizations can now include legacy systems in their Google Cloud mass migration plans\n- No application recertification and end-user retraining is required (it is the same application)\n- System capacity becomes flexible with possible adjustments in minutes\n- New Google Cloud high-availability schemes and disaster/recovery best practices become available\n\nCharon on Google Cloud supported by technology partner Stromasys\n\n\nStromasys offers product support for Charon on Google Cloud during business hours or 24/7 for all emulators worldwide. Support typically applies to the Charon emulator software itself. Stromasys can also offer operating system support such as support for OpenVMS 7.3 and earlier.\n\n\nStromasys is a Google Technology Partner that addresses the data center modernization needs of customers by allowing the movement of legacy system applications and data to x86 infrastructure without changing any legacy code or data.\n\nTell us your challenge. We're here to help.[Contact us](/contact) \n\nAbout Universidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC)\n\n\nUniversidad Tecnológica de México (UNITEC), one of two private universities under Laureate International Universities, offers high school, bachelor, and postgraduate programs on 10 campuses in Mexico City and in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, and Querétaro, as well as online. With more than 90,000 students, it is the largest private university in the region. \nIndustries: Education \nLocation: Mexico \n[Google Cloud](https://cloud.google.com/) [Compute Engine](https://cloud.google.com/compute/) [Google Cloud VMware Engine](https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine)"]]
