| dc.description.abstract | With the rapid advancement in information technology, hardware provided by vendors changes at an ever increasing pace. However, information systems, especially the mission critical ones, often does not follow the vendor’s product life cycle. Therefore, many companies are faced with the high cost of IT maintenance fee and performance bottleneck. Company CIO are hard pressed to make a decision, whether to replace the system, or continue to pay the continuously increasing maintenance costs and take the risk of hardware failure. System upgrades may seem to be the best way out. However, it may result in a whole new set of problems, especially for companies with mission critical applications. In this context, legacy application software has a compatibility problem with the new hardware system, while replacing the applications in tandem with hardware upgrades is a lengthy and high risk process. In addition, often times, the developers of the legacy systems are no longer available, resulting in software orphans. As such, many companies choose to continue to pay increasing maintenance fees to keep the system operation smoothly.
This study looks into the problem of Company T, which is faced with the legacy system replacement problem. A proposal is made to take an alternative route, adopting a ＂third way＂ of system upgrade. The new solution is based on the new virtualization technology, solving the legacy application compatibility issue and provides a quick and fast way to migration the application. The systems design takes into account issues of high availability and high reliability. The solution not only reduced the IT total cost of ownership, but also provided the rooms for future growths in business requirements. This successful case provides a viable alternative for CIO facing similar problems. | en_US |