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A great many businesses depend on a system that the rest of the industry has written off. The software will not run on anything newer, the machine is built into a piece of equipment, the vendor has gone, or replacing it would cost far more than it earns. Most support providers answer by refusing to touch it. We support it.
GEN support Windows NT, XP, 7 and 8, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and the BSDs, end of life Linux including CentOS 5, 6 and 7, and the old HP, HPE, Synology and other hardware underneath them, with spares on our own shelves and in-house engineers who know every one of these platforms.
Nobody keeps a Windows XP machine or a Solaris server out of nostalgia. It stays because it is still doing a job the business depends on, and the alternative is expensive, risky or simply not available. The application was written for that platform and its author is long gone. The operating system is part of a machine tool, an instrument or a phone system that cost far more than any computer. The system has been validated or certified, and changing it means doing all of that again.
We do not lecture anybody about that. We work out what the system does, what it is exposed to and what would happen if it failed tomorrow, and then we keep it running for as long as that remains the sensible commercial decision. When it stops being sensible, we say so and plan the way out.
We still have customers running Windows NT, XP, 7 and 8, and we support them fully: repair, reinstallation and recovery of the operating system, the drivers and hardware underneath it, and the software on top of it.
An operating system that no longer receives security updates cannot be patched into safety, so we do not pretend otherwise. We reduce what it is exposed to instead, using network segregation, firewalls and application proxies, so that the system can carry on doing its one job without being reachable by everything else.
When the time comes to move, we migrate the software, its settings and its data to a newer version of Windows, and deal with the compatibility problems that stopped anybody doing it before. For current Windows platforms, see Microsoft support.
Commercial Unix still runs more than most people expect, usually on hardware that has outlasted every vendor support contract ever sold for it. We have in-house experience on all of these platforms, we support the operating system and the hardware together, and where it makes sense we migrate the applications and data onto Linux.
Sun Solaris on SPARC hardware, and on x86 from Solaris 10 onwards, including systems that have passed from Sun to Oracle and out of both companies' support. We support the operating system, the SPARC and Intel hardware beneath it, and migration to Linux where that is the right answer.
HP-UX on PA-RISC HP9000 and Itanium Integrity servers. We hold HP9000 spares, and one of our customers still runs an HP9000 from 2002 under a GEN maintenance agreement. See HPE support for the current range.
IBM AIX and the IBM RS/6000 and Power hardware it runs on. Some AIX workloads have a realistic path to Linux and some do not, and we will tell you honestly which yours is before anybody spends money on it.
All of the BSD family and the hardware they run on, from general purpose FreeBSD servers to OpenBSD firewalls and NetBSD on unusual hardware.
CentOS 6 and 7 are still in service in a great many places: on servers, inside phone systems and on embedded hardware. When Red Hat ended CentOS as it was, many organisations could not move to RHEL, or had no reason to. We fully support CentOS 5, 6 and 7, and when a system is ready to move we migrate it to AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux with its settings and software intact. Our CentOS support and migration page covers that in detail.
The same applies further back: early SuSE and Slackware, Mandrake, Corel and Antergos, and embedded Linux on devices whose supplier has moved on. Our Linux support page covers the current distributions and the embedded work in more detail, and end of life Asterisk releases back to 1.4 are covered under Asterisk and FreePBX support.
An old operating system is usually only as reliable as the hardware under it, and the hardware is where most legacy systems finally fail. Our spares follow our maintenance estate: when a customer's equipment comes onto a maintenance plan, the parts for it come onto our shelf. That is why we can hold parts for HPE servers back to Gen6, HP9000 spares, and Synology parts for most common models back to 2014.
For some systems, particularly older Synology DiskStations and RackStations, no spares are available at any price. We have the staff and equipment to repair those at component level. It can take longer, because parts sometimes have to be ordered in, but it gets the system back in service.
Every legacy system ends up in one of three places, and the right one depends on what it does and what it would cost to replace. We help you decide, and then we do the work.
Maintain the system as it is, with spares held, a known recovery route and an engineer who understands it, for as long as it keeps earning its place.
Reduce what the system is exposed to: segregate it, firewall it, put a proxy in front of it and take it off the internet, so its age stops being everybody else's problem.
Move the applications, settings and data to a supported platform: Unix to Linux, XP to a current Windows, CentOS to Alma or Rocky, with the compatibility problems dealt with rather than discovered on the day.
Legacy work is charged at our published rates, or covered by a fixed price maintenance plan. Old hardware is priced on assessment, because its condition drives the cost rather than the badge on the front.
GEN support Windows XP, and Windows NT, 7 and 8, for businesses across the UK. That covers repair, reinstallation and recovery of the operating system, keeping the hardware underneath it running, reducing the security exposure of a system that no longer receives updates, and migrating software, settings and data to a newer platform when the time comes.
Yes. GEN support Solaris on both SPARC and x86 hardware, with in-house engineers experienced in both. Support covers the operating system, the hardware it runs on, and the migration of applications and data to Linux where that is the right answer.
Yes. GEN support HP-UX on PA-RISC HP9000 and Itanium Integrity servers, hold HP9000 spares, and have an HP9000 from 2002 still in service under a GEN maintenance agreement.
Yes. GEN fully support CentOS 5, 6 and 7, and migrate systems in place to AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux or RHEL when they are ready to move. Early versions of SuSE, Slackware, Mandrake and other discontinued distributions are also supported.
Yes. GEN support IBM AIX and the IBM hardware it runs on, and FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, with in-house experience on all of them.
By reducing what it is exposed to rather than pretending it can be patched. A legacy system is placed on its own segment of the network, firewalled so it can reach only what it genuinely needs, kept away from direct internet access and email, and fronted by application proxies where users need to reach it. Its disks are imaged so that a failure becomes a restore rather than a rebuild.
Yes. GEN hold HPE server parts back to Gen6, HP9000 spares, and Synology parts back to 2014, driven by the equipment on GEN maintenance plans. Where no spares exist, GEN can carry out component level repair on some systems.
No. Legacy systems are supported at the same published rates as everything else, pay as you go or on a fixed price annual maintenance plan, with no contract, minimum term or notice period. Old hardware is priced on assessment because its condition drives the cost.
Our engineers are UK based and in-house, with no offshore outsourcing: the specialist who takes your case is the specialist who works it, and they hold the production experience to match the equipment in front of them. Risk is assessed before anything is changed, the SAPR method is applied to every fault, and five shifts a day mean an overnight handover is a conversation between two engineers rather than a note left in a ticket. Our AI runs on our own hardware in our own data centres, and it never writes a word you read.
There is no support contract, no minimum term and no notice period. You buy hours at our published rates, use them when you need them, and what you do not use carries over. How GEN support works sets all of it out in full.