Platform Diversity in IT Maintenance: Supporting Legacy to Modern Systems

Maintenance Services

GEN has been providing systems maintenance in the UK since 1989, and it's still a significant portion of the work we do. Maintenance is generally a fixed price service to maintain a system or systems through ANY failure, which is a great budget friendly way to guarantee support, and to reduce the risk of outages and service interruptions.

Our fixed price maintenance contracts are designed to be flexible and accommodating, allowing you to tailor your maintenance needs to your specific requirements and budget, whilst insuring stability. Maintenance can be annually or monthly on fixed or rolling contracts as needed, and new deployments of hardware and systems will often include a period of complimentary maintenance.

Its worth pointing out that maintenance customers are not required to have comprehensive support, and in some cases maintenance is provided as parts or labour only, and sometimes as a service level guarantee only with both parts and labour chargeable.

Platform Diversity

Unlike most, we FULLY support Linux, Windows and other platforms in house, in the UK. It is important that we tailor the training to cover the platforms and solutions we're required to support as part of maintenance. Whilst planning said training, I asked someone to pull data from the system on what OS's we're currently supporting, and the result was enlightening.

Coverage

Platform	Percentage
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)	38.26
Windows Server 2022	11.34
SUSE Linux	9.21
Debian	7.79
Linux Other	7.49
Windows Server 2012	6.17
CentOS	4.76
Windows Server 2008	3.44
Windows Server 2019	3.34
Ubuntu Server	1.82
Windows Server 2000	1.32
OpenBSD	1.11
Solaris	0.91
Windows Server 2003	0.71
FreeBSD / NetBSD	0.61
OS/390	0.40
HP-UX	0.30
Windows NT 4.0	0.30
Windows Server 2016	0.30
AIX	0.20
Novell NetWare 4	0.10
OS/2 2.1	0.10
Windows NT 3.1	0.00

Linux

It's significant that we now support more Linux servers (69%) than Windows (27%), which is a growing trend we're seeing in business. Not all of these are on-premise with many being cloud hosted, hybrid or Edge.

In the Linux space, we're seeing a dominance of RedHat Enterprise at 38% which includes a shift to downstreams like Alma and Rocky after the aquisition of RedHat by IBM. CentOS still has a share at 4.7% even though its long since depreciated, and Ubuntu Server is only at 1.8% and has yet to take up much market share. Linux Other at 7.49% includes a wide array of other linux distros from Mint to Nix, all of which we support fully.

Windows

Windows Server 2022 is the new dominant platform, with 11.34% of the market share, followed by Windows Server 2020 at 10.02%. Windows Server 2019 is also at 7.49%. Legacy Windows Server, which is anything prior to 2019 still makes up a small percentage of sites and in most cases this use is mandated by the software/hardware used.

Legacy

GEN continues to support legacy platforms for as long as our customers require and that includes a vast array of Unix variants and propriatary systems.

AIX is a unix variant that runs on IBM hardware, OS2 (2.1) is a server operating system that runs on x86, and OS/390 (and Z/OS) runs on IBM mainframes (System/390 and zSeries). As late as 2022 we had a customer with maintenance on a IBM System 38 running CPF, but they finally migrated.

Solaris (now Oracle Solaris) is still in use and has almost 1%. Solaris continues to dominate large financial organisations that have a great deal of serverside applications running Java, and have yet to migrate to something else, probably Linux.

Windows NT4 is so legacy I had to find out what we're supporting, and its an application that runs on embedded micros in CNC machines. Windows Server 2003 is still used in its SBS variants by some small businesses who simply are not able or willing to upgrade, but these are of course on-premise and isolated.

Novell Netware 4, is an interesting one, used by a university as a demonstration of legacy technology, they have a whole thin-net setup actually and we maintain it all, although I think we're running out of E1000's.

Later Unix, like OpenBSD/NetBSD still hold 1.7% and these are used in legacy environments for things like T&A, stock control, and other industrial solutions, running code for which the original vendor has long since left the space. The cost of migrating systems like this isn't small and especially where there's also legacy peripherals and systems involved, requiring both software rewrites and replacement hardware.

Conclusion

I started writing this article because I was genuinely interested in seeing why we're supporting so much legacy stuff, and the reasons for this. We have the skills in house to support everything here, and much more, but from a training point of view, should I invest in training for younger staff in systems like OS/390 and OS2 ? probably not, but at the same time we have to ensure that the resources are available to support these customers should anything happen.

Its important to understand that 'Maintenance' isn't just software, and in most cases for these legacy systems we're also carrying stock of parts and even complete servers to support them, and we have hardware in stock spanning 4 decades. We carry SCSI hard drives, HP9000's, Sun Sparc, IBM6150, IBM PS/2, IBM System 3x, and much more for the sole reason of having parts to backup our customers. As time marches on, we will move some customers to best efforts maintenance for the really legacy systems, but as of 2024 everyone is on a full service level agreement.

If you have a legacy system, and you're current provider is complaining that they won't support it anymore, don't blame them, many aren't big enough to support every possible version in-house, but we can so ask for a quote today.

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