The ERP That Refused to Die
Every invoice, purchase order, and payroll run in the company flowed through one SAP production instance — living on Sun SPARC M3000/M5000 machines nearly twenty years old. No vendor support. No spare-parts market. One blown component between business-as-usual and a full stop.
[recon]Mapped the estate: Solaris on SPARC, tribal-knowledge configuration, no documentation, no reproducible build, no recovery path.
[assessment]Ruled out a quick lift-and-shift — the ERP was welded to its hardware. First objective: make the hardware survivable.
[assault]Engineered a golden-image clone of production onto matched standby units — bit for bit, firmware to filesystem.
[verify]Built a staged verification program: the clone must boot, run, and reconcile through every phase before it earns production trust.
[status]Verification advancing phase by phase. The company now holds a fallback where none existed.