We have made the change to sWOIS. The change was pretty straight forward and has given us some added capabilities. That said, the only requirement that I am aware of for upgrading your system is if you are a NERC CIP Medium site or higher (black-start, etc.) If you are not, there is not an external requirement to upgrade. That said, I believe that your questions is, how long can you really go before you shell out $450k? In my experience at other sites, as long as you have a back-up image of your system and a new computer that it will run on, you can extend the life indefinitely of what you currently have. What I have run into is having to go to Ebay or other sources to find parts and rebuild parts of the workstations as they fail. All that said, if you are in a situation where you have to install system patches, windows isn’t supporting the operating system, you don’t really have a choice but to upgrade. Make sure though that that you require the most recent operating system to give yourself the longest lead time. When we purchased our upgrade, server 2016 was already out but Wartsila wanted to do the install on server 2012…
Give me a call if you have any questions,
Kevin Moore
Ops. Mgr. Antelope Elk Energy Center (AEEC)
806-298-4835