[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[John Wallace]

On Sep 11, 10:47 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > I'm not sure who pays for the infrastructure costs at:
> >http://www.openvmshobbyist.org
>
> David Cathay from Montagar is the one that operates the hobbyist
> programme and we should all be grateful for all that he has done.
>
> I don't think he gets anything from HP. And with the change in staffing,
> I am not even sure the folks in India know about it.
>
> > because HP in in for some trouble when all us OpenVMS types retire.
> > Why? Because the younger generation coming up behind us has never
> > heard of OpenVMS which means that more of HP's market will wither on
> > the vine.
>
> Why would that be a problem for HP ? In case you haven't yet accepted
> it, HP has essentially already written off VMS. HP clearly doesn't see a
> future for VMS and some VPs have already alluded to the fact that it is
> an old operating system (now that it is more than 30 years old).
>
> With Sun gone, HP has high hopes that it can retain a large percentage
> of the remaining VMS customers when they realise there is no future for
> VMS.  For most, the signs have been there and quire evident for some
> time, but HP will need to ratchet up the font size to make the message
> clearer for those few who still believe that HP has great plans for VMS.


"HP has high hopes that it can retain a large percentage of the
remaining VMS customers"
"what is so special about "Proliant" ? "

There's a connection between those two.

Proliant is (or was, I've been away a while) to x86 servers what VAX
was to superminis - the "industry standard", with a model to suit
pretty much every requirement and every budget. Maybe a little bit
premium priced, often because of premium class design and engineering
and support, but if you do your research and pick the right model you
can be confident that what you're buying will work right out of the
box, and be properly supported through its (reasonably long in x86
terms) life cycle. At least it'll be OK until you put Windows on it,
then all bets are off, obviously. But lots of people do put Windows on
Proliant, and lots of people put Linux on them too, and lots of
enterprise applications on the Proliant/Windows or Proliant/Linux
combination are keeping businesses running around the world.

The current Proliant range starts at single socket and goes up to 8
socket, with (today, iirc) up to 512GB of memory. That covers most of
the server market.

There was an Itanium Proliant in the early IA64 days but the less said
about that the better. With "Common System Interconnect"/QuickPath one
might have hoped that an Itanium Proliant might rise again, perhaps
even to be qualified to run VMS; it would have seemed silly to have
Itanium-specific engineering at least at the low end of the IA64
range. Then again, now that the once-promised "common socket" between
x86-64 and IA64 no longer seems to be happening, who knows what will
happen.

It's highly likely that people abandoning VMS servers will end up on
Proliant just by default, unless the applications are already in the
tiny "Itanium-only" niche (eg they need more physical memory than
AMD64 can deliver in the foreseeable future, see related discussion
recently) or unless cHomPaq have already made enough enemies in the
organisation, such that the VMS systems are redesigned for a different
OS on Dell or IBM hardware (other options pale into insignificance).