[Info-vax] Decomissioning VMS... a sad day!

[Ken Fairfield]

On Jan 31, 11:52 pm, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> Mr. Mike schrieb:
>
> > We are moving our Cerner Application to a Remote
> > Hosted UNIX solution.
>
> Is the emphasis on "Remote Hosted" or on "UNIX"?

Probably on RHO (Remote Hosting Option in Cerner-speak).

Cerner announced EOL of VMS some 2 yrs ago, IIRC.
Current releases of the application (Millennium) run
only on AIX, HP-UX and Linux.

My organization moved to RHO in February of last year
running on an older release with VMS continuing as the
application tier and "unix" as the database tier (while
locally hosted, both were on our same VMS cluster).
We were a little surprised that the DB went up on Linux
instead of HP-UX, but since Oracle's preferred platform
is Linux (or at least was at that time), it didn't bother us
too much.

Right now we're in the midst of an application upgrade
which does involve moving to all unix.  We had expected
that would be HP-UX because that was what was stated
during our RHO negotiations.  Instead, we were very,
very surprised to find we're coming up on RHEL running
on Xeon blades!

Now one of the reasons an organization decides on
an RHO solution is that we were facing replacing
expensive hardware (GS1208's & EVA6000) with
other expensive hardware (IA64 Superdomes or
similar and newer/larger storage).  That's very
difficult for a non-profit health care oraganization.
Under RHO, Cerner bears those costs.

But truly, if we'd known that the upgrade would
be to commodity x86-64 hardware and a (nearly)
free O/S, I think we would have done better to
keep it in-house.

I don't think Cerner have been very public about
their support of Linux.  Their RHO people have
told us they'd had (unspecified) problems with
HP-UX and weren't very happy with it; thus the
move to Linux.  My own opinion is that cost is
the biggest driver for them.

For the OP: it may be too late to revisit your
decision, but I'd be very interested to know
whether there was any discussion which unix
platform you'll be running on under RHO.

    Thanks, Ken