[Info-vax] OpenVMS.Org quick pool

[JF Mezei]

The debate isn't how to emulate VAX. This has been done, and customers
who still rely on VAX know that VAXen have not bene produced since last
century, and that VAX/VMS hasn't been updated in about a decade.

VAX customers will continue unchanged because the products they rely on
(VAX and VAX/VMS) have been EOLed long ago.  They remained on VAX
despite the option to migrate to Alpha (some because it is an embedded
solution part of a bigger "box" (such as a paper mill), and others
because they rely on software killed by Palmer and not ported to Alpha
and others still have a VAX running for one last application with all of
the rest having been ported to other platforms.

The same will likely happen to both Alpha and IA64 VMS customers with
the difference being that there won't be a clear upgrade path to a new
platform as there was between VAX and Alpha and between Alpha and IA64.

returning to VAX is just not an option. While Alpha and IA64 VMS have a
subset of the original VAX/VMS applications portfolio, the apps they
have are far more modern and not available on VAX/VMS. (especially appls
that do require 64 bits).

How customers deal with the EOL of IA64 and VMS will depend on what sort
of programme HP announces (similar to Alpha Retain Trust when Alpha was
murdered).

Will HP make it easy to get extra VMS licences to grow capacity by
adding some more nodes to a cluster (buying IA64s second hand), or will
HP want to push customers to consolidate multiple VMS instances into
fewer that run emulated on an Odyssey 8086 mainframe ?

HP would be tempted to do the later in order to shore up sales of its
Odyssey mainframes.


There are far too many variables at this point to know how customers
will react. It all depends on what sort of "IA64 retain trust" programme
HP announces when it acknowledges the EOL of IA64 and VMS.


Unless HP announces a progressive port of VMS to x86 (module by module,
a bit like how Apple did it between 68l and PowerPC), the provision of
an emulator means that VMS will be declared mature and that HP expects
VMS custoemrs to first migrate their high CPU/capacity applications to
another platform and eventually move what is left of VMS on emulation
until that too has been migrated.

I don't think that performance will be all that important.