[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-03-16 19.25, JF Mezei wrote:
> Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
>> No. Not a single Unix behaves "OK" in this situation. They can't. It's a
>> part of the basic design of the whole system.
>
>
> Apple's OS/X (based on Darwin/FreeBSD) uses the Apple Filing Protocol
> (AFP) and this is more robust than NFS. But since Apple left the server
> business, it doesn't make much of a difference to the marketplace.

There are several other file sharing protocols out there. AFS, SMB, NCP, 
NCS, RFS and DFS to name a few, not to even mention FAL, which goes over 
DECnet. ;-)

> At the end of the day, Oracle provides the stuff that is missing from
> Unix  so people can run serious applications on Unix.

Indeed. I'm not saying that you cannot run large systems on Unix. There 
is plenty of proof otherwise. What I was saying was that Unix systems 
with a shared root disk means NFS, and that means everything hangs if 
the server goes down.

The solution is obviously to not do that. Instead you have distributed 
systems, where they all work rather independent of each other, and you 
have database servers which replicate data between them for greater 
availability. But from time to time, those replicated databases gets out 
of sync and someone have to repair them. It's just that normal users 
like you and me don't see or are aware of that. Would a VMS cluster do 
that better (as in less data corruption)? Probably yes. Would it do it 
cheaper or faster? Probably no.
And since you need to be able to deal with corrupted data anyway, since 
VMS cannot guarantee 0% errors anyway, what is the point? Hardware still 
breaks. VMS can't stop that.

> The world's largest company (Apple) runs on Solaris/Oracle. They run
> their internet stores on it, their customer databases, their real retail
> stores etc, and Apple has very good "MIS" systems.
>
> And they have very good records of customer purchases, warrantee on all
> their serial numbers etc.  The media may focus on their shiny iToys, but
> the company is truly well equipped in IT systems to run a very efficient
> ship with comprehensive CRM well beyond what Digital had and on a scale
> of hundreds of millions of customers.

Right. But I'd guess that keeping track of all customers are probably 
not the really big databases...
Keeping track of all transactions and manufactured items are probably 
way larger. And if/when things break on that end, you never know about it.
Even customer information breakage often pass unnoticed.

	Johnny