[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[JF Mezei]

John Reagan wrote:

> bundled support that comes with them.  I'm not an expert however.  I do know 
> that the Itanium chips are the same. 



The chips are but a small part of the "NSK" equation. Back in the days
of Tandem, their boxes had a lot of hardware features for not only
redundnacy, but also hot swappability of components whihout having to
stop the whole system.

disk drives were dual pathed for instance, and there were 2 controllers
for the disks.

The interconnects between systems were also quite different to allow for
memory exchanges and internode transactions etc.


Looking at the HP site, it appears HP still has NSK specific servers,
but the web pages are devoid of any real details on how they differ from
the "standard" IA64 servers for HP-UX and VMS.



http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/cache/307953-0-0-0-121.html

Consider how different the VAXft was from normal VAXen.


The NSK software and hardware might be sufficiently unique that customer
would demand HP port NSK to x86 and build x86 servers with fault
tolerance features for NSK to run on.

HP even has a video on Nonstop:
http://h20621.www2.hp.com/video-gallery/us/en/adc2060c6ef0fd43d853202cbcc2985efefe93c8/r/video

They even pitch NSK as a solution for healthcare. (no mention of VMS there).


Looks to me like NSK might survive beyond the death of IA64.