[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

JF Mezei wrote 2012-05-16 21:58:
> Michael Moroney wrote:
>
>> It depends on the level of service contract with HP, if any, they have.
>
> Service contract doesn't garantee you have access to a HP sales rep and
> even if it does, it doesn't garantee that sales rep is allowed to talk
> about transition yet.
>
> Once HP publicly admits that IA64 is on its last leg and that VMS/HP-UX
> are dead ended on IA64, then HP sales reps will be given a new script to
> read to customers and will stop pretending IA64 is succesful. At that
> point, HP should also announce some sort of migration assistance to
> their new 8086 basaed Superdomes and servers.
>
> Until then, HP reps are forced to deny this will happen so they are useless.
>
> If you are important enough that you can talk to Meg Whitman, then
> things owuld be different. But you wouldn't be coming here for advice.

Now, if and whenever HP/Intel stops further development of Itanium, that
doesn't make the currently available servers suddenly stop working.

In a 15 year timeframe there is plenty of time to wait-and-see and
make decissions from actual facts and not from what someone, who
feels burnt by DEC/CPQ/HP for his lost career, writes in a newsgroup.

Both my VMS customers are on AlphaServer DS20 or DS25 with no current
porting plans of the application to either Itanium or another OS.
Support is on one case by HP and in the other by a third part. One
of the custumers states a min lifetame of 3-5 years. Fine by me,
noone can look further into the future anyway.

So if IA64 would be EOL'd *today*, you could probably run your VMS
apps for at least 10 years or more on the currently available servers.