[Info-vax] Moving away from OpenVMS

[John Wallace]

On May 21, 7:01 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> John Wallace wrote:
> > Bear in mind that for a lot of folks, whether it's right or it's wrong
> > according to contributors here, there is a short term goal to get off
> > VAX, Alpha, and Itanium, and a longer (but not long) term goal to get
> > completely off VMS regardless of the business impact of lost VMS
> > functionality e.g.
>
> I view this differently.
>
> Starting on the day you decide to downsize VMS out of existance, any new
> projects go on the target platform. This is where growth happens from
> that point on.  This may require some interfaces with legacy VMS to be
> built so new apps on Linux can talk to old all on VMS.
>
> Then, you slowly migrate apps from VMS to Linux one by one. As you
> reduce the load on the VMS hardware by moving apps one by one, you make
> room for growth in traffic for remaining apps.
>
> If you start NOW to plan this move, then you have plenty of time to
> execute it, plenty of time to model/shape your new architecture
> properly, setup proper procedure for the system management aspects
> (backups, recovery, database replication of hardware based disk
> mirroring to replace volume shadowing etc).
>
> And if you start now, you still have one or two speed bumps coming for
> IA64 if needed.

That approach may well apply where IT policy and projects are driven
by business need. My point was in reference to the IT departments
we've surely all come across where the policy is driven by fashion and
comfort zones:
IT: "if it's not Wintel, we want it out, because it's not strategic"
Business: "based on our product evaluations, product XYZ continues to
be the best value for the business, and indeed the only product that
does [PQR] but it does not run on Window boxes"
IT: "the policy says Dell and Windows"
Business: "why?"
IT: "because... because Daddy says so?" [etc]