[Info-vax] "HP started then spiked HP-UX on x86 project"

[Neil Rieck]

On May 23, 4:15 pm, Paul Sture <p... at sture.ch> wrote:
> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/23/
> hp_project_blackbird_redwood_hp_ux/>
>
> or
>
> http://bit.ly/LED7hd
>
> "As part of the ongoing lawsuit about whether or not Oracle had committed
> itself to supporting its software on Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-based
> servers, the software giant did a core dump of very interesting documents
> that show what many of us suspected: that HP did indeed mull acquiring
> the Sparc/Solaris business and that HP did in fact have a skunkworks that
> was porting the HP-UX variant of Unix to the x86 processor from Itanium."
>
> --
> Paul Sture

Speaking of porting (this is a duplicate post from another thread)

 ###

For the past 3 months I have been involved in cleaning up a number
(10) of virtualized VAXs. I don't know why everyone uses the term
"virtualized" because these platforms are running on the Charon-VAX
emulation which runs on x86 (well, really the XEON flavor as part of
DL380 but I digress).

p.s. according to the contractors, my employer is running more than 25
of these things

Don't get me wrong, the disk i/o on these beasts is incredibly fast.
And there is something neat about doing a VMS standalone backup
(shutdown VMS; shut down Charon-VAX; then duplicate a Windows-2003
folder by just dragging and dropping). Doing any disk backup or
restore just takes seconds.

But the CPU power is horrible. For example, generating a new set of
1024-bit DSA keys takes 5 minutes on this emulated uVAX-4300 while
less than one second is required on my DS20e Alpha.

Once you buy Charon keys (rumored to be in the range of 8k each; HP is
a authorized reseller so they get a cut); ILO licenses for the CPUs
and SANs; Windows licenses; VMS transfer licenses; the all-in costs of
doing something like this is not cheap.

Why am I saying all this? It seems to me that HP thinks they can keep
OpenVMS alive by selling Charon-VAX and Charon-Alpha emulations (while
making a buck on the side) rather than doing a native x86 port (as it
appears they have done with HP-UX).

This emulation/virtualization technology is not that easy to manage in
a large enterprise as you would think.  In the old days there was only
one group responsible; now there are three (one group is responsible
for all Windows issues; another for the Charon environment; and a
third for VMS).

The whole experience has left me with the feeling of dead-technology-
walking.

If I were HP, I'd have the skunk-works in India working on an x86 port
right now.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/