[Info-vax] Message from HP.

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Tuesday, 10 December 2013 15:38:53 UTC, Jan-Erik Soderholm  wrote:
> johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk wrote 2013-12-10 15:26:
> 
> > On Tuesday, 10 December 2013 13:13:25 UTC, John Reagan  wrote:
> 
> >> On Monday, December 9, 2013 2:20:23 PM UTC-5, johnwa... at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> 
> >>
> 
> >>> On Monday, 9 December 2013 17:20:47 UTC, John Reagan  wrote:
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> >>
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> >>>
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> >>
> 
> >>>> On Monday, December 9, 2013 11:59:00 AM UTC-5, G�rard Calliet (pia-sofer) wrote:
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> >>
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> >>
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> >>
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> >>
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> >>
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> >>>
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> >>
> 
> >>> Try this for size, in the absence of the Hal Massey presentation:
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> >>
> 
> >>> http://ftp.hp.com/pub/nonstop/ccc/nov0608.pdf
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> >>
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> >>>
> 
> >>
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> >>
> 
> >>
> 
> >> Read a little farther down that same .pdf and you'll see that LSUs are no longer used.  They exist on H-series Itaniums but they don't exist on J-series systems (ie, blades).  It is now software-only.  I suspect that NSK on x86 will be a software-only solution.
> 
> >
> 
> > Maybe so. There were some bits in the Illuminata paper that struck me as (at
> 
> > best) insufficiently detailed, but in a vendor sponsored 6 page paper that's
> 
> > not really a surprise.
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> >
> 
> > For example, there's a tease about the future possibility of resurrecting
> 
> > triple modular redundancy which had historically been an option of interest
> 
> > to 10-15% of the NonStop market. The blade-based NonStop couldn't do it (at
> 
> > the time of the paper).
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> >
> 
> > The role of a Cluster IO Module (CLIM) is somewhat skipped over as well
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> > (standard redundantly-configured Proliant server+connectivity, software details
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> > totally unclear).
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> >
> 
> > Regardless, if the NonStop folks are going to be confident enough that suitably
> 
> > qualified x86-64 hardware suits them, and that all they need on top of that is a
> 
> > decent OS of their own, can the VMS world "leverage the synergies" (yuk) of
> 
> > e.g. having some other organisation already having done lots of hardware
> 
> > qualification work? (That should have been an option long ago anyway to anyone
> 
> > who wasn't inseparably attached to IA64).
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> >
> 
> > I'm thinking one difference between the VMS world and the NonStop world is the customers.
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> >
> 
> > The finance sector (and in particular the trading operations) have been looking
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> > at significant increases in volume, and therefore have needed to buy more kit
> 
> > more frequently (be they NonStop customers, VMS customers, or more recently,
> 
> > Linux customers).
> 
> >
> 
> > The VMS users that Gerard mentioned run (ran?) factories, maybe utilities such
> 
> > as power and water (both, markets I used to know). These customers have
> 
> > probably not needed that much increase in power in the last decade or more. So
> 
> > the manufacturing customers haven't needed to spend much money with HP (or
> 
> > CPQ).
> 
> >
> 
> > But if these folk want to move off VMS, they're looking at spending quite a lot
> 
> > of money. Not just a few x86 servers and a few Windows licences plus some
> 
> > VMS-emulation middleware (or VAX/Alpha emulation). In the absence of a visible
> 
> > future for VMS, these folks will be looking at a redesign from scratch,
> 
> > preferably on an OS/supplier combination with a ten year future. Can't do that
> 
> > with Ruby on Rails and a few agile programmers.
> 
> >
> 
> > You can maybe do *some* of it with a smart(er) ERP system and a redistribution
> 
> > of workload between IT kit and PLC kit. Jan-Erik (?) mentioned this - surely
> 
> > there's nothing that SAP can't do, given a big enough budget?
> 
> 
> 
> Yes, that was me. Our VMS system does *some* things that their ERP might
> 
> do, and some other things that might be "moved down" to some PLC solution.
> 
> And they look (as I wrote) at some MES system. Something like Rockwell
> 
> "Factory Talk" (or similar):
> 
> http://www.rockwellautomation.com/rockwellsoftware/factorytalk/index.html
> 
> 
> 
> Someone remember BaseStar ? :-)
> 
> Is this still an active product !?
> 
> http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/basestar/
> 
> 
> 
> Jan-Erik.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> >
> 
> > But how workable/affordable will that be in (say) the automotive sector where
> 
> > there is years of business logic and factory floor knowledge in the VMS applications?
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> >
> 
> > Even though there's been relatively little visible spend for HPQ on these
> 
> > setups in the relatively recent past (why would there be?), there's going to
> 
> > have to be money on the table here somewhere, either to keep these setups going
> 
> > on VMS, or to move them off VMS.
> 
> >
> 
> > How much money, to do what, and who is going to get it, may be questions of
> 
> > interest to some folk.
> 
> >

As it happens, yes, I used to be quite familiar with VMS, and BASEstar, and 
reasonably familiar with PLCs from AB, GE, Modicon, Siemens, and others (which 
made the Stuxnet story interesting reading - Stuxnet is yet another 
illustration of how difficult it is to displace Windows even though all the 
objective evidence says it's not fit for that particular purpose).

I was familar with both BASEstar Classic (VMS only, traditional VMS API and CLI 
and behaviours and documentation and support(?) and...) and BASEstar Open 
(BASEstar concepts re-architected from the ground up, in an OS-independent way, 
with some useful new features). 

BASEstar Open was to BASEstar Classic as DECnet Phase V/NCL is to DECnet Phase 
IV/NCP. Read that however you wish. 

I know BASEstar Classic was used in the UK in a variety of motor industry 
sites, and a few other UK industries too. Some of the UK sites have closed down 
(e.g. two well known US-owned companies) but the Japanese-owned ones are still 
operating.

BASEstar was fairly well entrenched in parts of the French motor industry too, 
from what I recall from my occasional BASEstar-related visits abroad. Probably 
Italy too, if I remember rightly (was BASEstar Open mostly engineered in 
Turin?) More details may be available but not necessarily right here right now.

Before BASEstar there was Baseway, which used RSX11S-based machines as data 
concentrators for connection to shop floor devices, in the era when a 785 was a 
big VAX. 

There was also a variant of BASEstar intended for use with CNC machine tools 
(at least one UK site used a variant of it for computer controlled wirewrapping 
of telephone exchange backplanes).

I've been out of that market for a few years but even back then there were lots 
of "SCADA" packages that get your data to and from PLCs and draw you a nice 
GUI. BASEstar could do that too, with easily integrated third party add-ons for 
nice GUIs.

The BASEstar family was also a framework for building a transparently 
distributed soft-realtime application suite which just happened to have a set 
of readily available (and easily extendable) protocol converters for device-
specific protocols (typically automation devices, but others chose to use 
BASEstar as a framework for e.g. connecting semiconductor manufacturing 
applications together and to the shop floor).

FactoryTalk looked quite interesting just now, offering a wide range of 
not-just-SCADA facilities. It wasn't around (at least not by that name) when I 
was in this market. Since that time, many companies have changed hands, the 
market has been a bit "dynamic". Then I saw FactoryTalk relies on OPC [1] for 
device connectivity. I vaguely remember that was a bad thing back then but I 
can't remember why; if it was just down to limited support for OPC back then, 
or for performance implications of OPC, that's probably fixed by now.

These automotive industry customers using BASEstar (and any software houses etc 
in this picture) are some of the customers who might benefit from talking to 
each other (on a non competing basis) and from talking to those who have in 
depth knowledge of the underlying technologies (and, ideally, of possible 
future options, technical and commercial).


Each on their own, these customers will have little influence and a company-
specific solution may be unaffordable (but migrating away won't be cheap 
either). Together, they may be able to achieve something, even if it's e.g. 
only to build a trustworthy reference platform on which to continue the 
existing business applications for a few years while they work out how to 
properly follow whatever they've built on BASEstar (which may have different 
answers in different organisations).

That's my 2p, 2c, 2centimes.

[1] OPC = OLE for Process Control. Refer to e.g. Wikipedia.