[Info-vax] Message from HP.

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-12-20 12:20:19 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:

> •OpenVMS/Integrity  8.4 SS to 2020
> •OpenVMS/Integrity  8.4 MPS w/o SE from 2020 to 2025
> ...
> •OpenVMS/Alpha      8.4 SS (?) to 2016, MPS w/o SE to 2018...


FWIW...

If you've a large and complex port off of OpenVMS, then first porting 
to Itanium means you can have more time for your port where the 
original system is still under vendor support.  It also means you've 
moved forward several generations in I/O and storage equipment.

I don't find the earlier end of OpenVMS Alpha support all surprising, 
given the age of the Alpha gear.  HP probably doesn't want to have to 
keep all that old equipment going for themselves.  By 2016, the final 
series of Alpha systems will be a decade old, and variously older.

If you port as far "forward" as an Itanium PCIe system, you gain access 
to recent-generation storage controllers and SAS and SATA disks, which 
avoids the hassles of the older SCSI storage.  You no longer have to 
contend with the limits of PCI-X and PCI and particularly SCSI storage 
for the next five or ten years of your operations and your port.   
Reasonably-configured PCIe-capable development systems can be acquired 
for well under US$1000, assuming you can acquire the necessary licenses 
from HP.

Of course neither Alpha nor Itanium hardware nor software will 
immediately stop working when HP support ends, though the software will 
start to rot and the hardware will continue to become more difficult to 
acquire and more expensive.  We'll almost certainly see improved and 
faster emulators by then, meaning that more of the legacy applications 
can be packaged up and forgotten away into emulation, too, but I 
digress.  One obvious potential source of software rot will be 2038 
(~19-Jan-2038 03:14:07 GMT) for at least some C applications and 
applications with C libraries underneath, and that rot will potentially 
start arising earlier for any future dates within various applications. 
 Might want to test your apps ahead of that.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC