[Info-vax] [OT] Architectures, was: Re: What is more important now, VMS software or hardware?

[David Froble]

Kerry Main wrote:


> Part of the challenge is that IT shops simply do not have the funds to do
> large, complex and high risk migrations anymore. The annual support 
> costs are just a lot easier to pay than big, risky expenditures for porting, 
> testing, re-certification etc. on different platforms.

My question has always been, why do such things happen?  If it ain't 
broke, then don't fix it, has always seemed a good plan to me.

Now, my suspicions are that one of the major reasons for such migrations 
is the desire of IT personnel to want to do something else, or may have 
some prejudices, and therefore lie to their employers convincing them 
that they "NEED" to do "so and so".

> It's also difficult to sell to the business - from an end user business 
> perspective, does anyone care what HW the App/service is running on?

What's important is the application, and how well it serves the users. 
Nothing else matters.  That said, security, or lack there-of, does 
affect the users.  As do other things.

> Note - this is also why the OpenVMS X86-64 port and the proposed VAX 
> / Alpha / IA64 translator Is so important.  An IT dept can usually sell a
> change in platform if there is minimal impact to the business in terms
> of risk and functional testing required. Hence, moving from VAX / Alpha
> / IA64 to X86-64 where the binaries simply run unmodified (or minor
> mods), is huge.

Indeed!

> In addition, a number of these large shops are already supporting Linux
> environments and have practical experience with Linux. Hence, they
> understand some of the challenges with commodity OS's that they do 
> not have with their enterprise OS's (AIX, Solaris, OpenVMS etc). They
> understand that the "grass is not always greener on the other side".

I'd say they should have asked the cows, but, it seems the cows never 
seem to learn the lesson, no matter how many fences they get through. 
(I wonder if they are in my yard, again.)