[Info-vax] 1 year.

[IanD]

On Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 11:22:07 PM UTC+10, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2015-08-09 03:28:56 +0000, Kerry Main said:

<snip>

> 
> But it's been my experience that folks that have a migration and 
> consolidation plan to a different application product and that are 
> making statements such as IanD has posted here are not usually 
> interested in expending more than minimally necessary on the old 
> configuration.  Not without a financial case, and sometimes not even 
> then.  Emulation becomes an option when the existing hardware becomes 
> more costly to maintain and to run than the cost of the switch over to 
> emulation.  This when some non-trivial part of the application source 
> code is missing and which means that anything short of translation or 
> emulation can be viewed as cost-prohibitive, and particularly when 
> there's already a viable target to migrate folks available here.
>  
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

and yet again I see your experience of real world dealings popping up in your comments :-)
I wish your timelines were a little nicer but I have a suspicion they are probably not to far from the mark

Yes, for us, the application supports a class of customers that are not the future, so minimal amounts of spending is the normal here, that is how the whole application got to be in the state it is in, it was all meant to slowly vanish and die away by now

To stay on VMS would mean an application rewrite and the so called architects who think linux is the future for everything and the solution to everything will never support a rewrite to VMS - it simply does not offer the business any advantages that wins them business or supports their business any more than does a linux solution, or so the architects tell them. They do not care about TCO, why should they, the business has outsourced all their IT to an IT company that runs it mostly offshore at bargain prices and they certainly don't want to support VMS either because they find it extremely difficult to get VMS resources as it is

Emulators are fine for most not wanting to move up the architectural path but some of us are stuck in no-man's land with aging hardware that is too fast for an emulator at this stage, and with HP dropping support all over the place for anything that even hints of an Alpha smell, migrating away is our only near term option