[Info-vax] VMS QuickSpecs

Stephen Hoffman seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid
Thu Aug 20 11:49:49 EDT 2015


On 2015-08-20 15:21:53 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

> What do you want to manage please?

Less.    I want to manage less stuff, fewer tools, and I want common 
and preferably commodity hardware and infrastructure, and familiar and 
preferably simpler management interfaces.  I want native integration 
with available distributed-management tools, too.  Better security, 
too.   VLANs or not, I'd also rather not have randos poking packets 
around on my FC SAN, for that matter.

IP over FC has added cost, added infrastructure replication, added and 
variously different management.  All these costs for both VSI and for 
end-users, too.

Based on what has been posted posted so far, you're going to have a 
difficult time selling me or most other folks on the advantages of IP 
over FC.

There are many and far better technical solutions around, too.  Always 
have been.  Always will be.   But to sell and to be successful in the 
market, any of these better solution has to minimally overcome the 
buyers' costs of adoption and — at least during the transition — 
parallel operations.   The solutions also have to sell enough for the 
vendor to invest in creating and supporting the solution, too.   From 
this thread and also based on what I know of the costs and difficulties 
around previous investigations of adding such support, IP over FC isn't 
enough better, and here it's not even an end-migration path.   In 
short, TANSTAAFL.

Or are we headed for an add-on — the OpenVMS LMF version of an in-app 
purchase — for IP over FC?   Even then, I just don't see IP over FC 
being as interesting as 40GbE support, etc.



ps: Telling me that I don't need to use TCP isn't all that interesting, 
unless there's a substantial benefit — migrating from TCP adds to my 
adoption costs, and adds to the network configuration and management 
costs — now I have a reliable not-TCP link, so how do I deal with that. 
  Or this adds to VSI's development costs, making the IP over FC 
connection look like TCP.  This because now I have to change code to 
use the link, and now I have to manage it differently.   Or I continue 
to migrate to 40GbE, and avoid the whole problem.




-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC




More information about the Info-vax mailing list