[Info-vax] IBM Layoffs

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-01-27 15:41:49 +0000, D W said:

> On 1/26/2015 11:39 AM, Stephen Hoffman via Info-vax wrote:
>> Hosting VMS, for VMS customers.  This opportunity is pretty obvious for 
>> a vendor with licensing rights to VMS and related products, 
>> particularly if the vendor can create and manage pairs of data centers 
>> located within range of clustering and HBVS, and preferably on separate 
>> electric and communications grids and drainages.
> 
> You can do most of that in one building. The Colocation site we use 
> gets power from two separate grids unlikely to be heavily loaded at the 
> same time (Sports stadium on either side) and gets data from three 
> telco trunks. I can't imagine what it would take to flood that area- 
> it'd probably have to be biblical.

Yeah, but when the {insert nasty product} being {manufactured, used, 
stored, transported, intentionally released} upwind goes {insert nasty 
event}, and you can't get into the location for a week?

Power grids, too, have suffered cascading failures.

Murphy, after all, was an optimist.

>> Irrelevant? Sort of.   Also sort of important, too.  Customers with 
>> applications operating on VMS today are probably going to want those to 
>> be run on VMS servers, whether emulated or actual servers.  For VSI, 
>> it'd probably be easiest to host Itanium guests, at least initially.   
>> Maybe eventually on x86-64 guests, once VSI gets the VMS code ported 
>> and then once somebody gets the customer applications ported.
> 
> A VM would be great. Something like FreeBSD's jail(8) (Did any of the 
> Galaxy stuff survive the Alphacide? but that's more HW based than I'm 
> thinking) would not only do the trick for providers, it'd be nice to 
> have in general. Take several smaller customers wanting clustering and 
> let them each have slices of different machines.

Galaxy is largely firmware based, and Galaxy could — if somebody were 
inclined to heavily customize the ACPI support — be deployed with 
customized UEFI code.   OpenVMS has picked up the hardware 
configuration from the console, and the Galaxy firmware provided a 
coordinated form of subsetting.    Customized or extended UEFI is not 
trivial and would tend to be server-model-specific, but it does remain 
possible.  But no, Galaxy didn't make it to Itanium, and the same 
general difficulties that encountered would also apply to x86-64.

OpenVMS can already run in a VM, via certain (and now older) versions 
of HP-VM product on Itanium.   There's little reason to assume that a 
VM won't be in the mix (eventually) on x86-64, if/when the port is 
completed and native boot support is added.   Presently, emulators can 
be guests.

Jails and sandboxes, VMs, and Galaxy instances are each rather 
different beasts.


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