[Info-vax] another HP website fubar

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-06-22 15:53:35 +0000, David Froble said:

> Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> 
>> Where I infer you're (David) going with your reply is sometimes called 
>> the "out-of-box experience", and — while improvements have been made 
>> over the years — neither the HP Integrity servers nor OpenVMS have yet 
>> to fully embrace that philosophy.  Pieces such as FIS and InfoServer 
>> and vKVM are a good start for single-deployment cases, certainly.   
>> These single-deployment cases also being a subset of the mass 
>> deployments and mass management and mass configuration comments I've 
>> previously made.  These are some of the areas where OpenVMS and the 
>> current Integrity servers are comparatively weak.  Not that the 
>> single-deployment cases aren't also comparatively weak, too.  Things'll 
>> get more interesting if OpenVMS should become fodder for mass 
>> deployments and mass VM deployments and such — not that recent smaller 
>> cases such as reconfiguring the networking on ~300 OpenVMS servers is 
>> at all easy now.
> 
> In the case being discussed, everything would be solved with the 
> inclusion of one DVD.

True.  But not everybody needed or wanted that media, though.   Media 
was something that DEC and Compaq and HP have often charged for and 
AFAIK still do, kitting and shipping those disks within the server kits 
adds to the incremental costs, and the customers often already had the 
DVDs or other media which means that effort was unnecessary and the 
extra parts just went into the trash.  Put another way, there can be 
pushback.

FWIW, if you're buying OpenVMS, you're probably not expecting much in 
the way of modern ease-of-use here, either.  You either have your own 
staff or contractors with skills in this area and run this in-house, or 
the ISV or some outside contractor is providing this service for you on 
your in-house servers, or on their servers.    There's certainly room 
here for VSI to improve both the single-server and mass deployments and 
as was mentioned above, of course.

> You know, like the ones I believe Clair mentioned being made for the 
> new VMS release.  These things are dirt cheap, and pressed optical 
> disks are much less volitable than those created with heat.  Much 
> better than FIS, which depends upon not losing the system disk.

If you're buying a few pallets of servers, you're going to end up with 
more than a little trash, though.

I've largely moved to online loading for the various operating systems 
I'm dealing with — host-based InfoServer for OpenVMS, or whatever the 
platform-specific analog of that approach is for the other operating 
systems I deal with — and to USB drives for offline and other work.

USB flash drives are still a little too expensive for use as mass 
distribution media, but are really handy for their size and the ability 
to rewrite them with updates and new version.   And that I can store 
images of an entire stack of optical media onto a tiny flash drive or 
two.   (Working with 32 and 64 TB flash drives that are smaller than a 
typical USB cable connector, too.  Go figure.)

Optical media is certainly cheap.  Useful for some stuff and for server 
firmware updates, if there's no easier (and reliable) means of doing 
that.  But in general, optical is dying — everything is going online, 
whether it's content, or software, or updates, or firmware, or 
whatever...  Yes, there are still sites that lack bandwidth or that 
cannot use online access for various reasons.  They'll be using USB or 
optical for a while.

> Just another case of HP making things just about as bad as they can. 
> I'm hoping VSI realizes this.  The fact that they have commissioned the 
> mfg of optical media for the new release is promising.

VSI will undoubtedly be providing FIS images to HP for those end-users 
that want it, as well as optical media, as well as downloads.   What of 
those options the customers might order and where VSI goes for future 
options and alternatives for installations and upgrades, we shall see.



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