[Info-vax] OT: news from the trenches (re: Solaris)

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Wednesday, 11 March 2015 11:06:59 UTC, seasoned_geek wrote:
> Sadly, putting VMS on x86 will ensure it a market life of minutes, not years. It is a special OS and needs a special kick booty chip. The earlier comments in this thread about Solaris running faster and better on SPARC T5 should provide a guiding light, but it won't. By all accounts Solaris should have been long gone from the market by now, but, a certain segment of the market cannot make do with Wal-mart quality chips so Solaris continues.
> 
> VMS also serves a market segment which cannot make do with Wal-mart quality chips. Porting VMS to Wal-mart quality chips ensures its demise. Porting VMS to the Wal-mart quality x86 line is like feeding chocolate to dogs. They beg for it, but for them it is fatal.

It's not The Chip Inside(tm) that makes a cheap x86 system a nasty
system, especially now Intel have finally abandoned that ridiculous
IA64 thing in favour of designing and making their own AMD64 clones
(x86-64 is of course an architecture which Intel HQ had earlier said
was impossible to do, but times change...).

People have been continuing to buy VMS largely *despite* IA64, not
*because* of IA64.

Porting VMS to AMD64 with support on a suitably qualified subset of 
HPQ servers, the same servers already found in most of the world's
enterprise-class datacentres [1], removes one of the obstacles to VMS's
continued survival. That announcment alone indicates that VSI are
to be taken reasonably seriously. Announcements are just a start.

A completed x86-64 port also removes one of the barriers to entry
for outfits that may just want a low cost low hassle way to try
kicking the tyres of a VMS system - no longer need there be any
need to try to scrounge an IA64 box from HP or a reseller, when
the hardware involved is likely the same hardware that is bread
and butter to these organisations. That may of course mean that
now isn't a good time for a reseller to be dependent on margins
on VMS-specific hardware, but any reseller still in that situation
has been heading for trouble anyway.

Lots of other things to think about for VSI and VMS.

[1] I see earlier this week HP announced a deal with Foxconn for 
"Cloudline" servers which are said to appeal to Facebook/Google/etc -
basically a commodity low end server with none of the Proliant value
add, a box that has little consequence if it fails because no one
really cares about lost or corrupt data at FB or G, and you can throw
the box away when it fails because they're bought by the thousand
on a 2year lifecycle anyway. I'm not sure why that will now be an HP
market just by adding an HP badge and HP margins. More relevantly,
massive but lightweight scalability historically hasn't been the VMS
market. It probably still isn't, but my crystal ball is bust again.