[Info-vax] Itanium Kittson lives on?

[Kerry Main]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Info-vax [mailto:info-vax-bounces at info-vax.com] On Behalf Of
> johnson.eric--- via Info-vax
> Sent: 19-Feb-16 8:13 AM
> To: info-vax at info-vax.com
> Cc: johnson.eric at gmail.com
> Subject: Re: [New Info-vax] Itanium Kittson lives on?
> 
> On Friday, February 19, 2016 at 7:09:32 AM UTC-5, Neil Rieck wrote:
> 
> > I'm not surprised. I'm not sure what is in the water in Scandinavia
> >  (the people who brought us: Linux, MySQL, and MariaDB) but
> > I know there are a lot of OpenVMS systems running there.
> > The same is true for continental Europe.
> 
> I'm curious as to your guesses as to how many firms, clusters or nodes
> there are
> that are still in use in Scandinavia or Europe in general.
> 
> EJ

After the DEC-Compaq-HP mergers and numerous transitions from many
different internal Customer call and contract handling systems (each major 
Region had their own), no one (incl HP) really has a good handle on how 
many Custs are using OpenVMS (or any other OS for that matter). After 
each transition to a new company or to a new system, existing Customers 
not presently on contract were often not entered in the new systems. 

In addition, HP has no view into partners Customer databases where a lot
of OpenVMS was sold in the past as well. Same applies to HP-UX as well 
btw, so the issue was not unique to OpenVMS.

A challenge for OpenVMS was that since it was so reliable, many Custs 
dropped their support contracts to save money. 

Some of these Cust's have lots more OpenVMS than people think. As
an example, a big lottery in Canada was planning to upgrade to Integrity.
When we (HP) went in, we knew they had a few systems in prod (less than 
5), but when we looked at all of their dev/qa/test environments the total 
number was 45 unique Alphas.

Many Customers quietly depend on OpenVMS in many mission critical
environments and work in the background with local OpenVMS 
Ambassadors and/or local ISV / Partner support resources. 

A challenge for VSI will be to re-establish contact with the many Cust's
currently using OpenVMS, but not presently on contract with HP. 
Hint - there are many out there :-)

Re: Europe OpenVMS Cust's - just a few examples (there used to be a 
Customer Success page on HP website, but it looks like it did not (yet?) 
survive the move to the new HPE web site.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/servers/integrity/evolution/alphaserver.html 
http://tinyurl.com/Acision-Video (also has link to US based Accuweather 
blades on OpenVMS testimonial)
(scroll down on left to click on videos)
 "Acision uses HP OpenVMS running on HP Integrity servers & HP Blades 
to help deliver more than half of the world's text and multimedia messages 
and serve three quarters of all video mail users. Acision and OpenVMS."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX6PFvK06qc 
"Published on Apr 19, 2013
This is one of the quotes from Johann Stiglbrunner, Head of Lutz OpenVMS 
Department, appearing in the new success stories now available. Europe's 
largest home furnishings retailer, Lutz is a two billion euro enterprise that 
delivers more than three thousand orders every day. To compete successfully 
in the face of rapid growth and acquisition, Lutz relies on HP OpenVMS 
systems, which enable the company to flexibly adapt to new business 
opportunities and address the demands of a constantly evolving marketplace."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2kiRlXjZSM 
eCube IDE Testimonial - "Leading Israeli Credit Card Company modernizes 
their development environment and engineering processes to deliver higher 
quality code and improved productivity with greater agility for the future."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgoaYMi_zTU  (OpenVMS Oracle RAC)
"Fraport is the operator of one of the biggest hubs in Europe, and within 
the hub we have many transfer passengers and their baggage, and it's very 
important that we have very good infrastructure for the baggage system. 
We need every day high reliability and also good quality."

http://www.stanq.com/4AA0-4293ENW.pdf 
Fraport upgrade to Integrity blades - Today, the baggage transportation 
control system runs on four high-availability clusters of HP Integrity BL860c 
server blades in three separate locations-all running the HP OpenVMS 
operating system.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms_nhsbt_jan2010_4aa1-3908eew.pdf 
"UK National Health Service - Blood & Transplant Builds World's Largest 
Centralised Blood Supply Management System on HP Integrity Servers and 
HP OpenVMS"

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/V2/getpdf.aspx/4AA5-8776ENW.pdf?ver=1.0 
May 2015 - Rob Perez, Head of FX Development, ICAP Electronic Broking
"Our use of OpenVMS goes back more than 15 years with the inauguration 
of our FX trading platform. We selected OpenVMS because it was and 
continues to be the leading distributed OS. OpenVMS provides robust 
reliability and DR capabilities and built-in networking, as well as the tools 
to customize components of the system to effectively solve our unique
architectural challenges."

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/wmv/SATURN.WMV 
Saturn Music retailer in Germany depends on OpenVMS Integrity server
clustering


Regards,

Kerry Main
Kerry dot main at starkgaming dot com