[Info-vax] Re; Spiralog, RMS Journaling (was Re: FREESPADRIFT)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-06-19 15:32:54 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> You keep trying to bring this back to what OpenVMS has or has not.

No, I keep bringing this back to dragging OpenVMS forward, and toward 
supporting competitive features.

Because — with the much-vaunted features and benefits you keep pointing 
to, and various of which I quite agree with  — OpenVMS has ended up 
where it is now.

Because OpenVMS is comparatively hard to use, hard to develop for, hard 
to configure, hard to install, and such.   In five years, tools on 
other platforms are only going to be better.   Some of those vaunted 
features — that wonderfully cautious I/O and the record-oriented design 
for file access — makes applications slow.   That'll take some thought, 
quite possibly involving replicated servers and other 
wholly-new-to-OpenVMS approaches.  Some of those vaunted and valuable 
features — clustering, HBVS — need a configuration and management 
overhaul and a re-think — e.g. integrated distributed authentication 
client and server, a logical volume manager, vastly easier 
configurations, etc.   Some features — like the current PKE security 
"design" — should be copied wholesale into NLA0: and reimplemented and 
integrated into OpenVMS, rather than being ad-hoc and grafted on.  This 
also includes better tools for your app-stacking and for app isolation 
— sandboxes/jails — and better tools for local and hosted deployments — 
provisioning, etc. — and a whole host of other areas that are expected 
or will be expected over the next five or ten years.  Better patch 
support, DVCS support, integrated relational database support, etc.

You keep telling me OpenVMS is great.  For a number of apps, it is.   
But there is very little here that's presently going to gain the 
attention of new sites and wholly new applications, and the x86-64 port 
is just a down payment on the effort ahead of VSI here.   There's a 
tremendous amount of work involved here for VSI and also for end-users 
to start adopting current and new OpenVMS features, and the competitive 
and the comparative operating system platforms and tools are themselves 
always being updated.  Often substantially.

You keep telling everybody about "blue oceans".   Maybe VSI heads that 
way.   But that blue ocean will inherently have to be far different and 
far more advanced than what OpenVMS offers today.  Hopefully much 
simpler, faster, cheaper, too.




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