[Info-vax] What would you miss if DECnet got the chop? Was: "bad select 38" (OpenSSL on VMS)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-10-07 15:31:31 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> Of course, you could pick a google or Amazon exception, but technology 
> has improved significantly since the 90's and even early 2000's.
> 
> We now have 64 core (2.5Ghz) blade servers with TB's of local physical 
> memory. Next year, this memory will be non-volatile. We have extremely 
> fast SAN based SSD flash drives.
> 
> So how many applications out there need more than 96-150+ 64 core 
> servers in a multi-site cluster - each with say 1.5TB of local physical 
> memory?

Because those apps can end up getting reworked to spread the load 
around, and can or do get wedged behind HBVS or FC or some other 
bottleneck.

I've chased enough of these over the years, and would really like a way 
to "bridge" OpenVMS clusters more easily.   Without that, I end up 
right in the middle of what you've pointed at.

Continental-scale OpenVMS clusters don't have official support — and 
aren't particularly desirable — though folks still want or need the 
lower latency that geographic distribution of servers can and does 
provide.

Stark is likely going to be hitting these same sorts of issues as the 
environment scales up, both for geographical distribution of the data 
and related synchronization, and as the general load increases.

> A biggie I would like to see is Enterprise Directory / LDAP being used 
> as a SSO mechanism between multiple clusters and standalone systems 
> i.e. "cluster of clusters concept". Think about how AD does not only 
> SSO for distributed Windows environments, but also resource control 
> (group policies etc).

Get rid of the local login mechanism.   Entirely.   Deprecate and 
remove the classic SYSUAF, RIGHTSLIST and related.   Make the old 
SYSUAF and the ~20 other files used for clustering go the way of 
DECnet; into deprecation and eventual removal.  Move to local LDAP for 
all that, to a local LDAP store with modern password hashes and 
capabilities, and transparently to networked LDAP when distributed 
logins are desired or needed.


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