[Info-vax] PowerX Roadmap - Extended beyond 2020

[David Froble]

IanD wrote:
> On Sunday, September 11, 2016 at 7:55:13 AM UTC+10, David Froble wrote:
>> IanD wrote:
>>
>>> Not sure where OpenVMS is going to fit in the IoT picture, it's not lean
>>> enough or it's file system not quick enough to act as a data collector. Maybe
>>> as an aggregator?
>> You've stated things like this in the past.  You got any citations, facts, or 
>> such to back up your statements?
>>
>> While I don't have any specifics, I remember reading years ago how the size of 
>> VMS compared to weendoze, and the comparison was rather favorable for VMS.  Much 
>> smaller footprint.
>>
>> With the memory available today, I'm not sure how much a difference in footprint 
>> matters, in comparison to capabilities.
>>
>> You also got to differentiate between the OS and the utilities that come with 
>> it.  In an embedded situation, much of the utilities would perhaps not be included.
>>
>> When you mention "file system", are you really referring to the file system, or 
>> to RMS?  I can do some rather fast I/O on VMS.
> 
> When one looks at things like the Gartner report on IoT for 2017 - 2018, the
> power requirements of devices is going to need to be extremely low

Again, I ask, what has this to do with VMS.  That's a HW issue.  You might say 
that VMS doesn't run on light weight HW, today, but that doesn't mean it 
couldn't in the future.  However, just talking about VMS as an OS, perhaps it 
just might work well in some new environments.

> As to the slowness of VMS file systems, I was referring to RMS since that is
> the layer most people work with and I doubt anyone that is developing for IoT
> is going to bother with anything lower level than the native file system on
> the device / OS they are implementing on, especially since there are already
> protocols and libraries out there that people are levering for software
> development (which will still have to be ported to OpenVMS if OpenVMS is
> going to participate)

Don't know why you insist on RMS.  I haven't used it since before 1984.  If I 
was working on something new, with perhaps special file I/O requirements, then 
I'd consider how I might best do the job.

> I would be extremely surprised if anyone wrote code to go block mode I/O on
> OpenVMS for data capture in the IoT space either

Go ahead and work on that "extremely surprised" look.  You might need it.  Nor 
is block I/O the only, or even preferred, method.  Regardless, most or all 
storage has the concept of "blocks" of data.  Other things are built on top of 
that.  Even RMS.  So, what else might you be considering?

> High transaction rate environments resort to items like sharding and
> distributed DB's like NoSQL Cassandra etc as well as other techniques.

Perhaps that's not necessary, or even close to optimum.  Just because it's done 
doesn't have much to do with it being good, or bad.

> So far
> OpenVMS doesn't have anything like these technologies to my limited
> knowledge. At the device level the options are stripping but then you get hit
> with lack of redundancy which isn't going to fly in most environments and
> even stripping isn't going to save you for lots of small data writes which is
> what IoT will be primarily focused on
> 
> In time, OpenVMS might participate in some up-stream data aggregation but I
> seriously don't see it acting in the data collection part of the spectrum

Nor do I, but not for the reasons you suggest.  There is no business case for 
it, at this time.  Nor do I see much chance of the world coming to VMS and 
offering to pay for the required work to be done.  VMS will flourish if it can 
do things people need that other products can't or don't.

> The sorts of things being looked at for IoT is ballooning and the spectrum of
> what people are wanting to capture data on is growing all the time
> 
> It's going way beyond wanting to capture data out of your toaster, there is
> not much of a commercial drive behind wanting to know how your toaster
> performed last night ;-)

But there might be a need for the toaster to operate some selected time after 
the alarm goes off.  But I doubt it, unless there is also a device to take fresh 
bread from a wrapper prior to toasting it.  Bread left out overnight won't be 
very good in the morning.

> Things like Smart Concrete however and items used in public infrastructure
> are certainly prime targets. Knowing if/when public infrastructure like a
> bridge might collapse or be subject to extreme forces etc are of high
> interest.
> 
> Imagine a dam with literally 10's of 1000's of collection points embedded in
> the concrete all sampling and sending their data back. You are talking about
> a lot of small quick data packets.
> 
> There is an dam not that far from where I live. It's small but it's 66 m x
> 390 m long. If you place a sensor in the concrete at say 1 m intervals, your
> talking about 25K sensors. If you sample at even a paltry 2x's per second,
> which for embedded devices is near in a sleep cycle, that's 50K samples per
> second of data. Can RMS take in data at those rates without issue? 50K
> writers at once?
> 
> http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04618690
> 
> This was an interesting find, this is OpenVMS with SSD support. Some of the
> upper range shown here is below even the modest example I made up above for
> the dam and HP were testing 4K writes, not what IoT will be targeting, which
> will probably be under 1K writes. I really think (without proof) that RMS
> will bottleneck quickly, especially in trying to keep it's index current

If you've been paying attention, you'll recall that many storage devices will be 
doing 4K writes as a minimum.  Nor is that required for each piece of data. 
Data might first be marshaled in memory and written to storage in much more 
optimum methods.

> IoT will drive the whole data / storage industry up another notch
> 
> We will see the early adopters take the lions share of the IOT space and I
> happen to think that will be linux yet again :-(, I really don't think
> OpenVMS is in any shape at present to even begin to participate, it's having
> enough fun and games getting itself onto x86
> 
> The rebuilding of OpenVMS is going to need to address why people abandoned
> the platform in the first place, it's not just a lack of x86 support. People
> are coding for other architectures currently and are doing so I think
> primarily because of good porting tools and excellent development frameworks
> and Open source is now just not a nice to have but an essential

Wait!  I know this one.  Pick me!  Pick me!

Perhaps it started back in the 1990s when DEC was telling people to move from VMS?

Perhaps it was influenced by Compaq's dropping Alpha, for that itanic thing?

Perhaps it was influenced by HP not really wanting VMS, by Stallard saying that 
in time HP figured VMS users would move to HP-UX, and the 20 years or so of 
ignoring any meaningful VMS work, with the firing of maybe the best software 
team the world has ever seen and shipping the jobs, what was left of them, to India?

What is amazing is that VMS is still in use ....

> On a philosophical front, man seems hell bent on sampling everything possible
> in the hope of controlling his environment and ultimately planning his
> existence. I happen to think it's folly to pursuit such things to the nth
> degree but until this approach as abandoned then expect IoT to keep getting
> more wild in it's hype and promises. I mean if central banks cannot give up
> on their notion of a controlled economy (yeah, how well has that been for the
> planet!), then what hope is there that IoT will be de-hyped in the near
> future? i.e. none!