[Info-vax] Updated HPE/VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 Marketing Brochures

[clairgrant71 at gmail.com]

On Tuesday, September 20, 2016 at 4:08:38 PM UTC-4, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <1bd0ceb5-2752-4bb4-bbb3-8a8928c13289 at googlegroups.com>,
> clairgrant71 at gmail.com writes: 
> 
> > Alpha is a very difficult issue for us. We have people coming to us looking
> >  for Alpha support
> > but the only way we can provide it at this time is for the customer to 
> > upgrade to a VSI release.
> > If you have been running on 7.3-2 for 10+ years do you really want to 
> > disturb that environment?
> 
> Some stayed at 7.3-2 since they thought that the writing was on the 
> wall.  If they are still on Alpha, they might want to go to x86, which 
> presumably means via 8.4.

Some might; we'll see. VMS on x86 will be 9.x
> 
> > People seem to think that just because there are thousands of Alpha systems
> > out there that they
> > should become VSI customers and make us lots of money. 
> 
> I don't know how many Alpha customers there are compared to Itanium 
> customers, but both are potential x86 customers, since that is the only 
> future for VMS.  It would be nice for the Alpha folks to skip Itanium 
> completely.  Going from 7.3-2 to 8.4 isn't that big of a deal, 
> especially if there is no change in the software run.

Best estimates are that there are 3 times as many Alpha/VAX users as Itanium.

It is not the release of VMS that is the big deal, it is the moving of applications
to a new different architecture. You either recompile/relink or let a translator run 
our Alpha image. That's a lot of disruption if you have been humming along for
many years.