[Info-vax] Marketing ideas for VSI ?

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Friday, 14 December 2018 16:21:09 UTC, Jon Schneider  wrote:
> Thanks Stephen.
> 
> that's about as good an explanation as I have ever seen.
> 
> Jon

Thanks for joining in, hope you enjoy it :)

As Dave Froble just said, choose the right tool for the job
at hand. Which may mean knowing something about some of the
less visible tools, regardless of whether they are old or new.
Also bear in mind that hardware has changed and software sales
channels have changed since the early days of VMSclusters.

The term "cluster" has been so degraded since the 1980s
and 1990s when DEC introduced the original (VMS)clusters, 
based around a then market-leading OS designed from day 1 to 
support clusterwide shared storage (which could also be shared
or replicated across sites if appropriate), and a clusterwide 
distributed lock manager, and on top of those fundamentals, 
lots of other things which the OS and applications could 
choose to use (or to not use). 

Maybe the term VMScluster should have been trademarked back 
in the day. But it wasn't. Anyway...

You could have an active-active loadsharing VMScluster 
(if required, active-active-active...) or active/standby, 
you could basically do lots of scalable available robust
stuff reasonably cost effectively, in comparison with what 
else was on the market at the time. You could start small 
and grow, rather than do everything up front. You could 
have safe clusterwide shared readwrite access to clusterwide 
storage (files and blocks). All of these in a way that no 
other product family quite matched. 

The "clusters" word (just the word, not the concepts) 
became so fashionable that two tin cans and a piece of 
string, sharing nothing and achieving not much, could 
be marketed as a cluster, because clusters were A Good 
Thing (like clouds are a good thing this week, right). 

And if two cans and a piece of string was a good fit, 
why not use it if the price is right. 

Variants on the VMScluster theme included the cluster
software eventually developed for DEC's Tru64 UNIX,
and to a lesser extent the "cluster" software 
eventually released for various flavours of Windows NT 
and successors.

The Tandem NonStop folks even developed a NonStop 
Clusters for SCO UNIX product, which was interesting
but even less visible than VMSclusters were (and 
very different).

So, when wanting to refer to (or ask about) 
VMScluster-specific benefits and features, bear in
mind that clusters means different things to different
people, e.g. a Hadoop "cluster" is not like a VMScluster,
and nor is a Windows SQL Server cluster.

There's a fairly basic Wikipedia article on VMSclusters,
but it may lead to places  more suited to what its 
readers are looking for.

As with the world of Linux, everyone's got their own
opinion about what's best (even before the requirements
are properly identified), and fragmentation of products,
ideas, and even of the audience can be a problem.

One size does not fit all. That's the main thing to bear
in mind. In addition, newer does not *necessarily* mean
better - as you've just discovered with Google Groups,
and as many folks are discovering with anti-social 
networks in general.

Best of luck. Have a lot of fun.