[Info-vax] Marketing ideas for VSI ?

[Scott Dorsey]

On 12/16/2018 3:55 AM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <mailman.3.1544908232.23319.info-vax_rbnsn.com at rbnsn.com>,
> Kerry Main <kemain.nospam at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> OpenVMS Clustering is simply a high end and solid implementation of a shared
>> disk (everything) cluster. Other implementations of this same shared disk
>> cluster strategy are z/OS and Linux/GFS2.
>
> Do these other systems have other things which I consider essential to
> clusters?

The absolute best followon to the vaxcluster was Transarc's DCE/DFS.  The
folks at Transarc took the Andrew Filesystem from Carnegie-Mellon and Kerberos
from MIT, and integrated them into a clustering system with true distributed
filesystems, universal authentication, the ability to fork off jobs on other
systems and batch queue management that allowed you to request particular
system attributes and have the job kicked off on the first machine available
with those attributes.

DCE/DFS took the vaxcluster notion and ran with it, making it into something
more powerful than DEC dreamed of.  It was appropriate for workstation
environments, server environments, and mixed environments.  People could
sit down at any workstation or ssh into any server and their files were all
there, and the loss of any system didn't cause the loss of files.

DCE/DFS ran under a huge variety of different Unix systems.  You could put
it on your Irix box, your Solaris machine, or your AIX or OSF/1 machine.

So, of course, IBM had to buy it and kill it.  It's gone now.  Sorry.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."