[Info-vax] Distributed Applications, Hashgraph, Automation

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-02-22 03:14:26 +0000, Kerry Main said:

> 
> Perhaps I am a dinosaur, but in the good ole days this was called 
> capacity planning combined with CoD.

Adding whole systems is a little different than licensing and 
unlicensing some cores.  iCAP / CoD was a way to transiently license 
and incrementally add cores into an SMP instance.  It probably would 
have been preferably for DEC and Compaq to have been able to use iCAP / 
CoD as a way to ship out fewer permutations of server systems and 
preferably with most or all of the server boxes shipped out configured 
fully populated with cores.  But that clearly didn't happen, 
particularly given the economics of adding cores back in that era was a 
whole lot different than multi-cores are today.

Wouldn't surprise me to see iCAP / CoD return for a few folks using 
OpenVMS, but it's still not particularly close to temporarily spinning 
up multiple guests and clustering them, as an example.   iCAP / CoD 
also doesn't help with apps that have conflicting system resource 
requirements (network ports, for instance), or that have conflicting 
system parameter requirements or conflicting username or software 
version requirements, etc.

> Having stated this, I would far prefer VSI focus on solving issues for 
> traditional enterprise Customers and not that razor thin upper 
> stratosphere layer of Customers that need 1,000 servers for only an 
> hour.

Outside of the installed base, traditional enterprise customers aren't 
all that interested in OpenVMS.   Most server customers aren't 
interested, for that matter.  That's something VSI will be working on.

Making it (much) easier for new folks to spin up some new servers for 
prototypes or some testing servers for developers might get some new 
deployments, too.   Even from existing sites.

Thirty years ago, it would have been really handy to spin up a few 
MicroVAX systems as transient front ends or transient statistical 
quality control servers for testing parts of the factory network or to 
deal with transient loads, but that sort of ease and speed and 
flexibility just didn't exist back then.   And no, iCAP / CoD isn't a 
help here, because app-stacking different apps or multiple copies of 
the same apps onto the same boxes tends to disrupt things.



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