[Info-vax] "x86 has only a few years left in the market place"

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-05-21 14:38:23 +0000, seasoned_geek said:

> On Thursday, May 17, 2018 at 12:18:46 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> 
>> Wasn't a whole lot of call for too much and too high-end with OpenVMS, 
>> based on the last decade or two...
> 
> There was always call, it was never delivered. At it's height when DEC 
> still was DEC and we were pushing into data centers with massive blue 
> iron we kept failing the minimum throughput tests at the companies who 
> wanted the cost savings and robustness of VMS but could not/would not 
> sacrifice throughput.

DEC at its height was a rather different era of computing, and most of 
thirty years ago.  Given that DEC wasn't able to profitably build big 
iron that met those throughput requirements?   The so-called VAX 
mainframe didn't do all that well in the market, after all.

Any of the DEC attempts to compete for customers with IBM hardly seems 
relevant to VSI and OpenVMS in 2023 and 2028.   That particularly given 
that in the intervening years between DEC at its height and VSI was an 
era when the platform qualification effort for existing Superdome iron 
wasn't viewed as sufficiently profitable to warrant the effort.

n.b.: There was no native HP/HPE SD1 boot support for OpenVMS.  HP/HPE 
SD1 support for OpenVMS via HPVM and HPUX, and OpenVMS on that stack is 
no longer being qualified and updated.  OpenVMS was never qualified on 
HP/HPE SD2.

VSI will eventually have the option of qualification on HPE SD-X and 
ilk, if the VSI folks are inclined and if there are enough folks 
willing to purchase.  Those are likely going to be some expensive 
software licenses, too.

And I'm exceedingly skeptical that there'll suddenly be notable call 
for support of HPE SD-X class gear.  Not the least of which is because 
processors and I/O and the rest of servers are substantially faster 
than in the DEC era.

In the past decade or two, I'm not aware of a great deal of call for 
high-end servers with OpenVMS.  Folks in recent years have been 
maintaining their existing OpenVMS installations.  Most of which 
apparently don't want to pay for SD1- or SD2-class servers and the 
related qualification costs.  Maybe we'll see OpenVMS qualified on HPE 
Apollo or some of the other similar boxes.  But I'd expect that the 
vast majority of the VSI OpenVMS server market will be two-socket 
servers, and quite possibly even those part-populated.  Computing 
server density has gone up slightly since the VAX era, after all.




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