[Info-vax] VSI VMS Community License Program - PAKS Arrived today

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <rh3mls$4ko$1 at dont-email.me>, "John H. Reinhardt"
<johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> writes: 

> > This lack of volume shadowing PAKS is really a bad deal.  I'm
> > dissapointed.  I was pretty excited to finally upgrade.  I just work
> > on porting various opensource packages in my spare time for fun,
> > exploring OpenVMS administration tasks, and other silly constructed
> > problems.  But I'm not going to put any time into a system that
> > doesn't have mirrored system drives, and disk mirroring for backups.

The questions are if there is a real problem with people abusing the 
hobbyist licenses for commercial use and if there will be no clustering 
in the community license in the long term whether a clustering license 
would be affordable for the average hobbyist.  I have no problem paying 
a reasonable fee.

> I agree with you.  With that said volume shadowing is available on the
> Alpha platform which is where most Hobbyists will be.  

And, from the looks of it, will stay, at least those who bought some 
commercial licenses back in the day.  :-|

> When it comes to Integrity there is the option of using an HP Smart
> Array card which has hardware RAID-0, 1, 5 and JBOD.  There is thee P600
> card which works in Integrity systems with PCI-X busses and SATA drives.
>  Or the P410 which is PCI-E and SATA.  For the likes of the RX2600 and
> ZX6000 with PCI-X and SCSI there are the Smart Array 5300 and 6400
> series.  These cards are relatively cheap on EBay.  I bought two P410
> cards for $13 and a 1GB flash backed cache for one was another $12.  The
> older SA6400 cards are creeping up in price but still can be had for
> under $50 usually. 

OK, it protects against a physical disk failing, but other than that, 
not much to do with HBVS.