[Info-vax] Special deals on Tape Drives

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 3/5/2022 7:41 PM, David Turner wrote:
> And what about security?
> When you are on the cloud, you are almost certainly running OpenVMS on 
> an emulator

Until 9.2 is ready: yes.

> And in most cases that emulator is running on Windows (M$)
> Yes, granted, AlphaVM-Pro and Charon-Alpha runs on linux but I can 
> almost guarantee you that to run it in the cloud
> it will require Windows.

Why?

Most cloud is Linux (even MS cloud Azure is more Linux than Windows).

> So then, a zeaous IT manager, to maintain security, patches the hell out 
> of your cloud server
> Server stops running

It could happen.

But it could also happen that your own server got hit by a crashing
airplane.

Neither seems to happen much in real life.

> How hard is it to maintain your own server?
> 
> Or ... should we start thinking about buying a building inland close to 
> a FIber trunk and offer REAL VMS boxes
> for cloud instances?
> Would anyone here trust us to provide, assuming we follow security 
> protocols etc per CO-LO sites requirements??????

You would rank high in trust.

But it will be difficult to be competitive.

People expect ability to create new instances immediately. At
least outside the VMS world the expectation is to be able to
create thousands of new instances immediately.

And then there is the business case. 5-20 cents per hour
is not much. You need a lot of servers to be able to
pay for 1 person. According to internet gossip then Google
has 28000 servers per sysadm.

Arne