[Info-vax] Comment on the future of OpenVMS

[Michael Kraemer]

Neil Rieck schrieb:

 > 4) Itanium blades (running OpenVMS) are making new inroads into
 > semiconductor manufacturing.

The question is whether these are really new customers
or just old customers replacing ageing VAXes and alphas
with native equipment. Maybe they've found the source
code for their apps to recompile and thus don't need to
resort to emulations.

> 
> I am probably the wrong person to be answering this question, but
> here's by 2-cents worth: Blades provide a more compact way to install/
> maintain CPU equipment in either a computer room or the factory floor.
> The cards are all hot-swappable (compare this to my AS-DS20e where you
> need to open/maintain it in a traditional way; it's really tough
> adding memory DIMMs because you are working on a dark mobo at the
> bottom of the chassis). They also seem to support virtualized network
> connections so that adding more blades to the rack doesn't require
> adding new network connections.
> 
> Maybe someone a little more knowledgeable should pick up where I just
> left off :-)

That's the idea. If one needs throughput by deploying many machines,
blades offer a rather compact solution for a server room.
Why one would choose this for factory control is beyond me,
because the chassis are rather bulky themselves.