[Vms.sig-hu] OpenVMS Pearl Wednesday July 14 - OpenVMS in the Press Again this time an article in Datamation - OK for external distribution (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

---------- Továbbított levél ----------
Dátum: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 07:39:15 -0400
Feladó: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Címzett: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Tárgy: OpenVMS Pearl Wednesday July 14 - OpenVMS in the Press 
Again this time an article in Datamation - OK for external distribution




Dear Distribution lists,

My sincere thanks to all the OpenVMS Champions that were involved 
with
this article, in particular Keith Parris (OpenVMS Ambassador and Ken
Farmer of Openvms.org fame.  We can all make a difference to VMS, 
thank
you very much.

Please do distribute as wide as possible.

Warm Regards,
Sue


http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/erp/article.php/3380341

OpenVMS: An Old Dog Still Doing New Tricks
July 13, 2004
By Drew Robb


Thought by many to be long since dead and buried, the OpenVMS 
operating
system persists inside many enterprises. 

OpenVMS continues to host critical applications, and in some areas such
as disaster recovery, it is even enjoying a renaissance. 

Why? 

Despite an avalanche of hype about unsurpassed availability,
fault-tolerance and security capabilities in UNIX, Linux and even
Windows Server 2003, the OpenVMS operating system is leaving them 
in the
dust in test after test. On top of that, real world examples abound of
this unfashionable operating system standing up to the most rigorous
disaster scenarios. 

One online brokerage, for example, had a full-blown outage right before
the start of the trading day. A brand-new security guard heard an alarm
emanating from a UPS device and panicked. He hit the emergency 
power-off
button, which took down the whole site. Fortunately, the brokerage 
had a
disaster-tolerant OpenVMS cluster and a second data center 130 miles
away with a full complement of servers and complete backup of stored
data. 

''The company operations continued without a glitch,'' says Keith
Parris, a disaster recovery specialist at Hewlett-Packard Co. ''They ran
through stock market trading that entire day on a single site; powered
the first site back up after trading hours were over, and started the
data re-synchronization operations required to restore the protection of
cross-site data redundancy once again.'' 

A steady diet of similar stories is convincing Fortune 500 companies to
either look again at OpenVMS or postpone their plans to phase out this
''legacy'' system. 

After Sep. 11, 2001, for example, word spread that seven
disaster-tolerant OpenVMS clusters actually survived the ordeal. That's
why most of the big financial services houses, healthcare,
telecommunications and big government agencies are firm advocates of
OpenVMS. Commerzbank, International Securities Exchange, Veterans
Administration, Dow Chemical, Vodafone, and the U.S. Postal Service are
just some of the business that rely on it to continue operations. 

Surprisingly, the stats of this old OS are impressive. 

According to Ken Farmer of OpenVMS.org, the operating system boasts 
10
million users worldwide and hundreds of thousands of installations. It
also shows annual growth rates of 18 percent over the last few years,
and cluster uptimes surpassing the five-year mark. In terms of
performance, OpenVMS claims 3,000 simultaneous active users; almost 
2
million database transactions per minute (with Oracle); up to 96 cluster
nodes (over 3000 processors), and a full cluster capability up to 800
kilometers. 

''OpenVMS has moved almost seamlessly from VAX to AlphaServer 
system and
now to HP Integrity Servers,'' says Farmer. ''It is bulletproof,
genuinely 24/7, disaster tolerant, remarkably scalable, rock solidly
stable and virtually unhackable.'' 

The unhackable claim was validated at the DefCon 9 Hacker Conference
where OpenVMS did so well they never invited it back. It beat out NT,
XP, Solaris and Linux, and then was graded as unhackable by the best
hackers in the business. 

Surprisingly, this new-found fame is being championed by relatively few
vendors. On the hardware side, Parris says HP offers business 
continuity
products and services that begin with assessing an enterprise's needs
and objectives, and run all the way to full-service data centers and
partnerships with niche companies to serve target markets. 

International Securities Exchange (ISE) is an HP OpenVMS customer 
that
only adopted it a couple of years ago. It uses HP AlphaServer systems
running in an OpenVMS multi-site cluster environment at its New York
City headquarters, along with an HP StorageWorks SAN. 

''OpenVMS is a proven product that's been battle tested in the field,''
says Danny Friel, CIO at ISE. ''That's why we were extremely confident
in building the technology architecture of the ISE on OpenVMS
AlphaServer systems.'' 

ISE boasts the fastest trading speeds in the industry -- less than 0.2
seconds in the New York area. It also has the ability to recover quickly
from any failure as it has no single point of failure. 

On the software side, a few companies are doing very well servicing
OpenVMS clients. Executive Software continues to offer several 
OpenVMS
utilities, such as Diskeeper for OpenVMS, I/O Express, Frag Guard and
Filemaster to improve OS performance. 

''Some of our Windows customers think we recently brought out an 
OpenVMS
version of Diskeeper, but in actual fact, we built the company on
Diskeeper for OpenVMS about two decades ago,'' says Justin 
Robertson,
OpenVMS sales manager at Executive Software. ''We are seeing steady
sales of new licenses of our OpenVMS products.'' 

The reason so many big companies are adopting or sticking firmly to
OpenVMS is all about the cost of downtime. The bigger you are, the 
more
money you make. And the more critical a few minutes of downtime 
become,
the easier it is to justify a high-end system like OpenVMS. 

After all, the perils of a data center crash are horrible indeed.
According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 93
percent of companies that lost their data centers for at least 10 days
filed for bankruptcy within a year. Half didn't even wait that long and
filed immediately. 

''OpenVMS is probably the best designed and most robust general 
purpose
operating system in existence,'' says Colin Butcher, an analyst with
consulting group XDelta Ltd. ''There are quite a few complete systems
out there with uninterrupted service uptimes in excess of 15 year