[Vms.sig-hu] HP Pearl - Press article in todays Computerworld - OK for external use (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

---------- Továbbított levél ----------
Dátum: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:25:16 -0500
Feladó: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Címzett: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Tárgy: HP Pearl - Press article in todays Computerworld - OK for 
external use 

Dear Folks,
Dear Distribution lists,

Here is a great OpenVMS pearl with nice storage information as well for
today.  Please do distribute or post as you see fit.


http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801
,97032
,00.html

I am sure you will like the article written by Drew Robb, there are
excellent quotes from many of our friends and an excellent customer
testimonials from 
several customers.

I am really liking this Drew Robb person a whole lot!

Warm Regards,
Sue
_________________________________________________________
___
 


News Story by Drew Robb

NOVEMBER 01, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - OpenVMS was supposed to 
have died a
slow and unheralded death sometime during the 1990s. Labeled passe 
by
analysts and "legacy" by Windows and Unix enthusiasts in the wake of 
the
distributed computing boom of the '90s, it hardly merits a mention in
the computer press. Yet the operating system has stubbornly refused to
go away. 
Digital Equipment Corp. developed the Virtual Memory System in 1977 
for
VAX hardware as a multiuser, multitasking operating system. (Digital 
was
eventually absorbed by Compaq Computer Corp., which merged with
Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2001.) OpenVMS is a later version that runs on
VAX and Alpha and will soon be available on HP Integrity servers, part
of the company's 64-bit Itanium line. 

One of the perceived drawbacks contributing to the aura of doom 
around
OpenVMS was the operating system's tie to expensive proprietary 
hardware
-- first VAX, then Alpha. But now that Integrity servers -- which also
support HP-UX, Linux and Windows -- run OpenVMS, its users will 
benefit
from the same manufacturing economies of scale that users of those 
other
operating systems do. 

Even now, however, annual OpenVMS-related hardware, software and
services earn in excess of $2 billion annually for HP, and more than
400,000 VMS systems are still operating worldwide, according to a 
source
at the company. Those numbers are backed up by Ken Farmer at
OpenVMS.org, an independent Web site dedicated to OpenVMS users. 
He
estimates that there are 10 million users worldwide and hundreds of
thousands of installations of OpenVMS. 

  
Daniel Sanchez Reina, IT manager at Sony Corp.'s Barcelona Center for
Distribution  
"There were about 456,000 VMS systems almost a decade ago, and 
after a
slight yearly decline for a few years, the operating system is now
staging a revival," says high-performance computing guru Terry 
Shannon,
a 22-year VMS veteran in Amarillo, Texas, who wrote the original VMS
user guide. "Some of the folks who drank the Windows Kool-Aid and 
dumped
VMS for Windows are now coming back." 

When the Chips Are Down 

OpenVMS/Alpha systems are commonly used by financial services, 
health
care, manufacturing and aerospace companies, as well as utilities and
state lotteries and other government agencies. HP says that 50% of 
major
telecommunications providers and 80% of chip manufacturers use 
OpenVMS.
Users say that they've stuck with OpenVMS because the operating 
system
has provided all of the features they've needed, along with tested
stability. 

"We chose VMS due to reliability, availability, solid performance, the
fact that it's mature and proven, and the stability of both the hardware
and software," says Joseph Stenz, senior systems
programmer/administrator at Albert Einstein Healthcare Network in
Philadelphia. "There were some IBM mainframe and Windows solutions
offered, but they didn't justify moving off of Alpha." 

Einstein Healthcare will be installing a new AlphaServer ES47 this fall.
It will be the third VMS/Alpha system within the 6,000-employee campus
encompassing six major facilities. Einstein Healthcare also has over 100
Windows NT/2000 servers in an enterprise LAN/WAN (frame
relay/Asynchronous Transfer Mode) environment. 

Einstein Healthcare's Alpha-based systems include an ES47 Model 2
OpenVMS machine with two 1-GHz Alpha EV7 processors with 1.75MB 
Level 2
cache (four-processor capable) and 4GB of error checking and correcting
memory. There's also an HP AlphaServer ES47 Model 2 OpenVMS 
enterprise
server with a memory expansion up to 8GB, and an HP AlphaServer 
ES47
Model 2 OpenVMS enterprise server with memory expansion up to 8GB 
and
optional RAID memory support. 

Einstein hasn't clustered its Alpha environment, which also includes two
HP MSA1000 Fibre Channel storage arrays. 

The ES47 supports several applications that demand reliability and high
availability: Siemens Document Imaging 23.4 for billing purposes;
IDXtend 9.0 for physician billing and scheduling; and McKesson/HBOC
Trendstar for decision support and cost accounting. 

Einstein Healthcare isn't the only user gravitating toward Alpha. Annual
sales of Alpha hardware add up to several hundred million dollars,
according to HP. 

Rising to the Challenge 

A major impetus behind the VMS/Alpha revival appears to be its
performance during the Sept. 11 attacks on New York's World Trade
Center. 

According to David Freund, an analyst at IT research firm Illuminata
Inc. in Nashua, N.H., several financial services businesses in the
towers and numerous others in the immediate vicinity had OpenVMS
disaster-tolerant clusters with backup sites outside the area. Every one
of them had their operations running just moments after the 
catastrophe,
says Freund. 

Following that awful day, OpenVMS seems to have gained new 
prominence.
In some IT circles, it's now regarded as the creme de la creme in
disaster recovery and high availability, according to users and
analysts. 

"OpenVMS uptimes can be measured in years," says Stenz. "This is
certainly preferable to a culture of rebooting and disruption that
plagues other platforms due to viruses, Trojans, denial-of-service
attacks and endless patching of systems." 

OpenVMS Globalization 

It isn't just U.S. companies that are remaining on or rediscovering
OpenVMS. The operating system has maintained a strong hold 
overseas,
according to Colin Butcher, a systems architect at systems integrator
XDelta Ltd. in Bristol, England, who has 20 years' experience on 
OpenVMS
for clients such as HP, Ikea International AS, the U.K.'s air traffic
control service and the U.K. National Health Service. 

When Sony Corp. opened its Barcelona Center for Distribution (BCD) in
Spain 12 years ago, it trusted its business-critical systems to VAX/VMS.
The facility is highly automated and runs 24 hours a day, six days a
week in order to keep up with tight deadlines for the distribution of
Sony and Aiwa products throughout southern Europe. 

Daniel Sanchez Reina, BCD's IT manager, lists the usual reasons for
choosing the operating system: its robustness, reliability, powerful
features, high performance and memory management. 

"You get true clustering on VMS as the number of machines becomes
transparent to you; they work as a single unit," says Sanchez Reina.
"This is made possible by the fast, powerful and clusterwide lock
manager." 

In 1998, BCD ported VMS from VAX to Alpha. It now runs a three-
machine
Alpha/VMS cluster in conjunction with a customs system and optical
archive running on Windows 2000 Server, an HP StorageWorks EVA 
5000
storage array and an Oracle Corp. database. 

Future Plans 

How much longer will OpenVMS remain viable? 

"Our intention is to keep on using VMS until doomsday, as long as it
keeps innovating and providing the highest standards in the IT world,"
says Sanchez Reina. "We have no plans to migrate to VMS on Itanium, 
at
least for now." 

That seems to be the consensus among IT shops: Stay on Alpha, milk it
for all it's worth, and keep a close eye on developments in the
VMS/Integrity server space. 

Like BCD and many other users, Einstein Healthcare has no immediate
plans to migrate. Stenz says he has a four-year lease on Alpha 
hardware
and is unlikely to change during that period. 

"We are going to adopt a wait-and-see approach to developments on
Itanium and VMS," he says. 

Meanwhile, HP has had OpenVMS Version 8.1 in field testing on Itanium
for many months. At the recent HP World Conference, it released 
Version
8.2 for testing. The company expects the first shipments of
OpenVMS/Integrity servers either late this year or early next year. 

Few anticipate significant problems in the system or in porting
applications from Alpha to Itanium. 

"The OpenVMS APIs are so correct architecturally that the operating
system has not required substantial change since its original design in
1977," says Bob Gezelter, a software consultant in New York who has
tested the new system. "OpenVMS on Integrity is a case of seamlessly
assimilating a new processor, not using a high-tech shoehorn to force 
an
old architecture into an ill-fitting shoe." 

XDelta's Butcher has also tested Itanium/VMS. Other than needing 
some
time to figure out the console interface, he says he found that VMS
seemed to run and behave just as it always does. 

Butcher does, however, express some reservations. "Performance 
might be
an issue at the moment," he says. "The big Alphas probably outperform
the larger Itanium boxes, but that will change with time." 

Few Alpha users are in a hurry to make the switch. 

"After seeing where the market and technology direction is heading, we
may adjust our direction after the third year of our lease," says
Einstein Healthcare's Stenz. "Depending on how things play out on
Itanium 64 and VMS, we could very well then migrate to that 
architecture
or extend/augment our ES47." 



Robb is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. Contact him at
drewrobb at attbi.com