[Vms.sig-hu] Excellent Press Article HP's Disaster Tolerance - in Enterprise Planet- OK to Forward Externally (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

---------- Továbbított levél ----------
Dátum: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 09:52:36 -0400
Feladó: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Címzett: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Tárgy: Excellent Press Article HP's Disaster Tolerance - in Enterprise 
Planet- OK to Forward Externally

It is very nice to see an article like this acknowledging capabilities
that OpenVMS has had for years and that our customers have come to 
know
and trust.

Many thanks to OpenVMS Ambassador Kevin FitzPatrick for Forwarding.
Special thanks to Colin Butcher and Ken Farmer.

Warm Regards,
Sue




http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/storage/features/article.php/339694
1


OpenVMS Gets a Case of the DT's
August 18, 2004
By Drew Robb


It's not uncommon for alcoholics to suffer from the DT's (Delirium
Tremens - severe alcohol withdrawal characterized by agitation,
violence, anxiety, insomnia, muscle cramps, tremor, delusion,
hallucinations, and fever). But whoever heard of an operating system
(OS) suffering from the malady? Well, the OpenVMS OS apparently has 
an
acute case of the DT's. Though in this instance, we are talking about
disaster recovery. 

Disaster Tolerance (DT) is a concept that extends beyond disaster
recovery (DR). Traditional DR focuses on minimizing downtime then
picking up the pieces and reconstructing any lost data afterwards. 

DT, on the other hand, has the goal of continuing to operate despite a
disaster so bad as to result in total destruction of an entire
datacenter. This is made possible by placing servers and storage at 
each
of two (or more) sites that are separated geographically by a safe
distance. Essentially you have to keep the contents of that storage
identical at each of the sites at all times. 

Expensive? Yes. But if an hour of downtime costs you millions of
dollars, or could result in loss of life, the price is worth paying. 

That's why big companies in healthcare (Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical
Center, and Cerner and IDX, who write software for hospitals),
transportation (Fraport AG is the Frankfurt airport), finance (Bank
Austria Creditanstalt and Commerzbank), as well as manufacturing and
government are willing to spend big to achieve disaster tolerance. And
OpenVMS is the OS of choice when it comes to disaster-tolerant 
clusters.


"You will find OpenVMS in any environment that is serious about high
availability, disaster tolerance, security, performance and scalability,
especially when running real time or near real time applications," said
Colin Butcher, an analyst at UK-based research firm XDelta limited. 

An early example of the effectiveness of OpenVMS is DT came in the
mid-nineties in Paris when Credit Lyonnais survived a fire at its
headquarters. Its multi-site OpenVMS Cluster safely mirrored its data at
a second site, while the UNIX folks reportedly had to run into the
burning building to pull the most-recent backup tape cartridges
containing their data from the tape drives. 

The big test of Disaster-Tolerant OpenVMS clusters, however, came on
9/11. At least seven big financial services companies (including Cantor
Fitzgerald and Commerzbank) avoided an IT collapse by using the OS 
for
DT. 

Take the case of Commerzbank's data center, located 100 yards from 
the
World Trade Center. When the attack came, power was lost in the
immediate area. The datacenter had its own UPS and generator so
operations were able to continue. Eventually, however, dust and debris
clogged the AC, and the temperature in the computer room rose to 104
degrees Fahrenheit. 

Result: all the disks and most of the servers failed. Fortunately,
Commerzbank had a disaster-tolerant OpenVMS cluster with another 
copy of
data 30 miles away in Rye, NY kept synchronously up to date. Their
cluster continued to operate. One OpenVMS Alphaserver system even
continued to operate in the 104-degree heat, processing Treasury
transactions using the disks at the Rye site. 

But two data centers may not be enough. What if both get taken out? If
the stakes are high enough, three data centers may be called for. One
European lottery system, for example, transacts so much cash that it 
has
implemented an OpenVMS disaster-tolerant cluster configuration 
designed
to survive simultaneous loss of two out of three of its datacenters and
still continue operating uninterrupted with zero data loss. This is done
by keeping three copies of data identical at each of three separate
datacenters, and using a server at a fourth site to provide a
tie-breaking vote for the quorum scheme in order to have automatic,
unattended failover. 

Brisk Sales 

According to Ken Farmer of OpenVMS.org, the OS now has 10 million 
users
and hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide. Granted that 
many
of those users may be hold outs from the old days, refusing to give up
the tried and trusted system in favor of the newest and most 
hyped "high
availability" system. But according to a source at HP, the company is
doing a brisk $2 billion a year in VMS-related hardware and software
sales. Although exact numbers are unavailable, Alpha hardware alone
accounts for several hundred thousand dollars a year. And that number 
is
increasing. 

Why? Like a veteran Michael Jordan in his last few years at the Chicago
Bulls, OpenVMS can still outperform the young bucks. The stats are
impressive: 3,000 simultaneous active users; almost 2 million database
transactions per minute (with Oracle); up to 96 cluster nodes (over
3,000 processors), and a full cluster capability up to 800 kilometers. 

So it's no wonder that HP is investing heavily in OpenVMS (HP inherited
VMS from DEC via Compaq). HP is now porting the OS to Itanium (due 
late
this year, early next year) and seems to be positioning it within the
storage landscape as a high end DT solution. 

And with numbers like those, it won't be long before some of the
marketing and PR types among OpenVMS' competitors are suffering 
from DT,
alcohol induced or otherwise.