Search Results for: openvms

In its initial concept, OpenVMS (then VAX/VMS) sought to provide the functionality and capabilities of a mainframe-class system at a small fraction of the size and cost, while at the same time providing higher levels of reliability and integrity. These goals were achieved by what has become OpenVMS' hallmark, an emphasis on integrity and architectural leverage. Note: This is an entry to our OS Contest.

"According to George Cook of WVNET this cluster has been up for over 10 years. WVNET is the West Virginia Network, a dynamic service organization providing telecommunications and computing services within West Virginia. WVNET was created in 1975 to provide central computing facilities and wide-area network communications linking its 'central site' computing resources in Morgantown with the campus computing systems at most of the colleges and universities throughout the state. The cluster consists of an Alpha 4100 (with four 533Mhz CPUs) running VMS 7.3-2; a VAX 6000-630 running VMS 7.3; and four DEC 3000 workstations running VMS 7.3-2."

From HP World Magazine: "At press time, Hewlett-Packard planned to announce in January its long-awaited version of OpenVMS that runs on Itanium-based Integrity servers. We spoke with Mark Gorham, vice president for HP’s OpenVMS Systems Division. He is responsible for worldwide engineering, customer satisfaction, quality, partner management and business management of the OpenVMS Systems product portfolio."

I just returned from spending three days with the OpenVMS stream of the HP - Intel Developer Forum in Mahwah, New Jersey. The over-subscribed OpenVMS stream was extremely successful, and provided an advanced view of what OpenVMS users can expect from the soon-to-be generally released OpenVMS for HP Integrity Servers. Read article...

When people hear mention of the OpenVMS operating system and Alpha-based servers, they typically think ''old'' and ''legacy''. And then they think about buying something much more modern. It might appear very strange for a company to buy a brand new OpenVMS operating system. Yet that's exactly what the IT department did at the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia.

Two articles on OpenVMS, one at ShannonKnowsHPC and one at ITPlanet, read on.

OpenVMS, Hewlett-Packard's high-end operating system, got its first European outing this week on the company's high-end Intel-based SuperDome server.

Total Cost of Ownership for Entry-Level and Mid-Range Clusters by Techwise Research. A detailed analysis of the total cost of ownership of three different RISC-based server clusters including HP OpenVMS, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. Read the whitepaper here.

"Everyone is talking about Windows clusters, Unix clusters and Linux cluster. But all we are saying, is that the 20 year-old architecture of clustered OpenVMS can teach these whippersnappers a thing or two. At OpenVMS.org there's a report about an OpenVMS cluster which handles the major processing for the Greater Amsterdam Police and naturally is required 24/7." Read the story at TheInquirer.

HP announced the evaluation release of OpenVMS version 8.0 for Itanium-based HP Integrity servers. This release is for selected ISVs including BEA, Cerner, Computer Associates, Brooks Automation, Attunity, Synergex, Legato and TECSys. These partners have begun porting their applications to the OpenVMS Industry Standard 64 (OpenVMS I64) operating system, utilizing the HP rx2600 server. In addition, HP partners have committed porting over 450 applications to this new version to date.

Anders Østergård writes "According to this newsgroup message, the OpenVMS OS (former DEC, now owned by Compaq) is now able to boot and operate on Intel's 64-bit Itanium-platform. OpenVMS was originally developed for the legendary VAX-architecture and has evolved for into a stable but anonymous OS for more than 25 years."

The long-awaited port of HP's OpenVMS to Intel's Itanium is set for full release next year, as are plans to move Tru64 Unix features into HP-UX. The announcements came as HP introduced its new Alpha servers, based on the EV7 chip, plus a strategy to migrate Alpha users to Itanium servers over the next three to eight years. Plans are to sell new Alpha systems through 2006 and support them through 2011.

VMS Software, the company developing OpenVMS, has announced some considerable changes to its licensing program for hobbyists, and the news is, well, bad. The company claims that demand for hobbyist licenses has been so high that they were unable to process requests fast enough, and as such, that the program is not delivering the “intended benefits”. Despite this apparent high demand, contributions from the community, such as writing and porting open-source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on their forums, “has not matched the scale of the program”. Now, I want to stop them right here. The OpenVMS hobbyist program was riddled with roadblocks, restrictions, unclear instructions, restrictive licensing, and similar barriers to entry. As such, it’s entirely unsurprising that the community around a largely relic of an operating system – with all due respect – simply hasn’t grown enough to become self-sustainable. The blame here lies entirely with VMS Software itself, and not at all with whatever community managed to form around OpenVMS, despite the countless restrictions. So, you’d expect them to expand the program, right? Perhaps embrace open source, or make the various versions and releases more freely and easily available? No, they’re going to do the exact opposite. To address not getting enough out of their community, they’re going to limit that community’s options even more. First, they’re ending the community program for the Alpha and Itanium (which they call Integrity, since it covers HP’s Integrity machines), effective immediately, so they won’t be granting any new licenses for these architectures. Existing licenses will continue to work until 2025. Effective immediately, we will discontinue offering new community licenses for non-commercial use for Alpha and Integrity. Existing holders of community licenses for these architectures will get updates for those licenses and retain their access to the Service Portal until March 2025 for Alpha and December 2025 for Integrity. All outstanding requests for Alpha and Integrity community licenses will be declined. ↫ VMS Software announcement This sucks, but with both Alpha and Itanium being end-of-life, there’s at least some arguments that can be made for ending the program for these architectures. Much less defensible are the changes to x86-64 community licensing, which basically just come down to more bureaucracy for both users and VMS Software. For x86 community licenses, we will be transitioning to a package-based distribution model (which will also replace the student license that used to be distributed as a FreeAXP emulator package). A vmdk of a system disk with OpenVMS V9.2-2 and compilers installed and licensed will be provided, along with instructions to create a virtual machine and the SYSTEM password. The license installed on that system will be valid for one year, at which point we will provide a new package. While this may entail some inconvenience for users, it enables us to continue offering licenses at no cost, ensuring accessibility without compromising our sustainability. ↫ VMS Software announcement The vibe I’m getting from this announcement is that by offering some rudimentary and complicated form of community licensing, OpenVMS hoped to gain the advantages of a vibrant open source community, without all the downsides. They must’ve hoped that by throwing the community a bone, they’d get them to do a bunch of work for them, and now that this is not panning out, they’re taking their ball and going home. That’s entirely within their right, of course, but I doubt these changes are going to make anyone more excited to dig into OpenVMS. All of this feels eerily similar to the attempts by QNX – before being acquired by BlackBerry – to do pretty much the same thing. QNX also tried a similar model where you needed to sign up and jump through a bunch of hoops to get QNX releases, and the company steeped it in talks of building a community, but of course it didn’t pan out because people are simply not interested in a one-way relationship where you’re working for free for a corporation who then takes your stuff and uses it to sell their, in this case, operating system. This particular mistake is made time and time again, and it seems VMS Software simply did not learn this lesson.

Tadpole Technology was a small British computer company formed in 1983 and originally based out of Cambridge, who amongst other things manufactured VMEbus boards for industrial applications, along with military spec, small server and laptop computers. During the 1990s and perhaps most famously, Tadpole produced a range of high-end laptops that were based on the SPARC, PowerPC and Alpha RISC architectures, running Solaris, AIX and OpenVMS respectively. A previous series of articles followed the restoration of a SPARCstation IPX, noting how Sun UNIX workstations were a much-coveted object of geek desire in the early 1990s. However, Tadpole laptops which boasted a RISC processor were a great deal rarer than such workstations, with an almost legendary status and you were lucky if you even got to see one in the flesh. In this series of posts, we’ll take a look at restoring a third-generation Tadpole SPARCbook, which was introduced in 1994 at a starting cost of $10,950 — which with inflation would make the price tag equivalent to almost $20,000 or £15,000 in today’s money! SPARC hardware in general has a special place in my heart, but the Tadpole SPARC laptops are in a whole league of their own – mythical beasts I know exist, but which are incredibly rare, and even more stupidly expensive when they come up for sale than even regular SPARC hardware. I’d not give up my firstborn for one, but we can talk about a kidney. Or two.