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.”
Interview: Mark Gorham, HP Vice President for OpenVMS
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Don’t get me wrong, OpenVMS is a great OS – but the rest of the industry is dumping Itanium….just in time for their big announcement.
I really wish they would open up “OpenVMS” a bit and allow it to be ported to AMD64 and perhaps even Power5.
This has the smell of the typical slow-death that Compaq/Digital/HP has been famous for….
hehe .. I agree
Not gonna happen. The VMS OS is mainly to sell their chips.
Hp coinvented Itanium.
HP also just dumped their Itanium development team. HP no longer has a real stake in the sale of Itanium chips.
IA-64 has some really good advantages over x86. It is designed to do better. However, there are some design flaws that should have been addressed before the chip was ever introduced but I think the design is great for high scale large systems. Intel chose the path of from high to low while AMD chose low to high with compatability. Would you get some better performance while retaining compatability or get a lot better performance while having to report all your apps?
Sun, IBM, others thru weight behind AMD64 because they were afraid of IA-64. They have done great with bad PR against IA-64.
I think HP was cutting their costs and their cancelations were due to non-selling servers.
I’m a fan of POWER now.
That when DEC released the Alpha, HP spent a lot of dosh on an ad campaign “Who Needs 64Bit?” ( IMHO, pur unadluterated FUD). Then they get into bed with INTEL and ITANIC is the result of Billions of $$$$$ spent and it is a bit of a three legged dog. They (HP) killed the PA-RISC and followed Compaq and let the Alpha wither & die a slow painful death. Now thay don’t have a real server chip at all yet just a few years ago, they were in the forefront of chip development.
I wonder how long Carly can keep on letting the business slowly die? They can’t rely on the printer biz for much longer especially if the forecasts that people like Dell are going to take up to 50% on the printer biz from them.
I doo feel sorry for those of my former DEC colleagures who still work for HP. Many of them are just biding their time until they retire.
The one jewel in their crown is OpenVMS but HP bods can hardly spell it let alone sell it.
Sad.
HP still has a vested interest in Itanium. Part of their deal with Intel was a reduced cost of buying IA64. So where other people may have had to pay $100 for buying 1 CPU, HP would only have to pay $65. I don’t know the exact percentages, but suffice to say that it was considerable. HP still needs a chip for OpenVMS – it is true that many companies are moving away from OpenVMS, but there are still many other “high-availability” companies that need the reliability and clustering mgmt that OpenVMS provides. There still are some companies out there that will pay a hefty amount of money for the “reliability” that OpenVMS provides
Stock Exchanges, Airlines, Semiconductor manufacturers, etc…
It’s a real shame, OpenVMS could have been something great…sure there are all the usual arguments but in the end HP isn’t giving out the right signals about OpenVMS. Porting an end-of-life OS to an end-of-life architecture makes me question what they are trying to achieve.
One can make a lot of comments about “Shoulda, coulda, woulda …”, however, they inevitably miss the point. Mis-quotations, and mis-citations, are another matter entirely.
The comments about “the low-end” systems are incorrect. What has happened, is two things: the low-end keeps getting lower, and two, that HP discontinued the IA-64-based workstations. It did not discontinue the use of direct graphics displays on a server, and indeed, OpenVMS 8.2 runs very happily on an rx2600 (and smaller) with a graphics display. Whether it is a workstation or a server is a question of terminology, not functionality. For that matter, increasingly even developers are using machines that they are adjacent to, so the presence of a graphics head is even more irrelevant. Most communications are either X-windows, RDP (on Windows), or TTY (ssh, telnet, etc.) to remote machines, either in the next cubicle, room, or continent.
For that matter, not to get off topic, the Microsoft announcements that I have seen referred to “XP Professional”, not “Windows Server 200x”. Put another way, at the present time, the desktop market, which is heavily centered on a VERY LOW price point, is not presently for IA-64. This has little to do with developers of non-desktop applications, nor for that matter with applications which need ever increasing computing abilities.
The citations about “abandoning Itanium” represent similar mis-readings of the announcements, as I have previously commented on in an earlier article on OSNEWS (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9191). Last time I checked, the details of the deal were private. I strongly suspect that the deal involved substantial Intellectual Property payments, as well as other terms. The term “abandon” was at best inappropriate. I would use the term “re-alignment”, and the most correct characterization, without access to insider information, is a re-adjustment in the relationship based upon needs going forward.
Last time I checked the public information, OpenVMS was experiencing growth, not shrinkage. The new release, which I have commented on at http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=04/12/07/0088240, is ready for serious use, as of several months ago.
OpenVMS 8.2 on Alpha and Itanium (and the soon to be released 8.2 on VAX) is a highly secure, stable, and reliable OS, and is an excellent base technology.
For those interested in trying OpenVMS on a hobbyist basis, the cost is essentially US $ 0, through HP’s Hobbyist program, administered by the user community. The Hobbyist www site is http://www.openvmshobbyist.com.
– Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com