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VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wait-they-just-noticed-that-now? dept.

Snot Locker writes "An informative piece at ComputerWorld talks about how VAX users are anticipating the costly migration to more modern systems. Several noteworthy tidbits, including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium and the tale of VAX systems that have not had a reboot in 6 years!"

4 of 463 comments (clear)

  1. 6 years of uptime? by inkdesign · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seems to me that 6 years of uptime will have most likely saved the company about as much money as it would cost to migrate to an updated system.

  2. 6 year uptimes... by NerveGas · · Score: 5, Interesting


    About a year ago, we switched data centers, and had to power down our rack of x86 machines running Linux. A couple of them had redundancy in hardware (power supplies, RAID arrays, etc.), but the majority of them, working as a load-balanced web farm, had no redundancy at all.

    Out of the rack of machines, nearly all of them had been up for the full two years that they'd been in the data center. Of the few that hadn't been up the entire time, *one* had a power supply die, the others were shut down for hardware upgrades.

    Now, a year later, all of the machines are still up and running. I really don't have any doubt that a fair number of them would have achieved 6-year uptimes, had they been left in place long enough.

    steve

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  3. Y2K meant NOTHING to VMS users by decsnake · · Score: 5, Interesting

    VMS uses a 64 bit date/time format that rolls over sometime slightly after the Sun runs out of hydrogen, so you're right, Y2K was pretty much a non-event to VMS users, even less than it was to Unix users. Unix users better start worrying about that Y2038 problem pretty soon...

  4. Story told by our DEC rep by Ktistec+Machine · · Score: 5, Interesting
    (Remember DEC?)

    DEC sales guy, to military contractor: "You're not our only customer, you know!"

    Military contractor: "No, but we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons."

    Seriously, VMS is/was great. I started working on VMS systems in the early 80s, did my doctoral research on them, and ended up managing a bunch of them for a while, before our department migrated to Un*x. I like to say that VMS is to Un*x as Python is to Perl. One is the ultimate in organization, the other is the ultimate in freedom.