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HP Gives OpenVMS New Life and Path To X86 Port
dcblogs (1096431) writes Hewlett-Packard has changed its direction on OpenVMS. Instead of pushing its users off the system, it has licensed OpenVMS to a new firm that plans to develop ports to the latest Itanium chips and is promising eventual support for x86 processors. Last year, HP put OpenVMS on the path to extinction. It said it would not validate the operating system to its latest hardware or produce new versions of it. The move to license the OpenVMS source code to a new entity, VMS Software Inc. (VSI), amounts to a reversal of that earlier decision. VSI plans to validate the operating system on Intel's Itanium eight-core Poulson chips by early 2015, as well as support for HP hardware running the upcoming 'Kittson' chip. It will also develop an x86 port, although it isn't specifying a timeframe. And it plans to develop new versions of OpenVMS.
As a qualified Computer Systems Necromancer I've been disappointed by the lack of demand for combine technical aptitude with an ability to work with the undead creatures of nightmare. HP's plans are an exciting development for me and my colleagues!
The Vomit-making system returns from the dead in zombie form!
There are applications that VMS does very well in. Clustering under VMS is unsurpassed by anything else.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I used to have an account on DEC's Alpha test servers, and remember testing out VAX/VMS back in the day.
Seeing OpenVMS being pushed for Itanium products though... that's running one doomed OS on another doomed and believed extinct platform.
I don't really see where they're going to make a profit on this, at least enough to survive until they can port it over to a modern x86 architecture.
After they do THAT, I can see it being viable, especially if they provide legacy binary support. There's still a lot of iron running VMS, and most of it, while necessary infrastructure, is running on hardware that I can't imagine can last much longer.
But they'd better get the port and compatibility layer rock solid before they try selling it, or we're in for some painful times (brownouts, water service outages, etc).
"I am surprised that people still want to use OpenVMS. "
Most Railways electronic Dispatching Systems run on OpenVMS, even the latest versions.
It's a bit like the Space Shuttle, you can't change anything without a crapload of red tape.
The only thing I don't understand in the article, is that they have been running it on x86 systems for 10 years.
OpenVMS is still used where high availability is needed but rarely at the front of a stack visible to users. Were I work, it's the back end, core application server (OpenVMS 8.4 on Integrity blades in a C7000 chassis), that without much effort stays up in the five or six 9's range, we use 2 or 3 CPUs worth of processing out of 16 and nobody complains about performance. Two of us easily survive 24/365 on-call because there is rarely a call. Changes from the software vendor or our in house programing staff are weekly if not daily, so it's not a static environment. We have no intent or desire to move to something else, there is little incentive: it would take 10 years to convert and certify, and several million dollars that we could us elsewhere (the study was done about 4 years ago when we moved from Alpha to Integrity). All that said, there is a lot of work needed to move to OpenVMS to X86-64: I don't expect anything for 5 years.
banks and insurance companies still use OpenVMS, which has clustering and filesystem features GNU/Linux and Unix have yet to evolve. Why do you mention Debian, it has no ability to run OpenVMS software
No there is no x86 code port, you might be thinking of emulator, which is fine if you want to emulate a microVAX workstation
Somehow I fondly remember VMS running on HP hardware back in the 90s. A local university had a dialup guest account. It was fun. Going back to the DOS prompt after a finished session always made me hurt and long for something better than DOS.
"Somehow" is that you're hallucinating. VMS didn't run on any HP hardware until 2002. Prior to that it only ran on DEC and Compaq hardware.
I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of systems out there running on it because the application it runs is essential, runs perfectly fine and would cost billions to replace.
Sometimes it's not smart to replace something just because you can or it's outdated. If it serves it's purpose, the code is essentially error free because it's been in use so long and the systems work fine there is little need to replace them. I'd argue it's better at that point to keep the original software and build new ways to access it through external applications than it is to recreate the server application.
Because you're trying to establish a niche. Everyone's running on x86 or amd64, you need to set yourself apart. Since the Itanium-based boxes, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, tend to sell in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars range, then perhaps this is an attempt to bring the OS back into the supercomputing market where it might actually find interest. From HP's perspective, since they're the main seller of Itanium-based systems, it's also a way for them to use something that they have significant money invested in and may not be selling as well as it should.
Thing is, it's going to come down to applications. At my work they're convinced that the i-Series/AS/400 is the devil's work, and they're wanting to replace it with Microsoft-based servers, and that's even with good recordkeeping and financial software that's reasonably up-to-date. If VMS is really as dead as it sounds, then there's going to be a dearth of applications for it, and with competition from other large "big iron" machines, large POSIX systems, and even from Microsoft virtual-cluster systems, it's going to be hard to justify getting in on VMS again. If there are any existing VMS users with applications that they haven't been able to replace then those would be the first customers, but there are only so many Rand Corporations and National Weather Services out there.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Because they're not at all the same thing, they're not even close. There's only a superficial resemblance, very high level concepts only. Also the concepts they have in common are very often very common in many operating systems! I think the article was written by someone who'd only ever seen VMS, NT, and Unix and failed to realize just how much variety there really was out there.
(and Cutler was called in originally to do OS/2, which is also not like VMS)
Declare a platform dead one year, support it again the next year once customers had time to think about migrating away. Product strategist at HP seems to be a very nice job.
OpenVMS is the most mature microkernel OS out there. You can have flaky hardware, flaky drivers, flaky software, and it'll just keep running perfectly, restarting whatever services as need, as often as needed. You can't make it panic.
It also has more advanced clustering than most people believe exists... A server's full state is replicated in real-time, so a hardware failure doesn't even need to be handled by applications, they just think everything has been running for the past decade...
OpenVMS has ridiculous uptimes, over a decade, even on heavily utilized systems. Far longer than anything else out there.
http://www.uptimes-project.org...
http://www.osnews.com/comments...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And when you want a SpaceX rocket, why not go buy a Tesla car instead?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
OpenVMS has run on Itanium since Itanium was launched. This isn't a port to a new OS, it's just updating the existing support for the newer chips.
The x86 port story is quite funny though. The 80386 launched with four protection rings specifically to make porting VMS from VAX easy. DEC never did the port (or, if they did, never released it publicly) and instead designed their own chip, the Alpha as the successor to the VAX. The Alpha just had two protection rings, which required a little bit of restructuring of the VMS design. Now, x86-64 has only two protection rings (unless you count HVM and SMC modes as rings), and is being considered as a porting target for VMS...
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There may only be so many, but you do not need many to keep a product line going. It sounds like that is all that is going on here, they have niche customers who for whatever reason would prefer to keep their VMS infrastructure going rather then rewriting it and HP is planning to offer a path that has less worries about compatible replacement hardware.
The expectations of most programers and consumers have shifted to not consider uptime all that high a priority. It is generally only older shops in conservative industries (or conservative departments within, like payroll) that this level of fault tolerance is valued.
Or put another way, the domains where fault tolerance is highly valued are already so stable people do not think about it, while domains that people generally interact with just take failures as a fact of life.
You're wrong, and the poster to whom you're replying was more accurate than you.
Dave Cutler was the lead architect for Windows NT, after being headhunted, along with his team leads, from DEC to MS.
He did not work on OS/2 as you claim. He was given the OS/2 v3 project, which is to say Portable OS/2. (IBM kept OS/2 v2, which was the 386 version and which got released under that name and then later had its version number incremented. OS/2 2 was 386-only and IBM's efforts to produce a version for the POWER processors failed.)
OS/2 v3 was the CPU-independent version, little more than a plan, an outline and some header files when Cutler got it. He finished it and made it work, building it on the Intel i960 CPU, codenamed the N10. But MS wanted to distance itself from the OS/2 name and trademark.
So, when the new kernel was running and stable enough, along with its POSIX subsystem, it got a Win32 subsystem, and MS attached the Windows name to it.
Windows on N10. N10 is pronounced "en-ten". They took the initials: NT.
Windows NT is the product of Dave Cutler's labours, and it takes many inspirations from VMS.
No, it's not the same OS. No, it's not directly compatible. But there is a strong connection there.
Windows NT -- and Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8 -- are the hybrid offspring of VMS and OS/2, as mated together by VMs' architect Cutler.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
The fact that you still have those LaserJet 4s may be why they considered selling it. Hard to make a profit when customers don't need to buy more printers.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
You are only middlin' right. WNT is like VMS as far as the general design of the kernel goes - but most of what makes VMS the wonder that it is is missing. No versioning file system, no DCL (DEC Command Language), no Distributed Lock Manager, no clustering (WNT clustering isn't even in the same league as VMS clustering), no logical name support, no RMS (Record Management System), no sophisticated Batch and Print environment, the list goes on and on. Without these things, WNT may schedule tasks and manage memory more or less like VMS does, but does not deliver the utility and user experience that make VMS legendary.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.