Posted on 07/13/2004 9:25:47 AM PDT by George Smiley
Technology: Servers
by Colin Butcher
Tuesday 13 July 2004
Hack-proof and crash resistant - have you discovered the OS world's best-kept secret?
OpenVMS offers unmatched robustness for business-critical apps
OpenVMS (originally known as VMS) is probably the best designed and most robust general purpose operating system in existence. It is also one of the least-known and appreciated, simply because it works quietly in the background without drama, unlike its noisier and more fussy siblings and offspring.
You will typically find OpenVMS in any environment that is serious about high availability, disaster tolerance, security, performance and scalability, especially when running real-time applications. Users include banks, stock exchanges, healthcare, manufacturing, aerospace, online billing, lotteries, chip manufacturing, oil and gas production, power stations, railways, government and secure public sector applications. In short, anything that really has to work.
Uptime measured in years
OpenVMS system uptimes are often measured in years - it being a point of honour to avoid rebooting and causing disruption unless utterly essential.
There are clusters out there with uninterrupted service uptimes in excess of 15 years, even if individual machines have been occasionally rebooted, upgraded or replaced. That is a far cry from today's "reboot and restart" culture, where users seem willing to tolerate disruption to service - indeed, they have come to expect it. If only they were aware there is a better way. OpenVMS is one of the industry's best-kept secrets - those in the know would not consider using anything else for business-critical systems.
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There's an OpenVMS hobbyist program that provides free licenses for noncommercial use.
Desktop-suitable systems can be found on eBay cheaply, and there are secure web browsers and webservers available for free as well.
Can you believe my company has a customer who is asking us to port one of their flagship systems away from OpenVMS?
Sheesh!
Old hacker lore...
/john
Can I play Call of Duty and UT2K4 on it?
LOL!!!
You are welcome to start up a GNUish effort towards porting it, though.
(now we'll see if anybody knows what that is...)
I know of two companies in the area that did the whole VMS-to-NT migration and were so disgusted at the decrease in reliability which occurred that they did a 180 and went back to VMS.
Quite old, probably predates version 5.
And as for VMS being full of hacks, far from it.
None of that buffer overflow vulnerability nonsense which infests Windows and various Unices.
As an operating system with a real-time pre-emptive scheduling mechanism
No way is it going to be as real-time as a true real-time OS. It may be fast, but it's not going to beat VxWorks for real-time processing. RTLinux probably also beats OpenVMS here. Horses for courses because I wouldn't want to be using either of those on a mainframe either.
"OpenVMS system uptimes are often measured in years..."
Exactly. The limiting factor on uptime for my system seems to be the reliability of the UPS.
And the hackers and viruses don't have a clue about how to mess with VMS. I had a prolonged attack once by someone trying to guess the password for root...
I've got an old Kaypro; compiled a few programs with Turbo Basic.
Shared-everything clusters.
*sigh* another Operating System thread...
OK I'm game! the other ones suck! I love Windows!
There's never been a virus written for CP/M, either. I knew I wuz holdin' onto them old diskettes for somethin'...
One of the main instigators did a very funny writeup of what went on there [VMS was called "cool and unhackable " by the judges].
Windowes NT 2000 is the single best operating system Microsoft ever made. I have not had a crash in YEARS. Tell me which company did Vax-to-NT and then switched back? I don't believe it. The tools that are available to program on NT are ALONE worth the switchover. And once switched (by competant programmers) NT is relaible AND stable platform.
I smell BS
My guess is that the number of problems associated with a given operating system is basically proportional to installed base and the desirability of bringing down a corporate monolith.
If you focus the resources that have been unleashed against Microsoft on any other product, you'll see many more weaknessed exposed. Where's the fun in crashing 3 Texas Instruments computers in Guam when you can send viruses to half the civilized world? If another O/S held the position of prominence that MS enjoys, I'd bet that there would be an equivalent attack on it.
I don't know enough about VMS and am ready to learn. How does this differ from IBM's Parallel Sysplex clustering? That has shared memory and queues, and transactions can happen on any node of the cluster.
Give it to me. I'll crash it or make it unstable enough to require a reboot. Sorry, NT and the hardware it runs on just cannot compete with mainframe OSs. Even Linux running on IBM's mainframes is virtualized so, among other reasons, a crash won't affect anything else (I don't think they trust it to actually run a mainframe yet).
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