DON'T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE!
The last sales of the Alpha family will occur in 2006.
The VMS rule of thumb is that a system will be supported for at least five years after its last sale date.
Hardware support in all likelihood will continue for a long time after that.
Hardware support is still around for most MicroVAXes, VAXstations and most of the VAX family!
For those who are interested in seeing what HP's plans are for the future of VMS, here is a link to HP's OpenVMS Roadmap which is the publicly available plan (Links at the bottom of the page have presentation source)
For those with applications that run on the VMS thinking about their future, it looks like we have about 5 to 6 years to rethink if we want to run on an ITANIUM based VMS platform...( what HP calls the INTEGRITY PLATOFORM) or maybe to upgrade ( I don't think it is the right word, so lets use the word -- MOVE ) to a different Operating System platform altogether ??
Hard choices. Also hard to determine how much longer VMS will live ....I don't know if there are any new installations out there at all.
Bite your tongue for even THINKING that.
There are things I know that I can't say publicly.
VMS sales increased this year over last year.
The percentage of growth would, quite frankly surprise you. (It surprised me.)
A training vendor with whom I spoke said that this year they did more VMS training than in the last several years combined, and a good deal of this was at new sites.
9/11 opened a lot of corporate eyes about business continuity, disaster recovery and high availability computing.
Link to Success story about Commerzbank, located 100 yards from the WTC. Link to longer article in .pdf
There were several companies located *in* the WTC that ran OpenVMS and whose systems kept going thanks to the robustness of VMS clustering with systems located at remote sites.
Some years before 2001, Credit Lyonnais' data center in France BURNED DOWN, and they didn't lose any data.
The eternal monthly Microsoft patch cycle is opening corporate eyes as well.
Corporate IT departments have to test each month's patch releases with whatever their suite of software products is and then deploy the patches du jour.
If you've got more than fifty or so systems, by the time you manage to do that, another round of patches is released.
And that cycle becomes exteremely expensive in terms of down time and personnel expense, not to mention the burnout factor in the people who have to do all that stuff on nights and weekends.
I watched a major federal agency spend WEEKS and heaven knows how many thousands of man-hours eradicating a worm.
It's called Total Cost of Ownership, boys and girls.
And one plus that you haven't mentioned: OpenVMS running on Superdomes will allow you to have one system that runs multiple OS's simultaneously.
The main VMS page is located at http://www.hp.com/go/openvms
I don't work for HP, but I *am* a VMS bigot.
LOL! I was THERE! I was walking near the Notre Dame, when a frenchman started yelling "Fume! Fume!" (phonic: FooMay!)
I follwed the smoke and came to the area where the building was in flames. Later found out there were some *reasons* for the fire...ahem.
Here is the answer to the question ....
How much longer will OpenVMS remain viable?
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,97032,00.html
"Our intention is to keep on using VMS until doomsday, as long as it keeps innovating and providing the highest standards in the IT world," says Sanchez Reina ( Manager of Sony Corp's Barcelona Center for Distribution (BCD) in Spain ). "We have no plans to migrate to VMS on Itanium, at least for now."
That seems to be the consensus among IT shops: Stay on Alpha, milk it for all it's worth, and keep a close eye on developments in the VMS/Integrity server space.
Like BCD and many other users, Einstein Healthcare has no immediate plans to migrate. Stenz says he has a four-year lease on Alpha hardware and is unlikely to change during that period.
"We are going to adopt a wait-and-see approach to developments on Itanium and VMS," he says.
Meanwhile, HP has had OpenVMS Version 8.1 in field testing on Itanium for many months. At the recent HP World Conference, it released Version 8.2 for testing. The company expects the first shipments of OpenVMS/Integrity servers either late this year or early next year.
Few anticipate significant problems in the system or in porting applications from Alpha to Itanium.
"The OpenVMS APIs are so correct architecturally that the operating system has not required substantial change since its original design in 1977," says Bob Gezelter, a software consultant in New York who has tested the new system. "OpenVMS on Integrity is a case of seamlessly assimilating a new processor, not using a high-tech shoehorn to force an old architecture into an ill-fitting shoe."
XDelta's Butcher has also tested Itanium/VMS. Other than needing some time to figure out the console interface, he says he found that VMS seemed to run and behave just as it always does.
Butcher does, however, express some reservations. "Performance might be an issue at the moment," he says. "The big Alphas probably outperform the larger Itanium boxes, but that will change with time."
Few Alpha users are in a hurry to make the switch.
"After seeing where the market and technology direction is heading, we may adjust our direction after the third year of our lease," says Einstein Healthcare's Stenz. "Depending on how things play out on Itanium 64 and VMS, we could very well then migrate to that architecture or extend/augment our ES47."