Ian Chivers wrote:
> As stated in an earlier email we are updating
> our book. We have coverage of some common operating
> system commands in dos, linux/unix and vms.
>
> How many people still develop under vms?
>
> Cheers
>
> Ian Chivers
I often develop under VMS, now known as OpenVMS, as a paid
consultant. There are still a lot of firms, particularly those for
which stability and availability are critical concerns, that host their
mission-critical systems under OpenVMS. As an example, one of my
customers decided two years ago to host the server side of a major new
client-server manufacturing system on OpenVMS for those reasons. A
recently published article by Drew Robb in IT Management says that
OpenVMS currently has an 18% annual growth rate.
OpenVMS is still very much alive and under active development,
support, and marketing by its new owner, HP. Current development
efforts involve porting it from the Alpha chip to the Intel IA-64
Itanium chip.
If you want to be on a mailing list of new developments and other
interesting information about OpenVMS, you should send an e-mail to
Susan Skonetski <[log in to unmask]> of HP OpenVMS Marketing.
A few days ago, I received from Susan Skonetski copies of two
published articles (IT Management and Computer Weekly) about the current
state of OpenVMS. Here are copies, for those who are interested.
[Begin IT Management Article]
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/erp/article.php/3380341
OpenVMS: An Old Dog Still Doing New Tricks
July 13, 2004
By Drew Robb
Thought by many to be long since dead and buried, the OpenVMS operating
system persists inside many enterprises.
OpenVMS continues to host critical applications, and in some areas such
as disaster recovery, it is even enjoying a renaissance.
Why?
Despite an avalanche of hype about unsurpassed availability,
fault-tolerance and security capabilities in UNIX, Linux and even
Windows Server 2003, the OpenVMS operating system is leaving them in the
dust in test after test. On top of that, real world examples abound of
this unfashionable operating system standing up to the most rigorous
disaster scenarios.
One online brokerage, for example, had a full-blown outage right before
the start of the trading day. A brand-new security guard heard an alarm
emanating from a UPS device and panicked. He hit the emergency power-off
button, which took down the whole site. Fortunately, the brokerage had a
disaster-tolerant OpenVMS cluster and a second data center 130 miles
away with a full complement of servers and complete backup of stored
data.
''The company operations continued without a glitch,'' says Keith
Parris, a disaster recovery specialist at Hewlett-Packard Co. ''They ran
through stock market trading that entire day on a single site; powered
the first site back up after trading hours were over, and started the
data re-synchronization operations required to restore the protection of
cross-site data redundancy once again.''
A steady diet of similar stories is convincing Fortune 500 companies to
either look again at OpenVMS or postpone their plans to phase out this
''legacy'' system.
After Sep. 11, 2001, for example, word spread that seven
disaster-tolerant OpenVMS clusters actually survived the ordeal. That's
why most of the big financial services houses, healthcare,
telecommunications and big government agencies are firm advocates of
OpenVMS. Commerzbank, International Securities Exchange, Veterans
Administration, Dow Chemical, Vodafone, and the U.S. Postal Service are
just some of the business that rely on it to continue operations.
Surprisingly, the stats of this old OS are impressive.
According to Ken Farmer of OpenVMS.org, the operating system boasts 10
million users worldwide and hundreds of thousands of installations. It
also shows annual growth rates of 18 percent over the last few years,
and cluster uptimes surpassing the five-year mark. In terms of
performance, OpenVMS claims 3,000 simultaneous active users; almost 2
million database transactions per minute (with Oracle); up to 96 cluster
nodes (over 3000 processors), and a full cluster capability up to 800
kilometers.
''OpenVMS has moved almost seamlessly from VAX to AlphaServer system and
now to HP Integrity Servers,'' says Farmer. ''It is bulletproof,
genuinely 24/7, disaster tolerant, remarkably scalable, rock solidly
stable and virtually unhackable.''
The unhackable claim was validated at the DefCon 9 Hacker Conference
where OpenVMS did so well they never invited it back. It beat out NT,
XP, Solaris and Linux, and then was graded as unhackable by the best
hackers in the business.
Surprisingly, this new-found fame is being championed by relatively few
vendors. On the hardware side, Parris says HP offers business continuity
products and services that begin with assessing an enterprise's needs
and objectives, and run all the way to full-service data centers and
partnerships with niche companies to serve target markets.
International Securities Exchange (ISE) is an HP OpenVMS customer that
only adopted it a couple of years ago. It uses HP AlphaServer systems
running in an OpenVMS multi-site cluster environment at its New York
City headquarters, along with an HP StorageWorks SAN.
''OpenVMS is a proven product that's been battle tested in the field,''
says Danny Friel, CIO at ISE. ''That's why we were extremely confident
in building the technology architecture of the ISE on OpenVMS
AlphaServer systems.''
ISE boasts the fastest trading speeds in the industry -- less than 0.2
seconds in the New York area. It also has the ability to recover quickly
from any failure as it has no single point of failure.
On the software side, a few companies are doing very well servicing
OpenVMS clients. Executive Software continues to offer several OpenVMS
utilities, such as Diskeeper for OpenVMS, I/O Express, Frag Guard and
Filemaster to improve OS performance.
''Some of our Windows customers think we recently brought out an OpenVMS
version of Diskeeper, but in actual fact, we built the company on
Diskeeper for OpenVMS about two decades ago,'' says Justin Robertson,
OpenVMS sales manager at Executive Software. ''We are seeing steady
sales of new licenses of our OpenVMS products.''
The reason so many big companies are adopting or sticking firmly to
OpenVMS is all about the cost of downtime. The bigger you are, the more
money you make. And the more critical a few minutes of downtime become,
the easier it is to justify a high-end system like OpenVMS.
After all, the perils of a data center crash are horrible indeed.
According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 93
percent of companies that lost their data centers for at least 10 days
filed for bankruptcy within a year. Half didn't even wait that long and
filed immediately.
''OpenVMS is probably the best designed and most robust general purpose
operating system in existence,'' says Colin Butcher, an analyst with
consulting group XDelta Ltd. ''There are quite a few complete systems
out there with uninterrupted service uptimes in excess of 15 years.
[End of IT Management Article]
[Begin Computer Weekly Article]
http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=131808
Many thanks to OpenVMS Champion Colin Butcher who wrote this article.
Warm Regards,
Sue
__________________________________________________________________
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.
OpenVMS runs on three hardware platforms: Vax (32-bit Cisc), Alpha
(64-bit Risc) and Itanium (64-bit Epic). A system disc from any Alpha
will boot and run on any other Alpha. The same goes for Vaxes, including
software-emulated Vaxes. Likewise for the latest HP Integrity servers.
OpenVMS will boot and run on anything from an RX2600 to a Superdome.
This scalability and interoperability derives from the excellent
internal architectural structure of OpenVMS.
The bigger machines (Superdome, GS1280, etc) can be hard-partitioned to
make a group of hardware resources inaccessible from other partitions.
OpenVMS also supports soft partitions, using a mechanism known as
Galaxy. This allows CPU resources to be dynamically reallocated between
soft partitions to meet changing workloads.
Partitioned systems are often used for server consolidation. Extending
that by dynamic reallocation of hardware resources leads us to adaptive
computing.
Pioneer of clustering
OpenVMS pioneered clustering in the mid-1980s and is still the standard
to which all others aspire. It provides a "shared everything" model with
minimal cluster state transition latency if a cluster member fails.
This model allows all the resources in a cluster to be used
concurrently, not in a failover or standby mode. There are many
disaster-tolerant, split-site clusters in operation that continue to
provide uninterrupted service without loss of data, even when whole
sites fail. The largest supported OpenVMS cluster is 96 nodes - where
each node can be a large multiprocessor system.
Cluster interconnects can be anything from the original CI hardware to
Gigabit Ethernet, or even Galactic memory in a soft-partitioned system.
Many operations staff find using better-known operating systems
frustrating in comparison to OpenVMS. The issues are primarily poor
availability and reliability, combined with the difficulty of obtaining
performance analysis and fault log data for capacity planning and fault
analysis purposes. OpenVMS is generally seen as the gold standard for
such things.
For instance, OpenVMS comes with essential tools and facilities (most
prominently, image back-up and restore) built in, rather than having to
be added on. In most cases, you simply install it, configure it for your
workload, add your applications and system-management utilities
(typically DCL command files), then run it as a black box operational
environment.
As an operating system with a real-time pre-emptive scheduling
mechanism, OpenVMS has always been capable of handling complex real-time
events. The interrupt-driven I/O subsystem design aims for minimal
latency, so OpenVMS is capable of exceedingly high, sustained I/O
throughput, especially with V7.3-2 on Alpha EV7 (Marvel) systems. It
will be interesting to see how V8.2 on Alpha and the Integrity server
range compare when it is released.
As a software development environment, OpenVMS provides a rich set of
features and programming languages, debug facilities and operating
system services.
A key aspect of the OpenVMS design is the "calling standard" that allows
code modules to be written in any language and code to call routines
written in other languages. This is a great aid to application
portability and, of course, to debugging code.
It is the architectural structures that make it easy to optimise memory
use with shared image libraries and also to deliver software
compatibility between versions of the operating system without the need
to recompile and relink applications.
Although off-the-shelf package-based products may be in fashion,
designing and implementing your own is the only way to utilise the
capabilities of the underlying platform.
This is especially true for high-availability environments where the
features have to be built into the application and need to be reflected
throughout the system architecture. Time spent investigating, testing,
customising and deploying a package can often be better spent developing
your own product layered on top of a system designed around the minimum
components that fit the overall application architecture.
OpenVMS also has excellent security. A hacking contest was held at the
DefCon 9 conference in July 2001, where the winner was not NT, XP,
Solaris, Linux or BSD. It was VMS, which was rated "cool and
unhackable".
Not legacy nor unfashionable
OpenVMS generally appeals to those who take pride in using computer
systems to do a job effectively and reliably, rather than those who want
to live at the bleeding edge with the newest (and often immature)
technology.
Probably the biggest challenge for OpenVMS to overcome is its lack of
public visibility. This has led to the perception of it being old, or
legacy, or simply unfashionable, whereas in fact it is still under major
development. This includes secure and stable implementations of
commonly-used software such as Apache, Java, Mozilla, Perl, Python and
XML.
End-users, system managers and software developers want and need to see
sufficient advertising of OpenVMS' strengths and capabilities so that
those at board level can realise that in many cases it is a better and
more cost-effective way of delivering secure, ultra-reliable and
scalable business-critical systems than the more fashionable and
better-promoted alternatives.
Now the new HP has begun to settle down, and with the porting work to
the Integrity server range almost complete, the expectation is that we
will see the many benefits of using OpenVMS-based systems being actively
promoted. OpenVMS has a long life ahead of it, once the current and
future generations of decision-makers realise what it can do for their
businesses.
Colin Butcher is technical director of XDelta and board member of the HP
User Group
[End of Computer Weekly Article]
--
Sincerely,
Craig T. Dedo
17130 W. Burleigh Place E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Brookfield, WI 53005-2759 Voice Phone: (262) 783-5869
USA Fax Phone: (262) 783-5928
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
(1759)
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