Rumours of the death of VMS…
- Article 70 of 77
- Information Age, May 2005
After 30 years, the venerable VMS operating system is showing no signs of going away. How is it holding on to its position at the heart of some of the world's most mission-critical systems?
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages
Many of the world's largest stock exchanges and banks; thousands of hospitals; national rail systems; several of Europe's mobile phone networks; the majority of the US army's computer systems. What do they have in common? They all rely on a 30 year-old operating system, one that is still unrivalled in its robustness and security by Unix let alone Linux or Windows.
Originally developed by Digital back in the 1970s for its Vax minicomputers, the VMS operating system is now on its third owner - Hewlett-Packard (HP) - and has had its obituary prematurely published multiple times.
Perceived by many as 'legacy' technology that has been superseded by Unix and even Windows, it has survived poor management and even poorer marketing only through the dedication of a diehard regiment of engineers and a customer base that has surprised Digital, interim-owner Compaq and then HP with its unswerving loyalty to the product. But there are signs that even if HP didn't realise when it merged with Compaq in 2002 that it was getting what some regard as a 'jewel' of operating systems, it may finally be waking up to the on-going commercial potential of OpenVMS (as it is branded). When CIOs in most market sectors talk about disaster recovery, security, business continuity, five nines uptime and measures of reliability, few think of OpenVMS as a potential solution. However, in healthcare, telecoms, government, manufacturing and other sectors, OpenVMS has long been the mainstay of reliability.
Derek Eaton is head of IT at the Police Mutual Assurance Society (PMAS), which runs most of its services, including a new Child Trust Fund, off OpenVMS. “If you had to choose an operating system to bet your mortgage on in terms of that machine being available 24x7, where would you put your money? I'd still bet on VMS,” he says.
While he says he has no particular emotional attachment to OpenVMS or any brand of operating system, Eaton still says it would be difficult to “find an IT manager who lies in bed at night wondering if his OpenVMS system will be available the next morning.”
As well as reliability, OpenVMS has security features available only in high-end Unixes and immunity to security issues such as buffer overflow errors that are so often the basis of vulnerabilities in Windows and Unix operating systems.
And for disaster recovery, the system comes with features that are even now only available at the extreme high-end: support for full 'share everything' clustering with up to 96 different nodes, each of which can contain up to 64 CPUs and can be based on Vax, the 64-bit Alpha processor originally developed by Digital or Intel's new Itanium processor; synchronous mirroring of data at distances up to 500km; and built-in imaging and restoring of system disks.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that organisations that have had a traditional interest in uptime and security have stuck with OpenVMS. And as HP's commitment to OpenVMS has gone from lukewarm to enthusiastic, the install base has not just stabilised but has actually started growing again.
Mark Gorham, vice president of the OpenVMS division at HP, says that of the 411,000 or so current users of OpenVMS, roughly 100,000 still use the now-ageing Vax hardware. However, revenue continues to grow year-on-year in the low double digits and 10% to 15% of all OpenVMS business comes from new users.
Work of art
What does surprise OpenVMS's fans is that so few organisations even think of it as an option. “How on Earth did the world go from where we all use VMS when doing serious work to the situation we have now where VMS is considered a bit of a has-been and everyone considers Unix bomb-proof?” wonders Elliott Roper, a long-time OpenVMS developer and managing director of systems integrator Yezerski Roper Ltd. “Unix is not bomb-proof; it's a toy. Anyone who knows the difference can tell [OpenVMS] is a work of art.”
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages