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?
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OpenVMS's decline from its heyday is a result of many factors. For one, there was the acceptance by many IT executives that being tied to a single vendor's hardware platform (as VMS originally was) undermined an ability to take advantage of industry standards. The growing scarcity of OpenVMS skills, and the smaller number of enterprise applications available for the operating system, have also contributed to its diminution, as has the understandable desire of many IT decision makers to have a more manageable, homogeneous infrastructure.
Digital, Compaq and HP have also all had problems with the marketing of OpenVMS. The decision by Digital to change VMS's name to OpenVMS - to emphasise its compatibility with the Unix Posix standard - is still proving confusing almost 14 years on: even existing Vax customers want to know the difference between VMS and OpenVMS and how they can upgrade.
Compaq and Digital have both exhibited what Colin Butcher, an award-winning OpenVMS developer and technical director of XDelta, tactfully describes as “stealth marketing”. “There are more people out there than I'd care to admit who thought it had gone away.”
HP's VMS chief, Gorham, who has survived with most of the original VMS team since its Digital days, also found it hard to sell OpenVMS as part of Compaq. “When I walked into customers saying I'm here from Compaq and I'm here to talk to you about OpenVMS there was a bit of confusion and maybe sometimes disbelief because Compaq was known as a PC company.”
The merger of Compaq and HP also stalled VMS marketing while HP got to grips with its new acquisition.
PMAS's Eaton recalls going to a seminar just after the merger where an HP spokesperson hinted that OpenVMS was “a surprise to the company after the takeover and it hadn't realised what it had got”. Many of HP's server teams have also overlooked OpenVMS, often talking of the company's “three operating system strategy - Windows, Linux and HP-UX”.
It is only now that HP seems finally to be working out a long-term plan for OpenVMS. The three-year long project to port OpenVMS from the dying Alpha chip to Itanium 2 was completed in January 2005. To coincide with the launch, HP announced some key software ports to the platform, including Computer Associates Unicenter Console Management and IBM's WebSphere MQ software.
Internal work to port as many of the most popular open source enterprise applications is also well under way, with Apache and other packages already ported - although not in production yet. A set of tools and a compatibility layer to help developers port applications from Unix to OpenVMS have also come as a welcome relief to developers more used to tools helping them move away from OpenVMS. Lastly, the threat of OpenVMS simply dying out as more and more members of the original Digital team retire is diminishing as the company has embarked on the recruitment of a new generation of VMS developers. Overall team numbers have actually increased considerably over the last three years, despite HP's decision last year to outsource thousands of its staff.
Slow and steady
Nevertheless, no one is talking about VMS returning to its glory days. Even if the departure of CEO Carly Fiorina doesn't prompt a massive rethink of HP's strategy and focus, there is still the problem of mindshare. HP has little intention of launching a mass-marketing campaign for OpenVMS so user numbers are likely to continue to increase only slowly if at all.
Education schemes to increase the OpenVMS skills base are continuing through donations of machines to universities, but few recent computer science graduates have had any exposure even to the name OpenVMS and there are no new Alpha or Itanium workstations on which to run OpenVMS. Andreas Vollmer, formerly OpenVMS manager at Ikea and now OpenVMS system manager at a major European postal service, finds that he has to evangelise the system to many and train his administrators in-house. “Even then, it takes a year before they get to grips with it, and two years before they can be in charge of a live environment.” Greater availability of packages from the bigger enterprise software vendors is also going to be needed if HP is to stave off migrations and encourage new users. Vollmer's team, for example, were considering a move away from OpenVMS since their Sybase database wouldn't run on the system.
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