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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The release of OpenVMS for Itanium 2 has now made them think about moving away from Sybase and changing database instead.
Perhaps the biggest problem for OpenVMS, however, is this pinning of its fortunes to Itanium 2. When Compaq planned to port the system away from Alpha, it was limited by technical issues to only a few possible 64-bit chips. At the time, Itanium seemed more promising than many regard it now, and if it were to fail in the market or fail to scale to the performance levels required by many OpenVMS users, the end of OpenVMS development would almost certainly be assured - even if HP had to keep on some Alpha-based and Itanium-based hardware to support powerful customers with 25-year support contracts, such as the US Department of Defense.
With HP facing a potential change in direction under new CEO Mark Hurd, OpenVMS is again at a crossroads. But its heavyweight supporters, which have helped rebuild the momentum behind the operating system, are unlikely to let it slow.
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