Getting Started with OpenVMS System Management (HP Technologies)

After 25 years in a constantly changing computer industry—spanning the PC revolution, DEC becoming Digital, VMS becoming OpenVMS, Compaq buying out Digital, HP buying out Compaq, and OpenVMS migrating from VAX 32-bit CPUs to Alpha 64-bit CPUs, as well as HP's migrating from OpenVMS to IA64 Intel's 64-bit CPU, and the advent of Microsoft products, Open Source and Linux products, UNIX products, the IBM pantheon of operating systems, and fault-tolerant products such as NSK—an industry watcher and career participant has to ask the following question: Why should companies use OpenVMS over the next 5 to 10 years? Considering that OpenVMS has the lowest cost of deployment and maintenance in the industry today, you might ask, why wouldn't you use OpenVMS? Lowest cost is one factor, but technology decisions seem to drive many deployment decisions. Let's review OpenVMS's current abilities.

• Clustering: OpenVMS has had the acknowledged best clusters and scaling in the industry since 1983. Its features include single system disk, single unified file system view across all cluster members (even with multiple file systems), shared tapes, shared disks, and up to 96 clustered member systems of desktop to mainframe-size systems, with as many as 32 SMP CPUs each and as much as 10 Tbytes of main memory (RAM) in the entire cluster. All systems are managed as a single system and a single work domain. OpenVMS clusters work out of the box across Ethernet, SANs, and high-speed memory channel connections, with minimal configuration and setup. You can literally add a new member system to an OpenVMS cluster in as little as five minutes (once the hardware has been plugged in).

• Disaster-Tolerant Clusters: Data centers can be completely duplicated (all disks, all resources, all transactions) in an active-active cluster at distances of up to 540 miles apart. (Note: Everyone else just offers a hot/warm or hot/cold site technology; OpenVMS uses both sites in an active-active configuration, which uses much less hardware then other active-passive cluster configurations—up to 50 percent less!)

• Oracle 8: This deploys larger, runs better, and runs faster on OpenVMS clusters. Oracle RdB continues to be one of the fastest databases in the world, fully integrated into OpenVMS and OpenVMS clusters, with new customers every year.

• Timeshare: As the Internet continues to grow and server consolidation continues, systems will be measured by their ability to handle many, many small jobs in a predictable time slot while sharing resources evenly. OpenVMS and its scheduler have been providing and polishing predictable, even real-time, performance since the 1970s. With today's Web server, transaction-servers, and application-server requirements, capacity planning and predictable response for every job is already becoming a prerequisite for deploying even a prototype application.

• Security: OpenVMS/VMS has had less then 45 CERT security advisories in the last 13 years. (Windows 2000, 484; Linux, 546; Solaris, 490; AIX, 377 as of June 2002; http://www.cert.org/).

  Deploying other servers in your production environment, you will spend considerably more system-management dollars securing your servers and making sure all the CERT advisories are all plugged than you would if you just deployed OpenVMS out of the box! If you checked all the CERT advisories, it could take hundreds of hours just to review various security holes in other operating systems.

  Out-of-the-box OpenVMS is virtually unhackable (or so say the goons/judges from the DEFCON 9 Hacker Convention, July 2001 http://www.dfwcug.org/dfwcug_newsletters/20107.PDF).

  Kevin Mitnick, celebrity hacker, just testified before Congress that he was defeated for the first time in his life when he recently tried to break into an OpenVMS system in England (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2454737,00.html).

• Diicoe: Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment certification means that Compaq/HP has signed (in 2001) an agreement with the U.S. government to support OpenVMS for the next 20 years. This allows HP to continue selling OpenVMS to the U.S. government (one of OpenVMS's largest user bases), and it must maintain support for the next 20 years on products sold to the U.S. government.

• Shared File Systems: OpenVMS offers integration with Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 SMB file systems via Advanced Server (code from Microsoft). From the Open Systems (UNIX) side of the house, OpenVMS integrates with NFS (V3.0). OpenVMS can also offer a single directory, which is viewed, coordinated, and accessed by both Windows systems and UNIX systems at the same time!

• E-business Infrastructure: Attunity's XML and database gateways are included with the OpenVMS license. Apache, SSH, Java, Microsoft's COM (object-calling standard), CORBA (Open Systems object-calling standard), DCE, and X Windows are all included with OpenVMS with the base license.

• Service and Support: For a business that deploys an OS for years at a time, support for past products and previous versions of the OS is critical. HP and OpenVMS continue to support VAX systems (even though they haven't shipped a new VAX in almost 2 years!), and they support previous stable versions of the OpenVMS operating systems as far back as 10 years for customers. It's hard to imagine a 10-year deployment of our latest PC of the hour. Businesses don't enjoy changing applications that are working, and OpenVMS applications, once up and running, tend not to get taken off line, which is one of OpenVMS's most famous hallmarks.

• High Availablity: Many companies choose OpenVMS because it's one of the few operating systems that can deliver on its claim of 99.99999 percent (about three minutes downtime per year). If OpenVMS had just started claiming this feat, it might be suspect; but customers have been getting this much service from their machines since the early 1990s (in a properly configured and maintained VMS cluster). Rolling upgrades of software and the OS, and continuous processing for years at a time, are other milestones that OpenVMS pioneered.

After 25 years as a computer, application, and database server, very few of the other operating systems can even begin to match OpenVMS as a deployment platform. While OpenVMS will never be the best games desktop, it has already proven itself the finest, most robust, most secure, and most clusterable OS in our industry today. But wait: Don't touch that dial, there's more! If OpenVMS were just another OS with the most features in our industry, that might be good enough; but what would you pay for such a fantastic tool? Two times or four times the cost of an average UNIX server? How about if OpenVMS gave you all this capability and had the lowest cost of ownership in the industry compared with all other UNIX systems and mainframes? Well, don't believe me—check out the study Techwise Research did on OpenVMS in 2001, where they found that OpenVMS had the lowest cost of ownership of any server deployment over a five year period (http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/whitepapers/techwise.html).

Tested and supported features, lowest cost of ownership and deployment in the industry, highest availability and scalability, and a 25-year track record with interoperability with all the latest Internet and e-business software and tools—that's why you will use OpenVMS for the next 10 years.