[HECnet] discontinuance of VMS

[Michael Holmes]

On Jun 6, 2013, at 8:19 AM, "Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman-" <system at TMESIS.COM> wrote:

Michael Holmes <mholmes10 at hotmail.com> writes:

Damn!

I work in federal govt and we have numerous (3 digits) VMS hosts world-wide t=
hat never gave us any trouble (especially compared to windoze).=20

Really?   According to HP's Lorraine Bartlett VP BCS Marketing & Strategy who
gave a keynote at the recent OpenVMS Bootcamp in mid-March, there were less
than 200 VMS customers and none were in Gov't.   I, and those in attendance,
knew better.   That figure must represent the largest VMS Itanium customers
and HP only case about LARGE sales.   I know of at least 100 sites with VMS
Itanium boxes in the US and I am sure there are more world-wide.   Itanium,
not the first generation anyway, did not win the hearts of VMS afficionados
happily running it on Alpha.   IMO, it was not until recent blade comfigura-
tions that people started to move.   Some are happy with their Alpha instal-
lations and were waiting for VMS in i4.   So, HP created a self-fulfilling
prophecy.


That is BS. I worked in DoD Military Health System and we had at least 101 host sites which we had to upgrade the big sites to Itanium (C7000 & blades) as the alphas were end of life and we recycled some of the alphas as spares for the smaller sites until they could be moved over to the smaller C3000 blades setup. 

When I left we were looking at potentially moving the application to run under windows server, but it couldn't do clustering like VMS could. 

HP is missing a huge market in healthcare as the 3 major commercial electronic health record systems all are run under MUMPS which runs great on VMS. 

Sadly HP never really listened to DoD security concerns and didn't upgrade VMS to address the items (like native PKI support) we had to move away from VMS since the vendor had no plans to fix. 




Guess well have to suffer more critical system failures in the future.=20

Hopelessly Pathetic, isn't it?

-- 
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker       VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG

Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.