On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Jeff Nelson wrote: > Disclaimer: HP is my employer. I am an OpenVMS operating system software > engineer. I don't work in sales or marketing, I just write code (and > sometimes teach). Statements made represent my understanding of facts, > my opinions, and are not official statements from HP. It is great to have someone with your expertise on the list. I will take your comments very seriously because you know so much about VMS. I wanted to find something about DefCon 9 and OpenVMS, so I did a google search. Everything I found seemed very 'corporate.' For example, on this web page it shows the CEO of HP and it says "MIT is the soul of OpenVMS Technology": http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html I assumed that MIT stood for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So I went to MIT web pages to see what they had to say about OpenVMS and this was one of the first things I found: http://www.psfc.mit.edu/cmod/unix/move_analysis.html The OpenVMS computers are aging, and will soon be going away. All interactive and batch jobs will eventually need to be moved to either the new unix machines or nodes of the beowulf cluster. Jobs should run five to ten times faster on the new machines. It is interesting that so many people believe that VMS is superior to UNIX OSs, yet VMS is basically dying and being replaced by UNIX/Linux. This has been going on for a decade or so, at least at universities. The corporate line is clearly that OpenVMS gives better uptime than UNIX/Linux, but where is the data? I found no data. No independent tests. It is probably a difficult comparison to make when both Linux and VMS boxes will run for months or years without a reboot. I do know that our most important service - e-mail - has been down very often during the past few years. Delivery is generally very slow. I'm very sure that a Linux solution would have given us better e-mail availability. Data? Oops - I don't have any either! On the other hand, with a small number of users on my Solaris box, I have kept e-mail up as long as I've had power for the past 7 years. It has never delayed delivery of any message as far as I can tell. I think Linux would perform at least as well. More messages to come... Mike -- Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Division of Epidemiology and Community Health and Institute of Human Genetics University of Minnesota http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/ _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list