Compaq fails to reassure DEC users

An OpenVMS upgrade has not convinced users of its survival. Jonathan Lambeth reports from LA.

Although Compaq unveiled a new version of OpenVMS at its US Decushan Lambeth reports from LA. User Group conference, users are still sceptical as to the depth of the hardware supplier's commitment to the operating system.

As a result, when Digital users was asked last week if they had concerns about the future of OpenVMS due to Compaq's takeover of Digital Equipment last June, everyone raised their hands.

Rich Marcello, head of the OpenVMS group at Compaq, tried to reassure them, however: "There will be further versions. We will keep doing OpenVMS releases as long as it makes sense. We have a much more positive story than prior to the merger," he said.

But other Compaq executives admitted they did not expect OpenVMS' market share to grow. John Rose, vice-president of enterprise systems, also refused to say he would commit resources towards encouraging the ISV community to port applications to the platform.

This left many users sceptical about how much resource would be put into OpenVMS in future, despite Compaq's promises to support the OS for the next 10 years and to introduce an advertising campaign for the software.

"They say all that about how important OpenVMS is to them and then slip in at the end that there is no growth strategy. They are just not putting enough behind it," said one IT manager from a manufacturing company in Ohio, who asked not to be named.

"My management puts Unix and NT stickers on the VMS boxes because they are embarrassed that when people visit our site, our company might look behind the times," she added.

Terry Shannon, an independent Digital watcher, was more optimistic. While he said Compaq would have to carry out all its promises, he added that it was backing OpenVMS for the foreseeable future.

"As with other traditional OSs, such as Unix, OpenVMS continues its inevitable strategic withdrawal into the high end. Nevertheless, rumours of the death of OpenVMS continue to be greatly exaggerated," he continued.

Stars in the Galaxy

"Galaxy (the new architecture included in version 7.2 of the OS) endows OpenVMS with a truly kick-butt differentiator. More performance than you could need," he added.

Tony Ioele, chairman of Decus US, agreed: "Over the next year, users will want concrete evidence of Compaq's commitment to OpenVMS ... but if we were still with Digital, the way it was going, OpenVMS technology would have faded away within a few years," he said.

He added that Compaq's U-turn on terminating the OpenVMS workstation family, and its plans for a new model by mid-1999 based on the next version of the Alpha processor, was an example of Compaq's willingness to listen to Decus members.

Version 7.2 of OpenVMS includes increased interoperability with Windows NT but, according to Compaq, the two OSs are "half-brothers" anyway because they were both designed by the same engineer, Dave Cutler, who now works at Microsoft.

The upgrade also has increased clustering capabilities, adds compatibility with Microsoft's object model, COM, and supports new technologies such as Fibre Channel, USB ports and Java.

But Compaq has also come out with its new Galaxy architecture, which runs on top of OpenVMS, and is based on its Adaptive Partitioned Multiprocessing (APMP) technology.

APMP defines multiple cooperating instances of the OS, each of which controls hardware resources and a variable number of CPUs, within a single server environment.

This means business-critical applications always have enough processing power when needed, but the OS can also run less important applications when the extra capacity is not required.

Galaxy will initially only be available under OpenVMS, and although it is technically feasible to port it to Windows NT or Unix, Digital refused to comment on future possibilities. While Compaq's Digital unit has been talking about Galaxy for the past 18 months, it has finally set a ship date of January for the technology.

Jesse Lipcon, vice-president of high-performance servers, described it as "the biggest, most exciting announcement in the 21-year history of OpenVMS," especially as there are, he claimed, 450,000 OpenVMS-based systems in use and as many as 10 million users.

Both new offerings will ship in January, but pricing for version 7.2 of OpenVMS stays the same as previous releases. Galaxy is priced separately and requires one licence per CPU.

This licensing structure has caused some concerns about potential total costs on larger Alpha-based servers, however, particularly with future 32-way and larger machines.

The next version of Alpha, EV6, is on track to ship within six months, and EV9 and EV10 are also on the drawing board, according to Compaq. This means if the designs are turned into product, the Alpha chip will have a life beyond 2004.