Gee, this sounds like an OS I'm very familiar with. But it doesn't fit
into HP's plans.
John Lee
Vaske Computer Solutions
At 07:00 AM 1/16/02 -0500, Mark Wonsil wrote:
>LETTER TO THE EDITOR
>
>HP wants to own the high-end server market
>January 14, 2002
>
> In response to "Compaq: VMS is alive, well -- and kicking" reader Ross
>Briosi writes:
>
>Other than Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, I seem to be the only
>person who understands that Fiorina's plan to purchase Compaq is brilliant.
>She has developed an excellent long-term strategy for the stability, growth
>and prosperity of HP. The fact that no one -- including the Hewlett family,
>the Packard family, the stock analysts and the media -- understands this is
>inexcusable, scandalous, and tragic.
>
>The merger has been analyzed and criticized based on the low-end products.
>The PC sector of the market is irrelevant to the deal. Clearly, few people
>understand the high-end server market. A couple of decades ago, the high-end
>market was IBM. Today there are better RAS (reliability, availability and
>scalability) choices available.
>
>Fiorina wants HP to "own" the high-end server market. Carly Fiorina dare not
>say it, but I can: She wants to buy the two best high-end computer operating
>systems on the planet -- Non-Stop Kernel (Tandem) & VMS (Digital Equipment
>Corp.), both owned by Compaq. HP and Compaq are still and may remain
>competitors.
>
>Phase 2 is merging the #2 (HP) and #4 (Digital) Unix "flavors" (both very
>good, but with different strengths). This would produce "the best Unix on
>the planet." In the high-end server technologies, the new HP would be way
>ahead of every other vendor, including the biggest -- IBM. The PC market
>would still be served, but HP's primary contribution to the industry, and
>its strength, would come from the top options in the "non-stop" market.
>
>VMS has been labeled "best operating system on the planet" and "the best
>clustering technology in the world." The hacker community has called VMS
>"cool and un-hackable."
>
>Non-Stop Himalya (Tandem) is the best in fault-tolerant systems (more than
>most of the "can never be down" companies require). It is designed for
>situations where losing even a portion of a single transaction would cost
>more than the incremental cost over a VMS solution.
>
>Currently, any business critical system running anything other than these
>two operating systems causes major problems (and big news) when they fail.
>For example, on October 27, 2001, the Canadian Toronto-Dominion Bank lost
>service to most of Canada when their main IBM system -- my guess, their only
>system -- had a single board failure. It was not a VMS cluster and it was
>not a Tandem system; they are designed to easily survive hardware failures.
>
>Sun, the number one Unix segment in the industry, made big news with the
>continual problems eBay had in June 1999. The numerous outages included a
>24-hour outage. The cause was Sun's Solaris (Unix) operating system.
>
>VMS was developed in 1977 and has matured into the most stable and feature
>rich operating system available. Both Digital (the developer of VMS), and
>Compaq (the current owner of VMS) were/are poor at marketing. None-the-less,
>the big players know and trust VMS. It is the small to medium companies that
>are kept in the dark by the media.
>
>One of the few who seem to understand is David Berlind. See "Compaq: VMS is
>alive, well -- and kicking."
>
>For the past 19 years, my experience has been managing "high-end" servers
>including VMS and variants of the Unix operating system. I currently work
>for one of the biggest companies in this business, and I know from
>experience that VMS:
>
>
>Has never had a virus
>Is very stable (vendor will guarantee 99.999999% uptime)
>Runs 70 percent of financial sector systems
>Is available in very small systems up to the world's largest, fastest
>computers
>Is rated as lowest TCO
>Runs Oracle, Apache, Java and very stable mail server software (comparable
>to Exchange, plus cluster aware)
>Runs multiple OS instances on same system, with "drag & drop" CPUs and
>memory
>Has very similar architecture to Windows NT (same architect) but with 16
>years more maturity and much more functionality
>Is capable of all NT (and Unix) functionality, even in mixed environment
>(PDC, MBDC)
>64-bit hardware and software
>Very old systems are still supported by vendor
>20-year future support commitment to U.S. government
>Offers the "best cluster technology in the world"
>
>Ross Briosi
>
>http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2838760,00.html
>
>Mr. Briossi missed the product future map, didn't he?
>
>
>
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