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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