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  • OpenVMS clusters give Windows, Unix thorough thrashing

    From: the INQUIRER

    The OS that dare not speak its name

    By €uromole: éåí øáéòé 03 ãöîáø 2003, 10:39

    EVERYONE IS TALKING about Windows clusters, Unix clusters and Linux cluster. But all we are saying, is that the 20 year-old architecture of clustered OpenVMS can teach these whippersnappers a thing or two.
    At OpenVMS.org there's a report about an OpenVMS cluster which handles the major processing for the Greater Amsterdam Police and naturally is required 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

    What is unusual about this cluster is that it has been running since April 1997 despite the addition of machines, upgrades to the operating system, upgrades to applications, a changeover to a SAN architecture and even the physical relocation of the machines to a new site some seven kilometers away. Yet, through all these changes the cluster has provided continuous IT services to the Amsterdam rozzers.

    The current up-time for the cluster is about 2430 days, or more than six years, with the installation of the oldest hardware, an FDDI concentrator, only 1650 days ago, while the oldest computer system was installed about three years ago.

    The planning and execution of these changes would have no doubt presented their own challenges. But it appears the most difficult part was explaining to managers why it was unnecessary to shut systems down, even during the physical relocation.

    This report becomes even more interesting when we factor in the conclusions from a study by TechWise Research entitled "Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise Class Clusters" that was released in January 2002. This study is slightly dated and so we hope that it is updated soon and will include data about Linux clusters.

    The TechWise report was based on 93 interviews and looks at the costs of ownership over a five year period for machines from Compaq (as it was then), Hewlett-Packard, Sun and IBM, with approximately equal numbers of systems from each manufacturer.

    In our experience, the report from TechWise is unusual in that it takes into account the actual costs of downtime as discovered in those interviews. It reached the startling conclusion that if downtime costs $50,000 per hour for a medium size enterprise system, then based on the average reported downtime, this is equivalent to 50% of the total cost of ownership over five years. If downtime rises to $100,000 per hour then on average it accounts for 80% of total costs. By contrast the acquisition is 26% in the first instance and just 10% in the second.

    It seems that the financial advantage of Linux might be far less than people imagine especially if it accrues more than the average of 9.2 hours of downtime used in the above calculations, but that's a story for another day.

    The upshot of the TechWise report was that when the average cost of downtime, $71,000 per hour, is included in the total cost of ownership over five years, the OpenVMS clusters are a clear winner. That's mainly due to their average annual downtime being 11.0 hours compared to the IBM clusters at 18.4 hours, HP clusters at 22.8 hours and Sun clusters at 28.7 hours.

    Depending on the cluster configuration, the financial advantage of running OpenVMS was between $1.7 million and $6.8 million.

    Your mileage may vary of course and these figures are somewhat dated, but they do give cause for thought -- both in relation to the clusters mentioned here and how Linux might stack up against them. It seems reasonable to suggest that if Linux clusters are used in environments where downtime is expensive, then it would only take about 25 hours downtime per year before the cost advantage of using Linux might be completely negated.

    As to the cluster operated by our Dutch friends, if that operated in a commercial environment and had no downtime in five years, then compared to clusters from other manufacturers with their average downtime, the savings could easily exceed $10 million.

    That's an amount that buys quite a few applications and certainly covers the costs of personnel.

    These stark facts may also shake HP from construing VMS as Vendor Marketing Silence, and maybe make them think the neglected OS could be a Veritable Money Spinner. µ
    "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."

  • #2
    I believe IT!!

    this jives with my observations of OpenVMS...

    ours are not clustered but they hardly ever go down...our OCRs' run OpenVMS and USPS programmers wrote the "Machine Control" interface.

    highly reliable.

    cc

    Comment


    • #3
      Correct me if I am wrong, OpenVMS runs some very relieable hardware with things like multichannel IO...etc. Are the systems being compared to run on the same fault tolerant multiply redundant harware?

      Dont' get me wrong I do believe openvms indeed evolved from such a need for reliabilty, and does deliver..but there is more to it than just the OS

      Comment


      • #4
        ours has a very proprietary hardware architecture for sure.

        ...but how is that any different than intel architecture made for intel coded operating systems...windows, linux et al??

        cc

        Comment


        • #5
          I betcha if you spent as much on a Windows cluster as you did on that shiny OpenVMS cluster, and used similarly redundant hardware... that you'd have similar uptimes.

          - Gurm
          The Internet - where men are men, women are men, and teenage girls are FBI agents!

          I'm the least you could do
          If only life were as easy as you
          I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
          If only life were as easy as you
          I would still get screwed

          Comment


          • #6
            No way.

            VMS was made quite differently from any OS out there.
            No matter how long you put into any OS (except probably for AIX and MVS), you'll never get the security level and stability of OpenVMS.
            It was one of the first OSs to allow online remote backup and redundancy features many years ago seen on other OSs only in the last few years.

            For example:

            1. easier to cluster machines and load balance them (they've been doing it since the early 1980's)

            2. multiple instances of OpenVMS operating systems can run together on the same hardware platform in something known as a galaxy configuration. Different operating system versions are allowed which means that systems may be upgraded with more rigorous testing.

            3. The POSIX interface in OpenVMS allows UNIX programs to run with little, or no, modification. One popular example of this is CSWS (a.k.a. Apache web server)


            The reason VMS lost to Unix is because VMS was admin/security/stability oriented in such an extreme way that it alienated developers who preffered the much more developer oriented Unix.
            I'm sure you could find much more info by "googling" around.


            The requested page doesn’t exist, or you don’t have access to it.
            "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."

            Comment


            • #7
              Yeah, but I had 2 windows servers up and running for 3 solid years with no unscheduled downtime. If they had been clustered I bet they could have had NO downtime.

              I understand that OpenVMS is nifty and all, but ... well ... it's VMS, you see... which is EVIL.

              - Gurm
              The Internet - where men are men, women are men, and teenage girls are FBI agents!

              I'm the least you could do
              If only life were as easy as you
              I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
              If only life were as easy as you
              I would still get screwed

              Comment


              • #8
                No, VMS is good. You have never tasted that fruit. Unix is evil.
                "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."

                Comment


                • #9
                  I've tasted the fruit that is VMS.

                  And it was BAD. Very very very bad.

                  Northeastern retired their VMS servers eons ago.

                  You will never again get me to touch VMS, not for any money. (Well, ok there are a few sums that might make it worthwhile...)

                  - Gurm
                  The Internet - where men are men, women are men, and teenage girls are FBI agents!

                  I'm the least you could do
                  If only life were as easy as you
                  I'm the least you could do, oh yeah
                  If only life were as easy as you
                  I would still get screwed

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    I wish I could go back to it.
                    At least for me, in VMS everything simply works (yes, it's simple and it works). It's a thing I can say about no other OS except maybe for BeOS (in which very little worked and not everything was THAT simple).
                    "For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism."

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      hmm, I used OpenVMS for a short while and hated it. My company bought out another company called TGV(Two guys and a VAX). They had there own, very complete, TCP/IP stack for VAX machines. I absolutely hated the CLI. I mean, just to put in a simple default gateway I had to conjure up like 10 words plus the IP address. It was EEEVILL! I was thankful to not support that product anymore. I think they felt sorry for us so they took us out to a really nice restaraunt and gave us all $250 spot cash bonuses.

                      Dave
                      Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.

                      Comment

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