HP has launched OpenVMS 8.2, which runs on both AlphaServer and Itanium-based Integrity platforms, and that gives the companies who use some 400,000 OpenVMS boxes an upgrade path.
Bob Blatz is the director of OpenVMS marketing at HP, and he hails from the pre-Compaq Digital Equipment Corp, the creator of the VAX minicomputer and the Virtual Machine System operating system for those minicomputers that defined a category of affordable computing that we take for granted today.
Three-and-a-half years ago when Compaq decided to sell off the Alpha chip to Intel Corp and move to Itanium, Blatz said the DEC team in charge of the port to Itanium would take 42 months to do the job. He is quite happy that it took 43 months, not a very big slip in the computer industry, and a stark contrast to the way Tru64 Unix and TruCluster customers have been roughly treated in the HP roadmaps. Tru64 was killed on Itanium, and the TruCluster software that was supposed to be integrated with HP’s own HP-UX Unix has been spiked in favor of HP’s own server clustering and cluster file systems from Veritas.
The new OpenVMS 8.2 is functionally equivalent to the current OpenVMS 7.3.2 release available on AlphaServers excepting some minor enhancements to security, usability, and the normal feature tweaks an operating system release gets. There is also one other notable difference: While HP has ported OpenVMS to run on Integrity systems that run on uniprocessor to eight-way servers employing the Pluto zx1 chipset, OpenVMS has not, according to Blatz, been certified to run on larger Integrity machines that employ the Pinnacles zx1000 chipset, including HP’s top-end Superdomes.
This is a surprising, but Blatz said the vast majority of customers running OpenVMS could get by with an eight-way or smaller Integrity machine, and said further that the company would, if pressured by customers, possibly work to get it done before the OpenVMS 8.3 release, which is scheduled to come out within the next 12 to 18 months. The end of the second quarter 2006 seems like the best estimate for a ship date for the future OpenVMS 8.3. In the interim, customers can mix AlphaServer and Integrity systems within a single VAXcluster, which is what is really important to OpenVMS users who want to add computing power to their clusters.
One of the issues with supporting the Superdome servers with OpenVMS is scalability. Even with the proposed Marvel 128-way AlphaServers servers running OpenVMS 7.3.2, the largest single system image was only going to be a 32-way partition in those boxes; when HP launched the Marvel machines last year, it scaled them back to 64-way machines and kept the single system image size at 32-way. The Superdomes can support 64-way SMP and 128-way virtual SMP with the Hondo mx2 dual Madison modules.
Blatz said the underpinnings in OpenVMS 8.2 had been tweaked so it could be extended to 64-way processing, which is something that HP didn’t think would work well until it actually got into the guts of the code and the Integrity architecture.
Moreover, by the time that HP could certify OpenVMS 8.2 on the Superdome machines, there will be a whole new Integrity line based on the dual-core Montecito Itaniums, which are expected to be launched in mid-2005 or so and perhaps shipping in systems by September. If HP can ramp up the OpenVMS 8.3 release to the end of 2005, it can certify it on the next iteration of the Superdomes and not go through the trouble and cost now.
The main issues with such a chip architecture jump is getting independent software vendors on board with the new chip and ensuring that customers get the same or better performance at a lower price. The latter is the reason for moving to Itanium, after all, because neither Compaq nor HP thought they could win out in the processor design and fabrication game with their respective Alpha and PA-RISC chips against the onslaught of Intel’s Itanium.
Blatz said more than 250 applications have been ported to OpenVMS on Itanium and another 550 applications are in the works. These are only the applications that have a firm launch date that the vendor has let HP know about, and Blatz said there are probably lots more who are doing the port. He also says the key databases are being ported to OpenVMS 8.2 for Integrity systems.
Oracle has committed to get the RDB database, which was developed by DEC for the VAX and sold off to Oracle, ported to OpenVMS 8.2 on Itanium by the end of the second quarter of 2005, and that Oracle 10g will be available on the platform by the fourth quarter of 2005. Intersystems’ Cache and Computer Associates’ Ingres databases, also popular on VMS, will ship before the end of this quarter.
The VMScluster clustering software embedded in OpenVMS 8.2 is relatively unchanged from a features point of view, and can support up to 96 nodes on AlphaServer systems, which is the same as can be supported on OpenVMS 7.3.2. However, VMScluster can only support 16 nodes on Itanium-based servers, and is only supporting a maximum of 8 nodes on AlphaServers and 8 nodes on Integrity machines in mixed clusters. Blatz says the constraints are not related to the VMScluster software, but rather to configurations that have been certified by HP.
With the launch of OpenVMS 8.2, HP said the performance of a current AlphaServer and a current Integrity server should be more or less the same, with some variation depending on the workloads. HP has said some workloads, particularly data warehousing and batch jobs, run a lot better on Itaniums than Alphas.
The base Integrity servers are considerably less expensive than base AlphaServers, and HP has also shifted from a server license for OpenVMS 7.3.2 to a less costly per-CPU license for OpenVMS 8.2. So, for instance, a base Integrity rx1600 server (uniprocessor) running OpenVMS costs about 70% less than a base AlphaServer DS15, and a base Integrity rx4640-8 (with eight processors) costs about 60% less than an equivalent AlphaServer ES80.
Blatz says OpenVMS customers who have service contracts with rights to a new version will be able to get OpenVMS 8.2 for free, and customers who do not have these provisions will be able to get OpenVMS 8.2 at 40% of list price if they move to an Integrity machine from an AlphaServer. HP is being generous with OpenVMS for one reason, according to Blatz. We have to move these customers, he said, because if we don’t, someone else will.
