Mission Critical Computing Blog - All Comments

re: OpenVMS 8.4 enters Field Test

Ian Miller — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:25:46 GMT

Hurrah!

and over 77 downloads of the FT kit in the first 24 hours :-)

re: System Age and Maintenance Costs

jacob.van-ewyk@hp.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:21:50 GMT

Ian,

What I thought was so interesting about the notebook example was that when we pushed out the refresh cycle, there was direct link to increasing maintenance costs that we could measure. While we all suspect that the same thing is true for servers, we often can't measure it directly.

Oh, and as for my notebook? It is already 2 years old, and I'm sure that it will be another year or more until I get a new one. I'm in the same 3 to 4 year upgrade cycle that most other people experience.

Jacob

re: System Age and Maintenance Costs

Ian Miller — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:49:51 GMT

Getting people to realise there is a cost in not upgrading is difficult. A system runs for years and slowly the running cost goes up then the system hardware starts to become unreliable and the cost jumps. There is a hidden cost in not being able to do things with the old system e.g. connect it to newer systems.

The running costs of systems are often obscure as the cost of patching and out of calls to do reboots can be not properly associated with a system especially if performed by people working unpaid overtime.

I'm glad to hear that the call volume is being assoicated with personal computer age.

I think there should be a way of recording the time spend moving from old to new pc - perhaps this is costing the company more but the cost is now hidden as you do it at home and it does not show on your timesheet. I think the time spent dealing with IT problems should be recorded too as that is a hidden cost.

I'm surprised you got a new laptop after only 2 years as I would expect 3 or 4 years.

re: Transatlantic Training and Remembrance Day

Ian Miller — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:55:34 GMT

I think bringing in Technology Services more often to help the customer improve is the way forward and think the cost could be simply justified.

re: Transatlantic Training and Remembrance Day

Ian Miller — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:54:57 GMT

I think bringing in Technology Services more often to help the customer improve is the way forward and think the cost could be simply justified.

re: Application Transformation & Modernization Virtual Conference

Paul Evans — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:23:55 GMT

Thanks for the blog & hope you enjoy the event.

re: 9-9-09 and the significance of 9s

Ian Miller — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:49:17 GMT

Mission Critical systems need a mission critical platform. HP has several of those.

Accoridng to the Availability Digest publication then active-active clusters are the best way to have a highly availabille system. OpenVMS clusters are inherintly active-active and also do disaster tolerance better than any other platform.

Customers require a range of availability solotions but if people die or large amounts of money are at risk then mission critical systems are required.

re: 9-9-09 and the significance of 9s

Alan S. Muir — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:01:05 GMT

Despite HP's seeming interest in "High Availability" it is still amazing how the company can continuously fail to market two OUTSTANDING operating systems (OpenVMS and NonStop) which have been delivering on this promise for MANY years. Yet your blog fails to mention either of these platforms upon which your customers have come to rely for mission-critical applications.

OpenVMS continues to hold the record for uptime according to the uptime project, and delivered the FASTEST recovery time in HP's test against all other environments.

OpenVMS has been praised as the "Gold Standard" in clustering capabilities, a key ingredient in virtually any high-availability configuration. HP owns this remarkable technology, but how often do you flaunt it?

Many in the market have been predicting the death of OpenVMS for years, but customers who use it know that it will continue to be a vital part of their infrastructure for the foreseeable future. Even Gartner had to revise its negative position on OpenVMS in light of its steadfast grip on many mission-critical applications.

Why is HP hiding this gem instead of heralding it?

re: Kirk & Friend's Rants on Mission Critical Computing

Olivier — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 01:19:25 GMT

Nice to read you, Kirk. Keep the posts comin'! Mmmm.... HP 9000 trivia questions? How about some insight on how the Keystones (or, should I say, "Babydomes") came to life? I've been with them and their descendants for what, 8 years now, almost longer than my wife, and I might be wrong, but II don't see that architecture going away soon.

re: The UNIX Paradox - Innovation

asfd — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:48:10 GMT

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re: The UNIX Paradox - Stability

Leo Sakaguchi / HP Japan / Technology Services — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:17:16 GMT

Hi,

There was a related and interesting discussion in "Techcomm Pdl-bcs-vse" community. Here's the archived thread:

<kctfulcrum.fc.hp.com/.../msg04230.html>

(Subject: Hpvm with hpux v2 guest on Tukwila ?)

I hope you find the discussion interesting.

IMHO, if ESS standalone can't continue to support an older HP-UX version and decided to EOL it, some sort of extended support is possible by combining TS and ESS talents and resources together.

Good Luck,

Leo

re: Mainframe Claims

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:34:26 GMT

HP should take a lesson from IBM on how to price software and how to structure license agreements. Instead of selling (2) processors at a time sell a system that has many processors and pay for on demand usage instead of node usage.

re: The UNIX Paradox

Christophe de Dinechin — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:02:47 GMT

The 'trackback' feature is disabled, so here is a link to some thoughts about your Unix paradox: <a href="grenouille-bouillie.blogspot.com/.../a>

re: The UNIX Paradox - Innovation

Ian Miller — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:20:46 GMT

HPUX can learn from that other operating system that HP own. The one that celebrated its 30th birthday last year and has a well known binary computability guarantee, stability of interfaces, low TCO and lots of things included in the price.

You know which operating system I mean, perhaps you can mention it sometime :-)

re: The UNIX Paradox - Stability

Rahul Gupta — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:15:02 GMT

What you have listed are indeed the key stability features a UNIX customer would like. Having managed UNIX tower for the largest outsourcing customer for HP, i can share another angle to this thinking. In the outsourcing world, customers actually want both Innovation and stability. Since all the leg work is done by supplier ( read HP), it's left to us to manage the innovation and stability at the same time. Example, customer forces us to follow N, N-1 software currency. Any older releases should not be in the enviornment, or we are not compliant with contract.