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If you go online to order an umbrella, it doesn’t really matter what truck it shows up in: what matters is that it shows up on time and performs as advertised. Technology should work the same way. The hardware you have in place or how your systems are configured shouldn’t even be considerations: everything should just function perfectly every time. This is the promise of virtualization, and over the last three decades, it has gone from a pipe dream to reality. In today’s cloud-enabled world, your hardware should be no more than an afterthought.

For those of you who have not heard of Dave Cutler, let me give you a bit of background to this giant of modern day computing. He was one of the lead engineers on the first version of VMS back in the 70s, part of the legendary team founded by Gordon Bell; he was one of the original architects of VMS!

I was reading this article recently: A CIO's guide to legacy system modernization. By all means read it yourself; however a quick executive overview…

Part of my job is to read publications, articles & blogs on technology and the directions it is going in. I recently came across this article On premises vs. cloud: The major similarities and differences and it got me thinking.

When we kicked off the CLP back in 2020, our idea was to replace the HPE OpenVMS Hobbyist program. As everyone knew HPE had pulled out of the OpenVMS market some years previously, and the Hobbyist program was heading to its inexorable end.

They say timing is everything, and only last week I was talking to Brett Cameron about databases on OpenVMS; you know the dialogue: what is the future; is it proprietary or open, relational, or NoSQL, DBaaS, and so on? The usual stuff.

Back in April, I wrote an article entitled “Migrate your Alpha environment to another platform”; towards the end of the article, I talked about the Spectre virus, which hit the streets in 2018.

I was talking to a very well respected ex-colleague recently about a mutual customer, and towards the end of the conversation he said, “so what are you doing about the Alpha customers I/O problem?” My first reaction was “what problem?”, so he went on to explain that customers who have Alpha systems have potential problems with support and modern storage arrays.

In computing, virtualization (alternatively spelled virtualisation) refers to the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.

This article is the last in the mini-series and is probably the most contentious, not for any technical or philosophical reasons, but rather for the cultural divide which determines which side of the fence you sit on.