Blog

Following on from the recent webinar in which we briefly introduced VSI Application Services, I thought it might be worth providing a little more information by way of a short blog post. Looking at it very simply, VSI Application Services are a set of services designed to help you get the most out of your OpenVMS application environments, and while the primary aim is to provide services to help you move your OpenVMS applications to VSI OpenVMS x86-64, the overall scope of the services portfolio is much more general than that, ranging from workshops and small consulting engagements to investigate and advise on various modernisation options, through to assistance with major modernisation initiatives (such as porting to x86-64), and application maintenance and support, where we take over the task of looking after your application code. In short, if it’s anything to do with maintaining and enhancing your OpenVMS application environment, we are here to help, and we’d love to hear from you!

As standard support for OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 for Integrity ends in December 2024, we strongly recommend that customers upgrade to V8.4-2L3. While extended engineering support for V8.4-2L1 remains available, the transition to V8.4-2L3 is advised to ensure increased compliance with the latest standards and continued optimal performance. However, some customers have encountered issues with the RTL8 kit on V8.4-2L3, which have hindered their ability to upgrade. This article aims to outline these issues and provide our recommended solutions.

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.