Weighing the Risks - OpenVMS vs. Commodity OS Migration?
Like many other companies, IT or otherwise, we go through an annual exercise of reviewing our risk assessments. You know the drill: list your resources including people, offices, software, hardware, customers, data centers, contractors, and so on, and then list all the things that can happen to them and color-code risks based on how likely and how bad they are, and then think of how they can be mitigated. And while staring at line 366 of my risk assessment, I thought to myself: I wonder how many people put OpenVMS in their risk assessments?
When I’d just started working at VMS Software, someone told me the story of an IT guy who noticed a bunch of cables going into the wall of a data center. Nobody knew what the cables were for, but judging by the sound the wall made when you knocked on it, there was something behind it. Breaking open the wall revealed a VAX, still operational, chugging away as it took care of what turned out to be a critical part of their operations. Once a joke, it now becomes a real problem as the generation of system managers that were hired when OpenVMS was all the rage starts to retire. Imagine the sheer horror that it must be for the IT director realizing that their entire business depends on a 30-year-old piece of software that nobody knew runs on a server that is no longer produced with an obscure operating system that they may have never even heard about. And obviously the first thing that pops into their head is, "we must get rid of this immediately". What we don't know is scary. But we're engineers here, so let's put emotions aside and take a look at the facts.
The fact is, 30 years ago, the company invested in this application, which was probably custom-written for them, and has been running a significant piece of their business on OpenVMS ever since. Scripts running scripts running scripts running Fortran code flawlessly for decades, maybe without even rebooting. Was that a worthwhile investment? I would say so. So what are the risks now?
Security breach – somewhat likely depending on how good your security setup is, and somewhat bad depending on how critical the system/data is. Mitigation? Improve your security setup, get the latest updates, and so on.
Hardware failure – somewhat likely, especially if running an old VAX, Alpha, or Integrity, and quite bad as that hardware is no longer produced. Mitigation? Migrate to x86 OpenVMS on hypervisors or the cloud; VAX and Alpha emulators are also available.
Software failure – unlikely (it hasn't happened in the last 30 years), but quite bad if your entire business depends on this. Mitigation? Learn how to maintain your existing software, or rewrite it to make it easier to maintain.
If you think about this long enough, it really comes down to staying on OpenVMS versus migrating to a commodity OS, and the only risks that we are comparing here is the risk of losing your VMS contractor versus the risk of failing to migrate off. Let's take a closer look at these two.
Risk of losing VMS updates/support: VMS Software is the only company in the World that provides support and updates for OpenVMS (there are many that provide training and services). If you migrate to, say, Linux, there are many companies on the market that provide support and the Linux sources are open, so in a pinch, you could write your own updates. From this perspective, we have a single point of failure and maybe you are more likely to end up in a situation where you get no updates . But what kind of chances are we comparing here? Maybe one in a million to one in a thousand. VMS Software is a stable international company that has been around for over 10 years, we are profitable, backed by a private investor playing the long game, we have more than a thousand customers many of whom are quite large, and we are completely dedicated to one objective: protecting our customers' investments in OpenVMS. How likely are we to hike up the prices and milk our customers dry? We haven't done that in the past 10 years, no reason for us to do it now; it's a good stable OS with a good stable customer base that brings a steady cash flow. Also, what happens if you do lose VMS updates and support? Well, historically speaking, it keeps running until it does not, but probably for decades, which cannot generally be said of Linux systems. So, it's a complicated comparison, but we can agree that the risk is low either way.
Risk of failing to migrate off: Thanks to the many cases that we know of companies migrating off VMS (it's a small world), their risk tends to be quite high, with many organizations spending millions of dollars and still not making it. To successfully migrate off, you need a team of people highly skilled in not only the target OS, but also VMS (a combination that’s very hard to come by these days) and depending on what your application does, many additional specific skills as well as your source code are required. Depending on the size of the team, their skills, the skills of managing a software development project, funding, and many other factors, you may need years to develop and test your new solution. In the mean time, you would be migratingbe migrating OpenVMS to x86 because your original hardware is no longer replaceable, and after you've done that you're probably wondering why you're still migrating off if it's going to run forever on x86 and you could just be running that and not spending all that money to reduce the already low risk from the previous paragraph.
So, if you are new to OpenVMS, you might overestimate the risks associated with running OpenVMS and underestimate the effort it will take you to migrate off. OpenVMS is not going anywhere; we are going to support our customers for as long as they need us, releasing regular updates and making OpenVMS more modern and more secure. We do encourage you to migrate to x86 though, because that takes away your hardware problem. And whatever your plan is, you need to get to know your OpenVMS application and do it fast, while you still have the sources and hopefully someone around to walk you through it. And if not, call us at VMS Software – it's what we do. We help OpenVMS users protect and realize the full value of their application investments.
Chief Executive Officer
