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So what are the features that OpenVMS has that others do not have? (Just curious)

by malkia 12y ago

omnibrain 12y ago
I've never used it but I read a lot of accounts of superb clustering capabilities. You can have clusters spanning several OS releases on different hardware platforms.
- robin_reala 12y ago
  I can’t find the original source but I remember reading an article about a VMS cluster that was moved piecemeal between two towns in Belgium without any downtime. Individual machines went down during the move obviously, but the cluster as a whole was able to stay up.
  - fuzzix 12y ago
    I remember this - I thought it was on el reg, but worse, it was theinq :) https://web.archive.org/web/20031219162954/http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13002 https://web.archive.org/web/20031219162954/http://www.theinq...
    - robin_reala 12y ago
      Wow, so it was. Takes me back :) Thanks for digging it up! Here’s the source story: http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863 http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863
- dfox 12y ago
  Clustering on VMS is mostly about marketing and integration, VMS cluster is essentially only about shared filesystem and same effect can be had by means of NFS and some kind of centralized management on Unix (even across different Unix OSes). It does not do any magic like process migration and intra-cluster shared memory. From technical standpoint interesting feature is sane approach to asynchronous IO and IPC (think libevent in kernel).
  - xorcist 12y ago
    There is nothing "only" about a clustered shared filesystem. There may be a hundred of them but none works off the shelf for all applications. There are a lot of details in there. You could probably make the point that early Google was "only" a clustered filesystem plus some apps running on top on it.
rollthehard6 12y ago
Like most things you have to bear in mind the time context - VAX/VMS had robust clustering of a solid multi-user, OS pre-1990. That was before Linux, the first release of SunOS and before Windows had networking.
lmm 12y ago
The versioning filesystem is very nice - better than snapshotting, it's as though the whole system were under version control, and it's integrated with the whole OS. Performance and security were reputedly very good, though I've no idea how it's kept up these days.

So what are the features that OpenVMS has that others do not have? (Just curious)

by malkia 12y ago

So what are the features that OpenVMS has that others do not have? (Just curious)

I've never used it but I read a lot of accounts of superb clustering capabilities. You can have clusters spanning several OS releases on different hardware platforms.

robin_reala 12y ago
I can’t find the original source but I remember reading an article about a VMS cluster that was moved piecemeal between two towns in Belgium without any downtime. Individual machines went down during the move obviously, but the cluster as a whole was able to stay up.
- fuzzix 12y ago
  I remember this - I thought it was on el reg, but worse, it was theinq :) https://web.archive.org/web/20031219162954/http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13002 https://web.archive.org/web/20031219162954/http://www.theinq...
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    Wow, so it was. Takes me back :) Thanks for digging it up! Here’s the source story: http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863 http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=03/11/28/7758863
dfox 12y ago
Clustering on VMS is mostly about marketing and integration, VMS cluster is essentially only about shared filesystem and same effect can be had by means of NFS and some kind of centralized management on Unix (even across different Unix OSes). It does not do any magic like process migration and intra-cluster shared memory. From technical standpoint interesting feature is sane approach to asynchronous IO and IPC (think libevent in kernel).
- xorcist 12y ago
  There is nothing "only" about a clustered shared filesystem. There may be a hundred of them but none works off the shelf for all applications. There are a lot of details in there. You could probably make the point that early Google was "only" a clustered filesystem plus some apps running on top on it.

rollthehard6 12y ago

Like most things you have to bear in mind the time context - VAX/VMS had robust clustering of a solid multi-user, OS pre-1990. That was before Linux, the first release of SunOS and before Windows had networking.

lmm 12y ago

The versioning filesystem is very nice - better than snapshotting, it's as though the whole system were under version control, and it's integrated with the whole OS. Performance and security were reputedly very good, though I've no idea how it's kept up these days.