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OpenVMS Year 2000 Initiative
1. What is the Year 2000 Problem?
The practice of representing years in dates using different formats
rather than consistently using a 4-digit format can result in
processing errors, especially when sorting or comparing dates or
when performing arithmetic computations using or involving dates.
The Year 2000 Problem has arisen as a result of the common practice
of representing years with only 2 digits instead of 4 (for
example, specifying 96 instead of 1996). Use of a 2-digit year
representation was a widespread practice from the 1960's to the
1980's to save disk and memory space when the cost of those
resources was relatively high. To compound the problem,
many programming guides promoted 2-digit year codes, and
some common specifications, such as ANSI and DOD,
also allowed 2-digit year codes.
Such 2-digit year representations will cause application problems
during the transition to the Year 2000 as the system may interpret
the year 00 as 1900, and any two-digit year (01, 02, etc.) as a
1900's date.
In fact, many applications in the industry have already encountered
problems caused by 2-digit year codes. Some examples of problems
currently posed by the 2-digit year method are: 1) credit cards
expiring in the Year 2000 have been denied transactions by ATMs that
interpret 00 as a card that expired in 1900, 2) bank computers
performing mortgage calculations can produce negative balances, and
3) warehouses that track date-sensitive inventory will misinterpret
a 00 year field as inventory that is 97 years old.
2. Customer Requirements
During 1996, customers have contacted Digital and
OpenVMS in particular for information and solutions to the Year
2000 issue.
Typical requests for information focus on the
following issues:
o Status of products
Are our products currently Year 2000-ready? Are there any
problems or limitations?
o Strategy and plans
What plans are in place to ensure the Year 2000 readiness of
our products?
o Schedule
When will Year 2000-ready releases of our products be available?
Customers want answers to these questions now. Many customers
are basing their own Year 2000 preparation activities on a schedule
similar to the following:
o 1996: Assessment of information technology environments
o 1997: Acquisition of Year 2000 solutions
o 1998: Validation of Year 2000 solutions
o 1999: Installation of solutions in production environment
3. Current Status of OpenVMS
All versions of OpenVMS and VMS operating systems use multiple
methods of internal representations of time. However, all these
representations interface through external ASCII and binary fields
that allow a representation of 4-digit years.
Applications consistently using the 4-digit year that OpenVMS
produces or accepts as input will not be affected by the transition
to the Year 2000. The 4-digit year field provides a Year 2000-ready
core on which to layer and build your applications.
At the hardware level, no changes are required because Digital's
Alpha and VAX system platforms use 4-digit year representational
formats and will be totally unaffected by the transition to the
Year 2000.
Digital expects that most Year 2000-related problems will occur
primarily in layered applications. Therefore, starting a complete
evaluation of applications as soon as possible is very important.
OpenVMS provides customers with the advantage and capability of
testing their applications now, before real problems occur.
While no systematic and automatic testing method can ensure
that all customer applications will continue to work across the
Year 2000 boundary, OpenVMS is one of the few operating systems
that allows users to advance system clocks to times in the future,
enabling users to conduct simulations using future dates, and thus
test their software for potential Year 2000 problems.
To protect real data integrity during such test sessions, Digital
recommends that users perform the evaluation in a completely
restorable, simulated, or nonproduction environment.
4. How OpenVMS Is Addressing Customer Requirements
While the overall status of OpenVMS is currently good, we are
making an additional effort to satisfy customer requirements,
for several reasons:
o To ensure Year 2000 readiness of software components
In the OpenVMS software environment, many interfaces and
layered software components are layered on the Year 2000-ready
core of the OpenVMS operating system. We want to ensure that
these interfaces and layers of software are also ready for
the transition to the Year 2000.
o To conform to Digital's new Year 2000 warranty.
Digital is standing behind the Year 2000 readiness of its
products with an express Year 2000 warranty on its Year 2000-
ready products. This warranty has been created specifically to
cover Year 2000-ready products. Our goal is to ensure that OpenVMS
software and its layered products meet the requirements
of this new warranty.
o To maintain OpenVMS quality
OpenVMS and its layered software products have traditional
strengths (for example, 24x365 operation, disaster tolerance)
and top-in-class quality that we plan to maintain by ensuring
that all our products can smoothly and seamlessly make the
transition to the Year 2000 and beyond.
5. Commitment to Due Diligence
Our strategy for satisfying customer concerns about the Year
2000 can be summarized in a single statement:
"We will do our best to ensure that our products work without
problems through the transition to the Year 2000 and beyond."
We think the best way to satisfy customer requirements is to
conduct a complete and formal investigation of the entire OpenVMS
environment (that is, the operating system and all other products
that are usually included with the package).
OpenVMS is committed to providing Year 2000-ready versions of
all its software products by the latter part of 1997. Our goal is to
satisfy contractual requirements for Year 2000-ready software
(for example, in government bids) and to provide customers with
Year 2000-ready solutions. The OpenVMS due diligence effort entails
a formal, comprehensive, and detailed analysis of all OpenVMS product
code. The results of this investigation will indicate whether
there are modifications or improvements that we can make to the
OpenVMS software environment. We will also document the results
of this investigation, including our methodologies, findings,
and schedules for any fixes.
6. OpenVMS Engineering's Commitment
The highest levels of OpenVMS management have established that
the Year 2000 effort is a high priority. Engineering has centered its
work around the activities of investigation, testing, and
documentation.
Investigation
The entire OpenVMS engineering group is involved in conducting a
complete investigation of all OpenVMS product code to evaluate
its Year 2000 readiness. First, we took an inventory of all
OpenVMS products, their modules and components that should be
addressed by our due diligence effort. Subsequently, all
of these product sources are being analyzed by OpenVMS engineers in a
manner equivalent to a line-by-line inspection. If problems
are identified by the investigation, these issues will be addressed
and corrected. OpenVMS plans to provide Year 2000-ready
versions of our products during 1997.
To ensure that OpenVMS investigations are conducted with a standard
level of thoroughness, all engineers received precise guidelines that
formally delineate all aspects of the investigation, including the
following:
o Methodology
o Criteria for due diligence
o Problem reporting and documentation
o Tools to aid the investigation and reporting of data
Testing
Testing is a significant component of our Year 2000
effort. OpenVMS regression test suites will be used to simulate
the transition to the Year 2000 (by setting system clocks ahead)
and to validate bug fixes and enhancements to products.
Also, we plan a variety of ad-hoc testing of transition dates.
If problems are identified during the investigation, we plan
to create regression tests for inclusion in test suites to
verify that all the bugs are properly fixed and do not generate
side effects or new problems.
Finally, we will document the testing criteria and consider the
feasibility of providing these test scenarios to customers as
part of our documentation deliverable.
Documentation
We will provide customers with comprehensive documentation of
our investigation results, including the following:
o A list of any Year 2000-related problems identified by the
investigation.
o The status of all time-related interfaces for all OpenVMS
software products. This documentation should help OpenVMS
users evaluate their environment and debug their applications.
All documentation of investigation findings will be distributed
using the World Wide Web as the primary channel. Other means of
distribution will also be considered.
Schedule
Our schedule conforms to customer needs for information and
solutions by the end of 1997:
May 1997: Investigation completed
July 1997: Documentation of results available
After July: Year 2000 solutions distributed to customers
The actual date and distribution vehicle for Year 2000 solutions
depends on the number and size of modifications needed for
a product. Options may range from a remedial kit to a minor
release. Some kits may be released sooner than others.
Future Products' Readiness for Year 2000
A further goal of the OpenVMS Year 2000 effort is to incorporate
checkpoints and other verification steps into existing engineering
maintenance, and quality control processes during 1997. This
added measure will ensure that all of our new and updated software
products will be free of Year 2000-related problems.
7. Scope of the OpenVMS Year 2000 Program
The following subheads describe the scope of the OpenVMS Year
2000 Program.
Products
As mentioned earlier, the OpenVMS Year 2000 program addresses
not only the OpenVMS operating system, but also several families
of layered products, including the following:
Business Recovery Server (BRS)
DECnet
DECprint Supervisor (DCPS)
DECram
DECwindows
Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
Distributed File System (DECdfs)
Distributed Queueing Service (DQS)
Enterprise Integration Package (EIP)
eXcursion
Internet product Suite (IPS)
License Management Facility (LMF)
NAS packages
OpenVMS Clusters
OpenVMS Management Tools (OMT)
PATHWORKS
Print Server
Security-Enhanced OpenVMS (SEVMS)
Spiralog
Systems Network Architecture (SNA)
TCP/IP Services
Volume Shadowing
X.25
Versions
To ensure that all components and features of our products
are Year-2000 ready, we are conducting our full investigation
using the latest release of our software products because this
release is the most comprehensive. However, earlier versions
will also be taken into consideration to aid customers who still
rely on older versions of OpenVMS products.
Our approach follows:
o We will backport patches for Year 2000 problems to previous
versions whenever possible and appropriate.
o We will conduct tests and simulations on configurations of key
components of older versions of software.
o We will investigate selected code from previous versions of
products wherever it differs from that of newer versions.
For OpenVMS, we are conducting a complete due diligence
investigation on Version 7.1, including full support, formal code
analysis, bug fixes, etc. as described earlier.
We will then address OpenVMS Version 6.2 by including patches
backported from Version 7.1. In addition, we will identify
differences between Version 7.1 and Version 6.2 code, and then
investigate them. After any necessary corrections have
been applied, we will test OpenVMS Version 6.2 with the same
regression suites and tests used to test Version 7.1.
Evaluation of other OpenVMS software products will follow the same
approach in order to provide a complete offering of environments
running on both OpenVMS Version 7.1 and Version 6.2.
We are currently evaluating the feasibility of addressing other
versions, and we recommend that customers upgrade their environments
to our Year 2000-ready releases before the Year 2000.
Warranty
Year 2000-ready products will be covered by an adaptation of
Digital's traditional warranty that has been designed specifically
to address Year 2000-ready products.
8. Software Outside the Scope of the OpenVMS Year-2000 Program
The following subheads describe areas that are outside the scope
of the OpenVMS Year 2000 Program.
Old Versions
The OpenVMS Year 2000 program may not address some old or obsolete
versions of products that are still in use. We recommend that
customers upgrade their environments to the more recent Year
2000-ready releases before the Year 2000.
Retired Products
Products that will be retired by the end of calendar year 1998
will not be addressed by the OpenVMS Year 2000 Program.
It is our intent to identify such products by the end of 1997.
Freeware
The OpenVMS Year 2000 Program will not address freeware. Freeware
is any piece of software that Digital distributes under a
disclaimer such as the following:
"The freeware components on this CD are included as prebuilt
applications. Please note that this software is provided
"as is". Digital Equipment Corporation disclaims all
warranties with regard to this software, INCLUDING ALL
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS."
9. Other Digital Year 2000 Programs
The OpenVMS Year 2000 initiative is part of a larger Digital Year
2000 effort. Digital Equipment Corporation has implemented a
company-wide program to address Year 2000 readiness of its products
and services. This program helps protect customers and business
partners against the possibility of serious Year 2000-related
issues. The program covers hardware systems, operating systems,
layered products, and services.
The corporate program also coordinates efforts among various
product groups within Digital and works with Digital's software
partners to share information and planning in order to deliver a
complete Year 2000-compliant solution to our customers.
For more information on Digital's Year 2000 programs, refer to
the following World Wide Web site:
http://www.digital.com/info/year2000
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