Conference 7.286::digital

4245.0. "An OpenVMS (Partner's) Bedtime Story" by DPDMAI::WISNIEWSKI (ADEPT of the Virtual Space.) Fri Nov 03 1995 00:40

AN OpenVMS(tm) BEDTIME STORY

The OpenVMS Partner got up from his comfy chair(tm) in front of his OpenVMS
POP (telnet: dfwlug.decus.org) on the expanding Internet.  

He chased his children away from the workstation with the pronouncement of 
"Bedtime" and off giggling to bed they went. The children had just been to 
the http://www.toystory.com/ WEBpage entertaining and marketing to the kids 
about the upcoming Disney movie. The OpenVMS marveled how easily the new
cyberspace venue was being assimilated by his children.  Hardly available
three short years ago, his daughters are now pulling WEBpage addresses off
TV, books and even trading them with other children.  

"Almost as good as trading cards" he mused aloud.   

Just then he remembered that they wanted a Digital Color Inkjet 501 for 
Christmas (he had just seen one for $279 on QVN earlier that evening, at
a much greater savings than Employee Purchase)

They wanted the printer so that they could print out the best pages in full 
color to trade with their friends. 

"Maybe not too different than trading cards" he concluded.

The children had finished brushing their teeth and washing their faces
and were climbing into bed when the OpenVMS Partner came to tuck them in.

"Are you kids going to miss Daddy while he's up at the OpenVMS Partner's 
meeting in Nashua?" asked the OpenVMS Partner.

"Oh Daddy" said 10 year old Jessica "You go up there all the time, you were
 just up there two weeks ago for the OpenVMS SELnet DVN"

"Yeah Daddy" 7 year old Jennifer added "I really wish you'd brought back 
more RAM for the OpenVMS version 7.0 you brought back. I want to see 
my three gigabyte Oracle Christmas list in main memory like Blake down
the street has with his OSF/1 machine."

"Blake's Father manages a manufacturing plant, he can't afford three 
 gigabytes of RAM. He spent all his Christmas money on SAP, he'll have to 
    spend next year's budget on performance."  

 The OpenVMS Partner quickly qualified the prospect mentally and added, 
 "And besides, you shouldn't use that word in our house."

The room quieted as the stern pronouncement cut through the children's 
mirth.

"What word?" asked Jenna meekly.

"You know what word. The B-A-D word." The OpenVMS Partner asked sternly 
 "We've had this talk before about you using such language in my house."

Jenna looked lost as only a 7 year old can and Jessica the older child
recited the word whining like she was explaining a lesson to mentally 
challenged child "OSF/1, you know we're not supposed to say OSF/1 in 
the house."

"Oh Yeah" Jenna looked relieved "I mean Digital-Unix(tm)"

"That's better sweetheart" the OpenVMS Partner smiled. "It took me almost
a year to get you kids saying OpenVMS(tm) instead of VMS and I'll not have 
you kids using the wrong Digital trademarks in my house.  Why it would 
be a waste of all the marketing dollars that went into the DEC, eh, Digital
name changes!"

"Yeah" Jessica agreed with a bit of apple polishing "I never said VMS
after the name change, not once,  I always said OpenVMS(tm)"

"Blake says OpenVMS is dead" Jenna blurted in a change of subject "He
said that there are no applications left and all the good ones are on
Digital-Unix(tm)"

"Now you know that's not true Jenna" the OpenVMS Partner began "OpenVMS
is still deployed in hundreds of thousands of mission critical applications 
today everywhere in the world.  And Digital has a plan to increase the NEW
application base for OpenVMS."  

"Didn't I tell you about the Digital Alliance for Enterprise Computing?"

Both children eager for a story smiled wide knowing grins and shook their 
heads no.

Smiling himself, the OpenVMS Partner sat on the side of the bed and said 
"Digital and Microsoft are working on scaling Windows and WNT into large 
enterprises by providing an Engineering Affinity program between OpenVMS 
and WindowsNT."

"Won't that mean that Microsoft takes over Digital's customer base?" asked 
Jessica wide-eyed.

"Digital Customers are a pretty demanding lot sweetheart, I doubt seriously 
that anyone but Digital could keep some of them happy. I sometimes wonder 
how Digital manages with some of our customer's 'DEMANDS'!" 

"The simple truth is WNT doesn't scale well and has some pretty large holes 
in it's middleware with regards to Enterprise Computing. Even first releases 
of WNT Clustering won't allow scaling to the requirements for the Enterprise 
that OpenVMS folks take for granted" 

"Like 64-bit support and 28 Gigabytes of main memory" Jennifer excitedly 
blurted her fixation on VLM/VLDB

"Or 1 to 10 Terabytes on a Server with the new Spiral Log file system to 
 do On-line high speed Backups." Said Jessica adding to the excitement

"Or even a couple hundred of those servers Clustered together in redundant
    datacenters as far as 500 miles apart for the highest salability and 
    availability in the computer Industry." Completed the OpenVMS Partner.

"But Windows NT can do all that." said Jessica remembering a Microsoft
training video.

"No matter what Mr. Gate's people insist, above a couple hundred gigabytes
of storage, or more than 4 processors in cluster or even SMP, WNT won't scale
well. That means you have to have lots lof little machines -- and the
    management nightmare that goes with it..."  

"It's going to be the finest 2nd Tier Server ever developed and Digital 
is going to sell a bunch WNT systems on Intel and on Alpha, but for a long 
time to come WNT need a lot of help to scale to the size and transaction rates
that drive enterprise computing and complex client/server applications."

"That's where OpenVMS comes in?" asked Jennifer on cue for the first
time tonight.

"That's where OpenVMS comes in."  The OpenVMS Partner smiled "Not only 
are we putting the Win32s APIs and back office APIs in, but today we're 
using Object broker and DCE to link OLE objects from WNT and applications 
in OpenVMS into a single operating environment. Pathworks provides full 
WNT domain support and as the integration becomes better, WIN32 Source code 
could be deployed across either WNT or OpenVMS." 

"This would allow customers to scale (using a three tier client server 
model) as large or as small as the enterprise needs deploying on 
Windows/WIN95/WNTclient and using WNT and OpenVMS to provide the Server 
power to service all those resource hungry enterprise clients."


"You mean I could run SIMCity on OpenVMS?" asked Jenna

"Customers will choose to deploy client applications on workstation 
 sized systems." The OpenVMS Partner answered 

"The high end WNT and OpenVMS systems will support Microsoft Backoffice 
 applications, AccessWorks connections to DB2, Oracle and 60 other databases, 
    and large scale transaction applications driven via Windows Clients."  

"And plus it would be kind of silly to have Microsoft Word running on an 
 Alpha 8400" chuckled the OpenVMS Partner "But not quite so silly to 
 have Microsoft SQL Server...In any event it's up to the customer to 
 do the final blessing on how they want to grow and deploy client/server
 in their company.  Anytime they buy from Digital,  software, hardware 
 or consulting Digital Wins!"

"And Digital Stock goes above $90 and everyone at Digital lives happily
 ever after, The End" The OpenVMS Partner wrapped up quickly because 
 of the short attention span of WEBspawned youths. 

"Awww Daddy" both girls complained "You never give us the details..."

"You can read it yourself on Daddy's OpenVMS WEBserver on 
http://www.montagar.com/dfwlug/" the undaunted daddy finished 

"Now it's off to bed for both of you."

Kissing his children goodnight and tucking them in the OpenVMS partner
looked down at his young charges.  

He reflected that being a single parent was not easy in this society, but 
you do what's required to accomplish the most good for your family.
   
    Sometimes he feels like a single parent admonishing Digital to eat 
    it's brussel sprouts for their own good when he talks about OpenVMS, 
    everyone knows it's good for you, but no one want to eat them or talk 
    about them, just like kids - all the excitement is always about deserts;-)

Sleep tight...Don't let the Client/Server bugs bite;-)


    --
    
The OpenVMS Partners are going to Training in Nashua NH next week to learn, 
grow and support the finest Operating System in the Industry today for 
Production Computing:  OpenVMS(tm) from Digital Equipment.

Be seeing you (there) (and missing my kids!),

John Wisniewski
OpenVMS Partner North Texas/Oklahoma
    

Does this mean SimGalaxy Server will be coming soon to support thousands of
client transactions creating distributed globular clusters?