OpenVMS is alive and well

I recently attended the OpenVMS Boot Camp in Nashua New Hampshire. I am pleased to report (with a nod to Mark Twain) that rumors of the death of OpenVMS were greatly exaggerated! VMS Software Incorporated (VSI) has taken over the product and appears to have the situation well in hand.

There were over 100 companies in attendance at the Boot Camp, with Hewlett Packard a very visible participant. The conference was quite lively, with multiple tracks running from 8:00 to 6:00 daily, and events planned each evening. At the conference, there was an undercurrent of optimism and energy, which was no doubt tied to the future of VMS. VSI has already released OpenVMS 8.4-1H1, which provides support for HP Integrity i4 server models based on the Intel® Itanium® 9500 series processors. Moving forward, VSI presented at the Boot Camp a rolling roadmap that provides for at least one release per year for the next few years, improving and extending the software on its current HP platforms—including new versions of TCP/IP and Java, a new file system, and CLI improvements. Concurrently, they are working on VSI OpenVMS 9, which will add support for x86-64 bit processers (slated for 2018). They are planning to support select HP (Intel and AMD) servers first, then Dell and others as well. ARM support is slated to be considered after x86-64.

VSI has pledged at least 5 years of active product support per release, followed by a minimum of 2 years of prior-version support. With releases planned into 2018, this provides a viable, supported future for OpenVMS at least into 2025 and likely well beyond.

The future of OpenVMS is now being tended to by some very experienced engineers—many have come from HP and have been with the O/S throughout its various versions and ownership.

So, VMS users, the immediate takeaway is to listen to the words of the late great Douglas Adams: “Don’t Panic!“ OpenVMS is not going away anytime soon.