The Change Mariner

VMS: Back to the Future?

Internet Week:

The venerable VMS operating system just doesn't want to fade away, and one longtime observer thinks he knows why--it's stable.

"It doesn't break," said Terry Shannon, publisher of Shannon Knows HPC newsletter. "It doesn't get viruses. It's unhackable. It's bulletproof." While Shannon said VMS's 400,000-plus licenses are dwindling every year, one of the interesting aspects of the software is that some users in "mission critical and clustering applications" in particular are moving to VMS for its stability. In fact, he said, some users that had strayed from VMS are returning. He cited the Veterans Administration as an example of a user with heavy stability and security demands that moved to VMS recently.

And that's why Hewlett-Packard--the current proprietor of the operating system--is evaluating HP OpenVMS Version 8.2 as the first OS production release for the Itanium family.