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HOUSTON -- Hewlett-Packard will sell its last new AlphaServer system late
next month — a plan that has been forcing users of the technology to decide
whether to make one last hardware upgrade or move to a new platform.
Martha Roberts, a systems manager at a financial services firm that she
asked not be identified, said at the HP Technology Forum last week that her
company has opted to stick with AlphaServers for now.
She said the firm recently spent millions of dollars to purchase more than
20 of the systems after determining that it would be more cost-effective to
keep running its custom-built applications on the soon-to-be-discontinued
hardware and HP’s OpenVMS operating system.
The AlphaServer line is also a proven and reliable technology, Roberts
added. The systems were originally developed by the former Digital Equipment
Corp. and were acquired by HP when it bought Compaq Computer Corp., which
had purchased Digital.
HP, which has ported OpenVMS to its Itanium-based Integrity server line,
plans to continue supporting the AlphaServer systems at least until 2011,
said Dennis Bak, a product planner in the vendor’s AlphaServer life-cycle
management group.
Roberts said the new AlphaServers that her firm bought will be used until
the end-of-support date at a minimum and possibly longer. “I’ve got servers
that I’m replacing right now that are 14 years old,” she said.
Mike Trimbach, an OpenVMS manager at Computer Sciences Corp. in El Segundo,
Calif., runs AlphaServers at a customer site. Trimbach said his client is
evaluating whether to upgrade to the latest AlphaServers or switch to the
Integrity line. He added that the potential cost of migrating applications
will be the deciding issue. “It may be more cost-effective to just go with
the last Alpha,” Trimbach said.
After the Oct. 27 cutoff date for AlphaServer orders, users may still be
able to get surplus systems from HP or some of its resellers, Bak said. But
once sales end, availability will become less certain, he added.
Although HP will continue to develop and support OpenVMS on the Integrity
line, the same can’t be said for Tru64 Unix, an operating system that has
consistently been praised by users for its clustering and file management
capabilities. Several years ago, HP considered moving Tru64’s clustering
technology and file system into HP-UX, but the company rejected that idea,
in part because doing so would have forced all HP-UX users to upgrade.
Instead, HP has been offering its ServiceGuard fail-over software with
HP-UX, along with a file system that was developed by Veritas Software
Corp., which is now owned by Symantec Corp.
If a system in a ServiceGuard cluster goes down, its processing workload is
shifted to other servers. But each system requires its own copy of HP-UX,
which increases management overhead. That isn’t the case with clusters based
on Tru64, according to HP.
However, HP officials said at last week’s conference that over time, they
expect corporate users to rely more on virtualization technology than on
clustering.
Copyright © 1996-2008 by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov.
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