HP OpenVMS Systems

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Article Abstract The Storage Library System backup application has been in existence since the late 1980s and has served the OpenVMS customer base extremely well. With the decision to make ABS/MDMS the go-forward backup application on OpenVMS operating system environments, the need has risen to provide guidance to those needing to migrate to ABS/MDMS from their SLS systems. This document is designed to give the SLS System Manager the ability to grasp what tasks need to be accomplished during the migration. Because each environment is different, the paper cannot address every possible scenario. However, with an understanding of what one currently has in SLS and how it equates to ABS/MDMS, the migrations impact can be minimized.

Author Bio Ted Saul - Off-site Software Support Consultant for the Product Competency Center at Hewlett-Packard. The author has been supporting the OpenVMS backup products for the past 15 years. These products include the native backup utility as well software applications such as the Storage Library System and Archive Backup System, as well as various cross-platform backup solutions. As a part of his duties, Ted spends time assisting customers with testing their disaster recovery, recovering from backups, and teaching classes in the application products.

Article Abstract Several layered products and utilities exist for collecting operating system configuration and performance data along with the associated layered products and their configuration and performance for the HP OpenVMS operating system. This article presents the VMS_Check utility, developed by the author for this purpose.

Author Bio Kostas Gavrielidis - HP Services Customer Support. The author has been part of HP/Compaq/Digital for more than 20 years. Currently, and for the last 10 years, he is involved with the MSE proactive consulting projects for customer production Database Management systems, and he works on the analysis and performance improvements for SAP R/3, Oracle, Rdb, Ingres, SYBASE, SQL Server on UNIX, OpenVMS, and Windows platforms.

Article Abstract Several layered products and utilities exist for monitoring Oracle Rdb databases on OpenVMS platforms. We will review what is available from other companies and will propose our internally developed solution that has been developed and deployed in customer production environments.

Author Bio Kostas Gavrielidis - HP Services Customer Support The author has been part of HP/Compaq/Digital for more than 20 years. Currently, and for the last 10 years, he is involved with the MSE proactive consulting projects for customer production Database Management systems, and he works on the analysis and performance improvements for SAP R/3, Oracle, Rdb, Ingres, SYBASE, SQL Server on UNIX, OpenVMS, and Windows platforms.

Article Abstract Shareable images play a key role in OpenVMS. They are largely responsible for the legendary upwards compatibility across all versions by allowing run-time-libraries (RTLs) to be updated while maintaining binary compatibility with existing program images. This mechanism can be exploited to provide a means for intercepting calls into shareable images, allowing black box diagnosis and debugging, selective modification of functions, and a variety of other interesting applications. This paper will discuss the theory and present some DCL command procedures for analysing and manipulating shareable images, and also for generating "fake" shareable image interfaces.

Author Bio John Gillings - Systems Software Consultant in HP Customer Services based in the Customer Support Centre in Sydney Australia. The author has held his current position for the past 17 years. Prior to that, he worked as a commercial programmer, and as an academic teaching Computer Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His experience with OpenVMS dates back to VMS V1.0, running on the first VAX 11/780 to be commissioned in Australia. He holds a BSc in Human Genetics, a BSc(Hons) in Computer Science and an MSc in Software Engineering. John is an OpenVMS Ambassador, and the Technical Lead for the OpenVMS track of the HP OpenVMS certification program.

Article Abstract The WASD VMS Hypertext Services Package is a general-purpose Web server with additional specialized capabilities to find a niche in transaction-oriented network services. This article explains how to use WASD to deliver SOAP remote procedure calls. The first section describes the persistent scripting mechanism used by WASD. This is followed by two case studies that explain the development of SOAP-based transaction systems in which WASD provides the Web infrastructure to interface front-end and back-end processing. The case studies describe technology choices, implementation details, system performance, and general outcomes.

Author Bio Mark Daniel - Senior software engineer with the Defense Science and Technology Organization, Edinburgh, Australia

Article Abstract This article shows how a new toolkit named WSIT (Web Services Integration Toolkit) can be used to wrap an existing (non-Java) application and expose it as a simple Java class.

WSIT is a collection of integration tools. These tools are easy to use, highly extensible, based on standards, and built on open source technology. The toolkit can be used to call OpenVMS applications written in 3GL languages, such as C, BASIC, COBOL, and ACMS from newer technologies and languages such as Java, Microsoft .NET, Java -RMI, JMS, and web services.

Author Bio David Sullivan - Expert Member, Technical Staff in the OpenVMS group of Hewlett Packard. The author holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Merrimack College. He has previously been published in the Digital Technical Journal and has written a number of white papers on networking, still imaging protocol extensions for video conferencing, disaster tolerance design, and web services. He is a United States patent holder for Internet browser interceptor and caching technology.

Article Abstract Moving from the familiar environment of OpenVMS on Alpha and VAX systems to the world of OpenVMS running on Integrity Servers gives us the chance to evaluate the performance and capabilities of another computer architecture and the systems built on it. Oracle is at the initial stages of optimizations of Oracle Rdb on the OpenVMS I64 platform and we have performed preliminary performance tests comparing Alpha and Integrity servers. This article provides some background of the Oracle Rdb port to the OpenVMS I64 platform and some observations based on these early performance tests performed in conjunction with OpenVMS engineering at HP during April of 2005.

Author Bio Norman J. Lastovica - Principal Engineer within Oracle's Rdb Engineering organization. Mr. Lastovica has over 20 years experience with large OpenVMS systems design and development, including several major Oracle Rdb benchmark and prototyping efforts on behalf of Rdb customers. Currently a member of the KODA project team, he shares responsibility for the physical data storage, index, journaling, recovery, row cache, hot standby, and LogMiner components of the Rdb product family, along with the port of Oracle Rdb to the OpenVMS Integrity environment. In his free time, he enjoys outdoor sports with his family in the mountains surrounding their home in Colorado.

Article Abstract Since the year 2000, Software Resources International (SRI) has been developing commercial emulators for VAX hardware. These emulators are designed as a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), essentially a software mathematical model of VAX hardware. If the HAL is accurate enough, the original VAX operating systems and applications can be executed on it. This enables the use of unmodified VAX software on any platform for which such a HAL is available, thereby avoiding the cost and risks of using old VAX hardware. This article describes the development of a HAL for the large VAX SMP systems, the ultimate performance step in replacing existing VAX systems.

Author Bio Robert Boers - CEO of Software Resources International in Geneva, Switzerland, a company specialized in the development of legacy system emulators Robert started his career as a sales representative in Digital Equipment Corporation in the Netherlands. He worked for several years in the computer department of a major Dutch bank. Then he returned to the engineering role in Digital Europe that he held for 19+ years. Initially responsible for the European academic contacts, Robert created several Digital engineering centers at universities in western Europe. In the last ten years in Digital, he worked in Moscow to develop Digital's European migration center, which subsequently became part of Software Resources International in a buyout he arranged with Compaq.

Article Abstract In 2001, the author built his first seismometer. As a hobbyist, he encountered the problem of how to gather, process and present the data gained by this instrument and its follow-ons. Since he does everything with a VAX-7820 (which is up and running on a 24*365 basis), it was clear that this machine would be the center of the online seismometer system. This article describes the process of gathering seismic data on the VAX system, interpreting it, and making it available for research.

Author Bio Bernd Ulmann - IT specialist for the Landesbank Rheinland Pfalz Born 1970 in Neu-Ulm, the author is a Master in Mathematics 1996 (minor subject philosophy), University Mainz. Working with OpenVMS since 1991, he collects of (mainly) VAX systems and runs a large mixed- architecture cluster containing VAX-6xx0, VAX-7xx0, VAX-8xx0, lots of small VAXstations, Alphas and sometimes even an Itanium. The author worked as consultant in the OpenVMS field from 1995 to 2004.

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