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Welcome to the June 2006 issue of the OpenVMS Technical Journal (VTJ). This edition features a great selection of articles covering a wide range of topics.
In Bringing Vegan Recipes to the Web with OpenVMS, Bernd Ulmann provides his own recipe for migrating a web-based recipe database -- the largest German database of vegan recipes
with thousands of hits per day -- from a small LINUX system with MySQL to his own VAX-7820 and RDB.
Kostas G. Gavrielidis asks the question: What's in your AlphaServer Console? He then provides answers in an article that should be of great interest to service engineers on how
to get to the Alpha console and access the settings for the console environment variables from the operating system via implemented console callbacks.
In CHARON-VAX Performance Benchmarks, Bruce Claremont provides an interesting and detailed performance comparison of CHARON-VAX -- a software-based VAX hardware emulator that
runs on Windows-based servers -- with native OpenVMS hardware.
In their Disaster Tolerance Proof of Concept study, Melanie Hubbard, Carlton Davis, Craig Showers, John Andruszkiewicz, and Keith Parris measure the levels of high availability and data integrity
attained over a variety of distances with HP Volume Shadowing for OpenVMS, Oracle9i® RAC, and third-party connectivity technology.
Ted Saul's comprehensive article, Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Strategies and OpenVMS Storage Applications, looks at key ILM planning concepts as well as two HP products
-- Hierarchical Storage Management System (HSM) and Archive Backup System (ABS) -- that make ILM achievable and more efficient.
Many of the actions that the OpenVMS operating system takes on behalf of a user are implemented as procedures called system services. Ruth Goldenberg's wonderfully written article --
System Service Interception -- describes in detail how OpenVMS dispatches to executive system services on both Alpha and I64 platforms and then how these services are
intercepted.
HP PERFDAT: A New Performance Solution for OpenVMSby Wolfgang Burger, Ewald Pieber, Manfred Kaser, and John Dite introduces the basic concepts, main components, and most
important features of HP PERFDAT, a new OpenVMS tool that delivers an unprecedented level of insight into multi-system performance.
We hope you enjoy this issue of the Journal. Let us know how you like it -- and what you would like to see in the future.
Warm Regards,
Sue Skonetski
Editor
» Would You Like to Submit a Technical Article?
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Article Title: Disaster Tolerance Proof of Concept: HP Volume Shadowing for OpenVMS and Oracle9i® RAC over Extended Distances -
» HTML,
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Article Abstract:
To demonstrate that OpenVMS
Host-Base Volume Shadowing (HBVS) along with Oracle 9i RAC can ensure high
availability and data integrity over a variety of distances including those
formally supported by OpenVMS Clusters as well as distances longer than what is
currently supported.
Author Bio:
Melanie Hubbard works in OpenVMS Sustaining Engineering assisting with a variety of
Oracle/OpenVMS issues, facilitating communication between Oracle and HP's Development
and Support and their mutual customers.
Prior to working for HP, she had been an OpenVMS Systems and Network
Manager as well as a Senior Technical Support Engineer for a variety of
internet software companies.
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Article Title: Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Strategies and OpenVMS Storage Applications -
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Article Abstract:
Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a new approach to data storage tracking and
management. ILM encompasses the life of data from its creation through to its
deletion while taking into consideration the value of data from two points of
view, an access value and a retention value.
Proper emphasis is put on these two values as they progress through
their lifecycle.
HP offers products that can help
manage ILM within the data environment.
This article will discuss the ILM concepts and how the HP products, ABS
and HSM fit into this strategy.
Author Bio:
Ted Saul is
an Off-site Software Support Consultant for the Product Competency Center at
Hewlett-Packard. He has been supporting the OVMS backup products for the past
15 years. These products include the native backup utility as well software application
such as the Storage Library System and Archive Backup System as well as varied
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.
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Article Title: System Service Interception -
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Article Abstract:
System service intercept (SSI) is an OpenVMS mechanism that enables system services to be
intercepted and specified code to run before, after, or instead of the
intercepted service. An image can declare routines to perform pre-service
processing, post-service processing, system service replacement routines, or
any combination thereof. SSI is used by the Debugger and tools such as the Heap
Analyzer and Performance Coverage Analyzer (PCA).
This article describes how system
services are intercepted on OpenVMS Alpha and Itanium.
Author Bio:
Ruth Goldenberg has been at Digital/Compaq/HP over 30 years, most of them involved with
OpenVMS, as backup support, teacher, author, and developer. Ruth is a
consulting software engineer in OpenVMS Engineering.
Recent projects include clusterwide
logical names, OpenVMS Alpha Memory Management Internals book, system service
logging, and OpenVMS Itanium System Service Interception.
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Article Title: What's in your AlphaServer Console? -
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» PDF
Article Abstract:
This article explores how to get to the Alpha
console and how to get the settings of the console environment variables from
the operating system thought the implemented console callbacks. In HP customer
production environments, very rarely are we allowed to shutdown or reboot a
production system, let alone try to connect a device to the console of the
system. Our customers will allow only a secure connection to their production
systems via the SSH protocol, and this will get us only to the operating system
level. So how do we get the environmental variables and their settings from the
boot loader without taking the system down?
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 GSE-MSE proactive consulting projects for customer
production D 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.
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Article Title: CHARON-VAX Performance Benchmarks -
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Article Abstract:
When initially
evaluating SRI's CHARON-VAX product, I benchmarked its XM and XL versions
against our in-house VAX, Alpha, and Integrity processors using our Migration
RPG quality assurance test suite. I
wanted to see how well the product performed and whether it would exhibit any
problems with Migration RPG. The product
performed flawlessly. This article
presents the performance benchmark results.
Author Bio:
Bruce Claremont has a degree in Computer Science and is a certifiable OpenVMS
bigot. He's been working in the IT
industry on OpenVMS systems since 1983.
Mr. Claremont has made a career in OpenVMS and software migrations,
getting involved in both areas in n his first professional position and
sticking with them ever since. He was a
major participate in Digital Equipment Corporation's Competitive Migration
Program in the 1980's and early 1990's, first as a third party supplier, then
as the head of the IBM
Midrange Migration Team at Digital's
Center for Migration Services (CMS) in Colorado Springs, CO.
Bruce has worked all sides of the IT
industry, as a customer, software engineer, system manager, delivery
specialist, project manager, and small business owner. He understands applications written in legacy
programming languages like RPG, COBOL, and DIBO L and knows how to code in
Macro-32. When force or paid really
ell, he'll confess to knowledge of C.
He remains the lead software engineer for Migration RPG, the only RPG
compiler supported under OpenVMS.
Bruce founded Migration Specialties
International, Inc. in 1992 and, when not fantasizing about selling the
business for millions and retiring to a life of leisure, continues to offer
OpenVMS and migration consulting services.
More information about Migration Specialties International can be found
at http://www.MigrationSpecialties.com.
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Article Title: HP PERFDAT: A New Performance Solution for OpenVMS -
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Article Abstract:
In this paper the OpenVMS performance and capacity planning solution HP PERFDAT is presented. HP PERFDAT performance solution for OpenVMS provides an unprecedented level of insight into multi-system
performance. A complete suite of highly automated collection, filtering, charting and trend analysis capabilities provide the user with accurate and complete performance information for effective
performance lifecycle management. The user interface was developed in close cooperation with customers in order to keep performance data analysis simple and intuitive and to enable the user to
pinpoint performance problems and to identify their cause without OpenVMS internals knowledge.
This article described the basic concepts, main components and highlights the most important features of HP PERFDAT.
Author Bio:
Wolfgang Burger is a Technical Consultant for OpenVMS within the Global Delivery organization
of Hewlett-Packard for the last 7 years and strongly involved in performance
analysis and troubleshooting of complex customer environments. He has more then
15 years of experience in software development on OpenVMS, from device driver
development up to the design of power plant solutions. Wolfgang Burger has a
PhD in Physics from the Technical University Vienna, and is the principal
engineer for the development of HP PERFDAT.
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Article Title: Bringing Vegan Recipes to the Web with OpenVMS -
» HTML,
» PDF
Article Abstract:
This article will describe the
techniques employed to run the larges vegan recipe database on a VAX-7820 using
RDB as the database, the WASD webserver and lots of Perl scripts. To speed up
things a Perl based RDB proxy was developed which speeds up the VAX so response
times are faster than on a DS-10 running CSWS! :-) Furthermore automated
techniques for the migration of MySQL databases to RDB will be described. The
website has about 500 to 1000 requests per day. Creating a web page containing
a recipe requires extensive use of CGI scripting and SQL statements due to the
highly normalized database design. The article may be of interest to all who
want to work with RDB and Perl as well as everybody using the WASD web server
in conjunction with Perl. To minimize startup times of CGI scripts the memory
resident Perl interpreter wrapper of WASD is used which causes additional
pitfalls due to Perl's closures, etc
Author Bio:
Bernd Ulmann has a diploma in mathematics 1996,
working as a freelancer since 1995 to 2005, mostly working in the VMS field. He
has Programmed industrial controls using Fortran/Macro 32, developed
measurement equipment, etc. Since 2005 working for the Landesbank Rheinland
Pfalz, Mainz.
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