In 2002, OpenVMS celebrated 25 years of shipments. During this time, OpenVMS has been the industry leader in developing security, performance, and high availability capabilities.
Security
OpenVMS was designed from the outset with security built-in. As competing operating systems have discovered, it is not possible to build effective security on top of an established operating
system. Security must be a fundamental and integral component of the initial design. Based on CERT Advisories, OpenVMS is the most secure, general purpose operating system on the market, surpassing
more recent operating systems by two orders of magnitude.
OpenVMS introduced the world to clustering in 1983, and it has since maintained the lead in this technology. OpenVMS clusters enable system managers to configure up to 99.999 percent uptime by
having access to multiple CPUs (up to 96 nodes) and servers sharing replicated storage. By deploying across two or more split-site clusters, the service can continue uninterrupted, even if a disaster
befalls one of the data centers.
An excellent report by analysts Illuminata in August 2002 declares OpenVMS the 'gold standard' for clustering and disaster tolerance compared to leading UNIX implementations from IBM and Sun.
OpenVMS has a comprehensive suite of management tools, and it is supported by a number of leading management independent software vendors (ISVs). This ensures that all elements of OpenVMS, OpenVMS
clusters, and the network (DECnet and TCP/IP) are securely managed.
In January, OpenVMS delivered an OpenView Agent and Smart Plug-in (SPI), which enables OpenVMS to be managed from the Enterprise Management System console and facilitates real-time monitoring of
an OpenVMS environment. This and further OpenView developments on the Alpha and Itanium platforms, including an Oracle SPI, will aid the integration of OpenVMS systems within an HP-UX or Windows
Server environment.
