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HP's OpenVMS throws Itanium lifeline

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 17 Jan 2005 16:05 GMT

Another company intrigued by the multi-operating system abilities of Itanium is Cerner, a major HP partner that sells health care software called Millennium -- 30 million lines of code and 56 modules for tasks such as recording patient information, logging pharmacy orders and billing insurance companies. Cerner sells its software along with either HP's Alpha-based hardware running OpenVMS or IBM's Power-based hardware running AIX, but the company has begun investigating using Linux on those servers, too.

"We are seeing more (customers) that are asking specifically about Linux," said Mike Nill, vice president of technical architecture at Cerner. "We can run Linux on the IBM boxes and the Itanium boxes. We're starting some initial research-and-development work there."

Cerner has been working closely with HP to translate the OpenVMS version of its software to Itanium, but the software isn't ready yet, Nill said. "There's some more time to get fully certified on the technology. It's in the relatively near future," he said.

OpenVMS 8.2 features
HP is expected to release three versions of OpenVMS 8.2, said Terry Shannon, longtime OpenVMS watcher and author of the Shannon Knows High Performance Computing newsletter.

The Foundation level will be for low-end use and price-sensitive customers; the Enterprise level will sport better reliability, management tools and performance; and the Mission-Critical level will feature support for clustering.

OpenVMS 8.2 supports clusters of as many as 16 machines -- up to eight Alpha-based and up to eight Itanium-based in the same group, a source familiar with the software said.

HP also is expected to introduce per-processor licensing for OpenVMS, which should make customers pay for the amount of computing horsepower they're using instead of today's pricing based on the capability of the entire system. The move dovetails with HP's Adaptive Enterprise initiative, which aims to better link a customer's computing infrastructure with its business priorities.

Support for the operating system initially will be available on lower-end Itanium servers ranging from the dual-processor rx1600 to the four-processor rx4640.

A key requirement for customers to make the move to Itanium will be new versions of their software, though HP offers a migration tool that eases the change even when the software's original source code isn't available.

There will be 250 OpenVMS applications available for Itanium by the end of February and 800 in 2005, HP said. That compares with 3,000 for other Itanium operating systems -- roughly 1,500 for HP-UX and 750 each for Windows and Linux.